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THE ROAD THAT TALKED

"A road can't talk!" you say. Oh, yes it can; but it requires a particular kind of ear to hear its voice. See if you can find out what kind is required.

Dickie sat by the roadside and frowned at the toes of his scuffed shoes. He was very unhappy. Why had his mother gone driving with Mrs. Reed and left him with nothing to do?

A month before, when the doctor had ordered his mother to a country farmhouse for rest, Dickie had voluntarily given up school to accompany her. For awhile he had not minded the absence of playmates and toys, but now he was beginning to tire of lonesomeness. Oh dear! If only there was something to do!

He looked around him. Great, billowy, yellowwhite clouds were piled up against the blue sky, and over toward the distant mountains was one that looked like a blacksmith's anvil. Dickie remembered that the farmer had called them "thunderheads" and said that they meant rain. Would his mother get wet? The boy's hand closed on a pebble at his side and he tossed it at the dappled bark of a near by tree. Oh, if there was something to do! He had just stretched himself out disconsolately with his head in a bed of ferns when a voice spoke at his elbow.

"It's dreadful, my boy, to be choked," it said, "and it's not a bit nice to have mud in your bed."

Dickie sat up quickly and again looked around him, but not a soul did he see. There was the same little stream at his left, the same muddy puddles in the wagon wheel ruts, the same stones in front of him, and yet something was different. What was it? Dickie stretched himself out for the second time, wondering, and another voice spoke:

"If people can smell and hear and see,

"Why is it, I ask, they're so cruel to me?"

Dickie jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, but the stream at his left, the muddy puddles in the wheeltracks, and the very same stones were there as before. Quite solemnly he pinched his left arm; then he pulled two brown hairs out of his head and rubbed his eyes. "I'm awake all right," he declared, "but I must be crazy. He stared this way and he stared that way, and finally he demanded, "if you don't want mud in your bed, why do you have it there? Who are you, anyhow?"

Whereupon the first voice answered:

"I'm only a part of a roadside spring,

Too choked up with leaves to talk or sing.' "Well, well," said Dickie, picking up a stick at once and hurrying toward the little stream, "you are a bit choked up, aren't you?" Fishing about with his stick, he began throwing out great gobs of wet, brown leaves. The little stream gurgled forward joyfully, carrying away mud and ugly sticks and leav

ing only pretty pebbles to stare up at Dickie. He was so pleased that he raked and scraped with his piece of a stick until the little stream was running merrily across the road instead of oozing out into muddy puddles in the wheel tracks. "There," said the boy at last, "I wonder why people haven't done that before?"

And a voice replied:

They want eyes to see and a heart to do;
The eyes and the heart belong to you."

Dickie blushed at this praise, but it was so unexpected and queer to hear a stream talk that he thought something else might do it too, so he said aloud, "Is anybody else in trouble around here?"

At once a voice answered in a very great hurry, "If the wagon wheels don't break my back, My smooth white face they're sure to crack." Dickie, somewhat puzzled, looked this way and he looked that way, and at last saw a big, white stone square in the wheel tracks. He lifted it up carefully and put it in a hole that had been washed in the middle of the road.

"You'll help the road there," he told the rock, "and I guess people will be glad not to bump over you any more." He was beginning to enjoy his new work and was looking around for another stick or stone that needed him, when the white stone began calling him in an excited voice:

"Run right home just as fast as a man, And come again as soon as you can.”

A great drop of rain splashed down on the end of Dickie's nose, and he found that he had been so busy that he had not noticed the sky. The puffy yellow clouds had turned black, and a sheet of silver rain was rushing toward him with a roar like an express train. He turned and ran toward the farmhouse and got there the same moment the thunder began to crash. He found that his mother had come home by another road and was sitting in front of a crackling wood fire waiting for him.

"Oh, mother," he shouted, "I've learned the language of the road while you were gone. The stones and the stream have been talking to me."

Dickie's mother smiled. "You funny boy," she laughed. "You've been asleep."

"No, mother," insisted Dickie, "indeed I haven't. Dogs and horses don't talk as we do, but you can easily learn what they say. If they're cold or hungry, you know it, don't you? Well, I've learned about the road this afternoon. When it has gullies in it, it feels as we would, if we had holes in our faces, and it's ever so uncomfortable with its ditches filled up. I guess it feels just as we do when we can't blow our I'm going out to-morrow and dig out some of the ditches, next the banks, so the rain can run in those and not wash out the road."

noses.

"My dear boy," said Dickie's mother, "if you'll keep the little holes in the road filled up and the little ditches unfilled, you'll save the county many hundreds of dollars in repairs each year."

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When she told the farmer about it that night, he said, "Sometimes you meet a man who can speak French, German, and English; sometimes he can talk Chinese, but the greatest man of all is the one who understands the language of the crooked post, the broken gate and the forsaken road."

And Mrs. Reed said, "I wonder if I could teach my children that language?"

"Of course you can," declared the farmer. "Send them outdoors every single day and tell them to look and to listen and to do at least two things every day for something that can't talk English, and after a while they'll get so they can hear the crooked post distinctly say:

'Oh, please, Mister Man, won't you straighten me; My back's half broken, as you can see?'

And the broken gate say:

'Oh, please, Mister Man, won't you fix me up, I'm tired of swinging g-plup-g-plup?'

Dickie smiled at the farmer because he knew that they understood a language which the others didn't know, and he went to bed still smiling because he had learned a new language without being taught.

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Select from the statements given below the one which best expresses the central thought of the first paragraph. a. Dickie sat by the roadside. b. Dickie's mother had gone riding. c. Dickie had nothing to do. d. Dickie was unhappy.

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