To my grandpa

    There was once a little boy with brown hair and green eyes. He a slave in 1478 and his name was Dan Macast. The boy lived in Rome, Italy in a small house with an nefarious witch. The house looked like a ramshackle with old wood falling down and broken steps. The boy lived in the house working for the disgusting witch. He couldn't leave though. He had no money and would die by himself. His parents died very young,  and he doesn't remember them not even a little. The boy was smart though and knew never to cross the witch.

    Every day he would do different tasks that weren’t easy. Once a week he had to count the cows, chicken, pigs, and sheep for no reason. Then one day the boy went out to count the animals and the animals had babies. It was late out night with a full moon, so it would be even harder to count. He was glad there was some light. He had and idea he would make a new way to count the animals a faster way. He was through with using slow tally marks.

     There were problem with that: if he didn’t count the animals the witch wouldn’t let him eat for one day. He knew that he had to make a faster way to count. The boy always used tally marks, but today he had too many tallies because of all the animals, so he had an idea. He thought, “What if I use letters to count and make them more efficient than tally marks?”  The reason he picked using letters is because a single tally mark looked like an I, which is how picked that for the number one. He knew it wouldn’t help with all the animals, so he picked to put them in groups of five. 

     He knew the witch was vicious and was always threatening him with dangerous things. He thought, “If I take the first letter of the word it vicious it would be V for vicious." That was the final choice for five. From then on it was V, and no one could change it, not even him. He wrote down a V, representing 5 animals.