But Jack’s hotbed work is quite another story.  However, I can tell you that the next winter he added two other frames to this one.

X

Albert and Jay’s drainage problem.

The problem of draining which Albert and Jay had to consider, was perhaps the biggest piece of work that was done all that spring.  In the first place, it should have been done in the fall.  That is the time to do such work, for if put off until spring it delays greatly the spring planting.

It was a wet spring, too.  The boys, rather impatient of waiting, started digging one day, but it ended in disaster.  The ground was soft and wet and hence very heavy to handle.  This piece of land was one hundred feet wide or deep.  It had a frontage of one hundred and fifty feet.  A slope rose up in front of it, which accounted for the water being drained onto this land.  The water naturally would have run off the land into a brook at the back.  But in about the centre was a hollow, and beyond that the ground rose a little, and then dropped toward the brook.  The depression made a kind of drain hole and the water settled there all the spring through.

This strip of land of the boys was not by any means the entire piece of land, which was much larger, but the boys’ father had given them this largely to try their mettle.  He felt so certain they could not do it that he said they might have all they needed from a pile of drain pipe he intended to use himself on a piece of wet land the next fall.  “I shall have all my drain pipe left to me,” he said to the boys’ mother one night.  She smiled, for the boys had talked matters over a bit with her.

Myron’s strawberry bed was all made, Jack’s garden-filling work done, George’s ploughing and planting finished, before the boys could lay the drain.

“It’s no use,” said Albert, “I’m ready to give up.”

“Now Savage, there’s to be no quitting.  I’d be ashamed of you, at least we can surprise father.”

“All right, Jay, I’m with you.”

Finally the day came when The Chief and the boys started work.  A drain pipe should be laid ordinarily anywhere from twenty inches to three feet deep.  One may dig or plough to make the trench.  It is wise to dig as narrow a trench as possible and so lift as little soil as possible.  Then, too, the bed of the drain should slope gradually from the upper or highest point to the lowest.  The drop in level should be about four inches per hundred feet.  So the boys had to consider just this.  This is the way they “sighted” to get the drop in level.  They drove a stake into the ground at some twenty feet from the place where the drain was to begin.  Previously a cord had been stretched from one end of the centre of the field to the other end.  Since the centre of the field seemed to be the place for the deposit of water the drain was to go directly through the centre.