III. After School
Wallace brought Harry, and Ruth brought Mildred Maydole home after school to watch the bricklayer work.
“Why, how straight and true the bricks must be!” exclaimed Harry. “A bricklayer has to be very careful, doesn’t he?”
“Indeed he does,” replied Wallace. “Do you know what the mortar is made of?”
“Yes; I think I do. It is lime and sand and—something else,” Harry said. That made them all laugh.
“I think the most wonderful brick work I ever saw,” said Mildred, “was in the arch of a big sewer. I couldn’t tell why the bricks didn’t all fall down. My father said the mortar held them.”
“Why, if it weren’t for bricklayers, and cement workers, and stone masons, we should be without lots of things!” exclaimed Harry. “Just imagine it, if you can.”
“That’s so,” said Wallace. “Let’s count what we know of that they build for us—sewers, bridge piers,—go on, Mildred.”
“Pavements,” added Mildred.
“Houses and chimneys,” said Ruth.
“Foundations for houses,” said Harry.
“Here comes father!” cried Ruth suddenly; and all the children ran to meet him.
“We’ve been talking about how it would be if there were no bricklayers, or stone masons, or cement workers, father,” said Wallace.
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Mr. Duwell. “I was thinking very much the same thing as I walked home so soon after such a heavy rain without getting my feet wet.
“I remember what Benjamin Franklin wrote,” he went on, “about the streets of Philadelphia in his day. He said the mud after a storm was so deep that it came above the people’s shoe-tops. It was Benjamin Franklin himself who first talked of paving the streets.”
“I’m glad they aren’t as bad as they were in Benjamin Franklin’s time,” said Mildred.