Then the men took away the small poles and the log fell upon the ground, and it made a big booming noise as it fell.
The other log was unloaded in the same way not far from the corner of the new house, and they led the horses to a tree and tied them; and they took the shovels and all the little poles and the other things out of the wagon.
The shovels were strange-looking things, with long, straight handles and queer blades, more like long mustard-spoons than shovels; and the little poles had sharp spikes in the ends, and some of the poles were not much longer than clothes-poles, and some were a great deal longer; and there were two sharp-pointed iron bars.
The men took all their things to the place where the first pole lay on the ground, and two of them took bars and the other took one of the shovels.
And the men with the bars stuck them into the ground and loosened the dirt, and the other man scooped out the dirt with his big mustard-spoon. Then some more dirt was loosened and that was scooped out with the shovel.
The hole that they were digging was not much bigger around than the end of the pole which would go into it.
The hole kept getting deeper, so that a common shovel wouldn't have got up any dirt at all; but the man with the mustard-spoon shovel just gave it a little twist, and lifted it out with dirt in it.
Pretty soon they had the hole dug deep enough.
It was so deep that, if a man could have stood on the bottom of it, he could have just seen out, if he stood on his tiptoes.
But only a slim man could have got into the hole. A fat man would have stuck fast as soon as his legs were in.