s very slowly and
carefully, for there were rough boards on those stairs, too; and they
went through a door and through the upstairs hall, and through another
door into a small square room.

The foreman said that that room would be the bathroom. No plaster was
on the walls yet, but the laths were all on. And there wasn't any
bathtub yet, nor any basin; only some pipes sticking up out of the
floor.

And David saw the bodies and the legs of two more men.

These men had their heads and shoulders through a great square hole in
the floor, and their bodies and their legs were lying on the floor and
sticking out straight.

David laughed. "Water-pipe men are funny men," he said.

One of the men lifted his head out of the hole in the floor and smiled
at David, but he didn't say anything.

"They're putting in the waste pipe and the trap," the foreman said;
"that is, the pipe that the water will run through when it runs out of
the bathtub. A tub will be here Davie, after the floor is laid."

David nodded.

"Would you like to be a plumber, Davie?" the foreman asked, smiling.

David shook his head.

"I think I'd better go now," he said. "My kitty won't know where I am."

So the foreman laughed, and he tucked David under his arm and carried
him downstairs and out of the front door, and he set him down on the
ground.

"Good-bye, Davie," said the foreman.

"Good-bye," said David.

And he took hold of the handle of his cart, and walked home as fast as
he could, dragging his cart, and his shovel and his hoe rattled in the
bottom of it.

When he got home, there was his cat waiting for him.

David dropped the handle of his cart, and ran around to the back of
the house and got an old grocery box that he used to play with.

He kept all his things at the back of the house: old broken grocery
boxes and old tin cans and rows of bottles, some of them filled with
water and some filled with thin mud and some empty, and nails and
pieces of iron and sticks; but not his toys.

And David dragged the old grocery box around to the front, and put it
opposite the end of a step.

Not all of the boards which had been nailed on for a cover were taken
off, so that the inside of the box was hard to get at, and it was
rather dark.

Then he picked up two short sticks and put them on the step.

David hurried to do all these things, and when he had them done, he
hurried into the house and into the dining-room, and he climbed up in
a ch