posted 07-12-2005 11:29 PM         

A young family moved into a house, next door to a vacant lot. One day, a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot.

The young family's 5-year old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers.

Eventually,. the construction crew, all of them gems-in-the-rough, more or less adopted her as kind of a project mascot. They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee and lunch breaks and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important.

At the end of the first week, they even presented her with a pay envelop containing a couple of dollars. The little girl took this home to her mother who said all the appropriate words of admiration and suggested that they take the two dollar "pay" she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.

When they got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the litle girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age. The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with the crew building the house next door to us."

"My goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"