Chapter V
BULKA GETS INTO TROUBLE
Where was Bulka?
When Poor Cecco changed places with the little black dog, and sat down on the pavement to wait for pennies, Bulka soon got very bored with sitting there beside him, and nothing at all to do. So bye-and-bye he got up, quietly, without saying a word, and strolled off along the sidewalk to see what there was to be seen.
The bridge, like a great many other bridges, had water flowing beneath it. And a few steps further on, not far from where the old man sat, a little path ran down a steep bank from the sidewalk to the water’s edge.
Now Bulka loved water. He had often thought that he would like to be a sailor, in spite of the fact that the least rocking made him seasick. And he had never seen so much water as this before. In fact, all the water he had seen, up to now, had been in tubs and pails, or else in puddles on the garden path after a shower, and these were shallow and muddy, and always dried up just when the sun shone out and you didn’t want them to. But here was water, plenty of it, flowing along as freely as if there
48
