seemed to resemble a sharp point like steel.  Keyser dropped some poison on it; but it didn’t appear to mind the stuff, but kept slowly creeping up from the ground.  Then Keyser felt it, and was astonished to find that it felt exactly like the end of a fork-prong.  He sent the boy over to call Perkins and the rest of the neighbors.  Pretty soon a large crowd collected, and by this time the animal had emerged to the extent of a couple of inches.

[Illustration:  A QUEER PLANT]

Everybody was amazed to see that it looked exactly like the end of a large auger; and two or three timid men were so scared at the idea of such a thing actually growing out of the earth that they suddenly got over the fence and left.  Perkins couldn’t account for it; but he suggested that maybe somebody might have planted a gimlet there, and it had taken root and blossomed out into an auger; but he admitted that he had never heard of such a thing before.

The excitement increased so that the men who were boring the artesian well knocked off and came over to see the phenomenon.  It was noticed that as soon as they stopped work the auger ceased to grow; and when they arrived, they looked at it for a minute, and one of them said,

“Bill, do you recognize that auger?”

“I think I do,” said Bill.

“Well, Bill, you go and unhitch that wheel from the other end of the rod.”

Bill did so; and then the other man asked the crowd to take hold of the auger and pull.  They did; and out came four hundred and fifty feet of iron rod.  The auger had slid off to the side, turned upward and come to the surface in Keyser’s garden.  Then the artesian well was abandoned, and Keyser bought a steam-pump and began to get water from the river.

Another remarkable boring experience that occurred in our neighborhood deserves to be related here.  When Butterwick bought his present place, the former owner offered, as one of the inducements to purchase, the fact that there was a superb sugar-maple tree in the garden.  It was a noble tree, and Butterwick made up his mind that he would tap it some day and manufacture some sugar.  However, he never did so until last year.  Then he concluded to draw the sap and to have “a sugar-boiling.”

Mr. Butterwick’s wife’s uncle was staying with him, and after inviting some friends to come and eat the sugar they got to work.  They took a huge wash-kettle down into the yard and piled some wood beneath it, and then they brought out a couple of buckets to catch the sap, and the auger with which to bore a hole in the tree.

Butterwick’s wife’s uncle said that the bucket ought to be set about three feet from the tree, as the sap would spurt right out with a good deal of force, and it would be a pity to waste any of it.