Charlie and His Puppy Bingo

by Helen Hill; Violet Maxwell

So Charlie did so—he put on his rubber boots and his sou’wester and his slicker and he picked all the branches that he wanted. When he brought them into the house he had to shake them over the sink because they were so wet.

Now I suppose you will wonder how Charlie made those branches stand upright on the floor to make them look like trees?

I will tell you. Charlie went to his box, where he kept the old toys that he used to play with when he was a very little boy, and there he found a whole lot of spools. When he was a baby he used to like to string spools together and his Mother and his Auntie always gave him their spools of thread when they were bare, so Charlie had dozens of spools and he sometimes let Bingo and Topsy play with them.

Well, Charlie got these spools and he stuck a small branch in the end of one of them and stood it upright. It made a beautiful tree! So he made a dozen trees and set them all along the streets of the village.

Charlie Made Three Villages

But there were no people in the village. Charlie thought hard for two whole minutes—then he went and found his old Noah’s ark and his box of lead soldiers. Of course, Noah and his wife and his family were the people who lived in the village, and so were some of the soldiers. The animals of the ark he stood up in the fields behind the houses and he pretended that they were all cows—yes, he pretended that the elephants and the giraffes and the lions and the tigers were all cows.

When Charlie had finished making one village, he started right away and made two more, so that he had three villages, and each village had a railway station. Then he arranged his railroad track so that it went between the different villages, and he made his train run up and down between them. He put some of the lead soldiers in the coaches. And every time that his train came to a station Charlie blew his whistle and called out, “All out for Stony Hollow! All out for Pine Hill! All out for Ford’s Crossing!” and some of the soldiers got out at every station and others got in.

My goodness! but Charlie did have a good time playing with his train and with his villages. He had such a good time that the morning only seemed five minutes long!

When his Mother and his Auntie came in to see what he had been doing with himself all the morning, and to tell him that it was time to get ready for dinner, they were surprised and de-light-ed when they saw the beautiful villages that Charlie had made.