[Illustration]

“I brought a two-horse plough because it’s virgin soil,” the man said.  Margery wondered what in the world he meant; it had not been cultivated, of course, but what had that do with the kind of plough?  “What does he mean, father?” she whispered, when she got a chance.  “He means that this land has not been ploughed before; it will be hard to turn the soil, and one horse could not pull the plough,” said her father.

It took the man two hours to plough the little strip of land.  He drove the sharp end of the plough into the soil, and held it firmly so, while the horses drew it along in a straight line.  Margery found it fascinating to watch the long line of dark earth and green grass come rolling up and turn over, as the knife passed it.  She could see that it took real skill and strength to keep the line even, and to avoid the stones.  Sometimes the plough struck a hidden stone, and then the man was jerked almost off his feet.  But he only laughed, and said, “Tough piece of land; it will be a lot better next year.”

When he had ploughed, the man went back to his cart and unloaded another farm implement.  This one was like a three-cornered platform of wood, with a long, curved, strong rake under it.  It was called a harrow, and it looked like the diagram on the next page.

The man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform and drove all over the strip of land.  It was fun to watch, but perhaps it was a little hard to do.  The man’s weight kept the harrow steady, and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it did not stay in ridges.

“He scrambles the ground, father!” said Margery.

“It needs ‘scrambling,’” laughed her father.  “We are going to get more weeds than we want on this fresh soil, and the more the ground is broken, the fewer there will be.”

[Illustration]

After the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and Margery’s father said that he himself would do the rest of the work in the late afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he was a boy.  So Margery did not see any more done until the next day.

But the next day there was hard work for Margery’s father!  Every bit of that ground had to be broken up still more with a spade, and then the clods which were full of grass-roots had to be taken on a fork and shaken, till the earth fell out; when the grass was thrown to one side.  That would not have had to be done if the land had been ploughed in the autumn; the grass would have rotted in the ground, and would have made food for the plants.  Now, Margery’s father put the fertiliser on the top, and then raked it into the earth.

At last, it was time to make the place for the seeds.  Margery and her mother helped.  Father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden.  Then he took the cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to another stake, and drove that down.  That made a straight line.  Then he hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and scattered fertiliser in it.  Pretty soon the whole garden was lined with little trenches.