elbows on the
beams, and they didn't have room enough to work.

That was the reason why David had seen only their legs when he first
came down.

It wasn't a very convenient way to work, but the men didn't seem to
mind. Perhaps they were used to it.

"Are those the pipes that the water goes through?" David asked.

"Yes, Davie," the foreman said. "It comes in through the wall there,
close down to the floor, from that pipe that you saw the men laying in
the street.

"Then it goes up and through these pipes to the back of the cellar,
and then up again to the kitchen and the pantry and the bathrooms.

"It isn't much fun being down here, is it?"

"No," David said, "it isn't."

The foreman laughed.

"Well, you wait a half a jiffy and we'll go up."

So David waited while the foreman took a paper out of his pocket.

And first he looked at the paper and then he looked at the pipes, and
then he looked at the paper again.

Then he folded the paper and put it into his pocket, and he took
David's hand and they went up the cellar stairs, and through a door
into the kitchen.

There David saw the legs of two other men who were lying down under
the sink.

They had a stump of a candle, too, for David could see its flickering
light.

And there was a kind of a lamp out on the floor beyond, and it burned
with a sputtering and a hissing and a roaring, and it threw a big
bluish kind of a flame straight out, like water out of a hose.

David watched the men for nearly a minute without saying anything, but
he couldn't guess what they were up to.

"What are they doing?" he asked at last.

"They're putting in the waste pipe and the trap," said the foreman;
"but you don't know what that is, of course. They're putting in the
pipe that the water runs through when it runs out of the sink."

"Oh, I know," David cried. "It's for the dirty water that the pots and
pans have been washed in; the soapy water."

"That's just right, Davie."

"Well," David said, "why do they have to be lying down to do it? I
should think they'd rather do it standing up or sitting down."

At that, one of the men poked his head out and smiled at David.

"You got that just right, too," he said; "but here's where it has to
go, and there's no other way that I know of."

"The pipe has to be under the sink, Davie, for the water to run into
it," the foreman said. "Now come on, and we'll go upstairs again."

So the foreman and David went up the back stair