Sure enough!  There were the rose-bushes still, and the croquet arches; but they were standing, so to speak, up to their knees in pools of water, which seemed several inches deep, and covered the whole place, with the exception of the flagged walks which ran from the gates to the front and side doors of the house.  Clover noticed now, for the first time, that these walks were several inches higher than the grass-beds on either side.  She wondered if they were made so on purpose, and resolved to notice if the next place had the same arrangement.

But as they reached the next place and the next, lo! the phenomenon was repeated and Dr. Hope’s lawn too was in the same condition,—­everything was overlaid with water.  They began to suspect what it must mean, and Mrs. Hope confirmed the suspicion.  It was irrigation day in Mountain Avenue, it seemed.  Every street in the town had its appointed period when the invaluable water, brought from a long distance for the purpose, was “laid on” and kept at a certain depth for a prescribed number of hours.

“We owe our grass and shrubs and flower-beds entirely to this arrangement,” Mrs. Hope told them.  “Nothing could live through our dry summers if we did not have the irrigating system.”

“Are the summers so dry?” asked Clover.  “It seems to me that we have had a thunder-storm almost every day since we came.”

“We do have a good many thunderstorms,” Mrs. Hope admitted; “but we can’t depend on them for the gardens.”

“And did you ever hear such magnificent thunder?” asked Dr. Hope.  “Colorado thunder beats the world.”

“Wait till you see our magnificent Colorado hail,” put in Mrs. Hope, wickedly.  “That beats the world, too.  It cuts our flowers to pieces, and sometimes kills the sheep on the plains.  We are very proud of it.  The doctor thinks everything in Colorado perfection.”

“I have always pitied places which had to be irrigated,” remarked Clover, with her eyes fixed on the little twin-lakes which yesterday were lawns.  “But I begin to think I was mistaken.  It’s very superior, of course, to have rains; but then at the East we sometimes don’t have rain when we want it, and the grass gets dreadfully yellow.  Don’t you remember, Phil, how hard Katy and I worked last summer to keep the geraniums and fuschias alive in that long drought?  Now, if we had had water like this to come once a week, and make a nice deep pond for us, how different it would have been!”

“Oh, you must come out West for real comfort,” said Dr. Hope.  “The East is a dreadfully one-horse little place, anyhow.”

“But you don’t mean New York and Boston when you say ’one-horse little place,’ surely?”

“Don’t I?” said the undaunted doctor.  “Wait till you see more of us out here.”

“Here’s Poppy, at last,” cried Mrs. Hope, as a girl came hurriedly up the walk.  “You’re late, dear.”

“Poppy,” whose real name was Marian Chase, was the girl who had been asked to meet them.  She was a tall, rosy creature, to whom Clover took an instant fancy, and seemed in perfect health; yet she told them that when she came out to Colorado three years before, she had travelled on a mattress, with a doctor and a trained nurse in attendance.