The Stone Boat, A Story

This drawing of a stone boat is an illustration for a very short story of mine related to the “Three Little Pigs.” The story however is about five mice. Here it is, in much abbreviated form.

Five mice named Jason, Rason, Dason, Clayson, and Mason live on a farm where they are in constant terror of the cat. They have a meeting and decide that if they build a house in the yard then they can play outside all they want and retire to the protection of their house if the cat should appear. Like the three little pigs they first build a house of straw. The cat appears and the mice hide in the house of straw. The cat sleeps all afternoon on the stoop, and goes into the house in the evening but the wind blows the house away and the mice realize their mistake. The mice then build a house of wood which also offers them protection all day from the cat, but collapses when the dogs tail thumps against it. Finally they build a secure and permanent house of bricks and mortar, and this turns out to be the perfect reliable refuge. Their success emboldens the mice to build a boat so they can go sailing on the lake nearby. They hold a meeting and the eldest mouse, Mason, declares, “Every thing good is made out of bricks and mortar, everything else is trash.” This kind of thinking is natural coming from a mouse with a name like Mason. The mice all take his advice and build an elaborate boat of bricks, only to see it sink in a very few minutes. The stone boat floated only long enough for its picture to be drawn. The mice swim to safety and proceed to build a boat of wood. Now a boat of wood should work in theory, but mice know very little about boat building technique, they neglected to caulk the seams and the wood boat sank even faster than the stone boat. Then, for a long tome, the mice were totally perplexed but the youngest mouse, sitting by the edge of the lake happened to see some straw and string float past and thought to himself, “Nothing can sink a straw!” So, reluctantly taking the advice of the youngest mouse, Rayson, The five mice built a boat of straw tied together with string. This boat is perfect, they use it all the time, and lately they have been loaning it to the cat when they aren't using it.

This drawing was done with a red wax pencil on thick watercolor paper which was prepared in a very curious way. I painted a thick coat of white gesso onto the paper and just before it was completely dry I pressed it up against some bricks to give it a kind of masonry texture, this gave me a little bit of a head start in drawing the bricks of the boat but if you look carefully you may see some particles of brick dust stuck in the paper surface.