Pinocchio Read Free

and already you’re treating your father with disrespect. That’s bad, my boy, bad!”
    And he wiped a tear from his eye.
    The legs and feet were still left.
    When Geppetto finished making the feet, one of them kicked him in the nose.
    â€œI deserve it!” he said to himself. “I should have known—now it’s too late!”
    Then he lifted the puppet from under the arms and set him down on the ground so as to make him walk.
    Pinocchio’s legs were stiff and he didn’t know how to move them, so Geppetto led him by the hand, teaching him to put one foot in front of the other.
    When his legs loosened up a bit, Pinocchio began to walk by himself and then to run around the room, until he slipped through the door, jumped into the street, and ran off.
    And there was poor Geppetto running after him, unable to catch him because that puppet was bounding like a rabbit. The clacking of his wooden feet on the pavement made quite a racket, like twenty pairs of farmer clogs.
    â€œCatch him! Catch him!” yelled Geppetto. But the people who were out in the street, seeing this wooden puppet running like a thoroughbred, stopped and watched him with delight. They laughed and laughed and laughed, not believing their eyes.
    Finally, and fortunately, a policeman appeared. Hearing all that clatter, and thinking it was some colt that had slipped from its master’s grasp, he bravely planted his feet wide in the middle of the road and resolved to stop him and prevent further mayhem.
    When Pinocchio saw the policeman blocking the entire road up ahead of him, he figured he’d surprise him by running straight between his legs, but it didn’t work.
    Without budging an inch, the policeman snatched him up by the nose (it was a prodigiously long nose, one that seemed specially designed to be easily seized by policemen), and delivered him back into Geppetto’s arms. Geppetto’s first impulse was to give him a good ear-pulling, to set him straight. But imagine his reaction when, looking for Pinocchio’s ears, he wasn’t able to find them—and do you know why? Because in his haste to finish carving, he had forgotten to make them.
    So he grabbed Pinocchio by the nape of his neck and began to lead him back. Shaking his head menacingly, Geppetto said, “We’re going home. And you can be sure we’ll settle our accounts when we get there.”
    Pinocchio understood his drift and threw himself to the ground, refusing to take another step. Meanwhile the busybodies and the idlers began to gather into a crowd around them.
    They all had their opinions.
    â€œPoor puppet!” some said. “Who can blame him for not wanting to go home! Just imagine how that mean Geppetto would thrash him!”
    And the others added spitefully: “That Geppetto seems like a nice man, but he’s a real bully with the boys! If they leave that poor puppet in his hands, he might well bust him to pieces!”
    In short, they made such a fuss that the policeman set Pinocchio free and took poor Geppetto straight to jail. At a loss for words to defend himself, Geppetto cried like a little calf, and on his way to jail he stammered as he sobbed: “Wicked child! And to think that I worked so hard to make him a proper puppet! But it’s my own fault—I should have known what to expect!”
    What happened next is so strange you’ll scarcely believe it, but I’ll tell you all about it in the coming chapters.

4
    W HAT HAPPENED next, children, is that while poor, innocent Geppetto was being led off to jail, that rascal Pinocchio, freed from the policeman’s clutches, went sprinting across the fields to get home as fast as he could. Running crazily, he leapt over tall embankments, thorny hedges, and ditches full of water, much like a little goat or rabbit fleeing from hunters. When he got back home, the front door was ajar. He pushed it open and went inside, and as soon as he had