[Illustration]

CHAPTER III

GEPPETTO NAMES HIS PUPPET PINOCCHIO

Geppetto lived in a small ground-floor room that was only lighted from the staircase.  The furniture could not have been simpler—­a rickety chair, a poor bed, and a broken-down table.  At the end of the room there was a fireplace with a lighted fire; but the fire was painted, and by the fire was a painted saucepan that was boiling cheerfully and sending out a cloud of smoke that looked exactly like real smoke.

As soon as he reached home Geppetto took his tools and set to work to cut out and model his puppet.

[Illustration:  A Little Chicken Popped Out, Very Gay and Polite]

“What name shall I give him?” he said to himself; “I think I will call him Pinocchio.  It is a name that will bring him luck.  I once knew a whole family so called.  There was Pinocchio the father, Pinocchia the mother, and Pinocchi the children, and all of them did well.  The richest of them was a beggar.”

Having found a name for his puppet he began to work in good earnest, and he first made his hair, then his forehead, and then his eyes.

The eyes being finished, imagine his astonishment when he perceived that they moved and looked fixedly at him.

Geppetto, seeing himself stared at by those two wooden eyes, said in an angry voice: 

“Wicked wooden eyes, why do you look at me?”

No one answered.

He then proceeded to carve the nose, but no sooner had he made it than it began to grow.  And it grew, and grew, and grew, until in a few minutes it had become an immense nose that seemed as if it would never end.

Poor Geppetto tired himself out with cutting it off, but the more he cut and shortened it, the longer did that impertinent nose become!

The mouth was not even completed when it began to laugh and deride him.

“Stop laughing!” said Geppetto, provoked; but he might as well have spoken to the wall.

“Stop laughing, I say!” he roared in a threatening tone.

The mouth then ceased laughing, but put out its tongue as far as it would go.

Geppetto, not to spoil his handiwork, pretended not to see and continued his labors.  After the mouth he fashioned the chin, then the throat, then the shoulders, the stomach, the arms and the hands.

The hands were scarcely finished when Geppetto felt his wig snatched from his head.  He turned round, and what did he see?  He saw his yellow wig in the puppet’s hand.

“Pinocchio!  Give me back my wig instantly!”

But Pinocchio, instead of returning it, put it on his own head and was in consequence nearly smothered.

Geppetto at this insolent and derisive behavior felt sadder and more melancholy than he had ever been in his life before; and, turning to Pinocchio, he said to him: