“I wouldn’t want to do that,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “I didn’t think of doing that. I thought of mining in the old shack over yonder. It has a dirt floor and it has screens over the windows and at the door. I thought we could go into the shack and close the screen door and sink a shaft there, and then tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow and get the worms. I don’t suppose a worm cares whether you dig down to get him or tunnel up under him to get him. I never heard so.” Well, of course, Jibby was joking about whether worms cared how we got them, but as soon as he mentioned a worm mine, we all wondered why we had never thought of one. When you come to think of it, a worm mine is the only sensible way to get worms from a place where the mosquitoes practically eat you alive. You are down under the ground where the skeets can’t get at you, and you are down where the biggest and best worms are, and you have your mine, and any time you need fishworms you can go into the mine and dig a little worm-ore and get the worms out of it. Almost before Jibby was through talking, we were making a rush for the old shack. The screens were fair to middling at the door and windows--good enough, anyway, even if they were rusty--and in a minute Tad had marked out the size of the shaft we ought to sink. He scratched it on the hard earth of the floor with his spade. But Jibby wasn’t there with us. We were so excited that we did not notice, at first, that he was not with us, but about the time when we began to try to dig the hard earth of that floor he came in bringing a regular ditch-digger’s pick. It was just what we needed. Jibby always did think of everything. Well, the worm mine was a big success. We took turns digging the shaft, some of us digging and some of us looking for worms in the dirt we dug out and some of us carrying the dirt out of the shack and dumping it. The dirt we got out of the shaft was pay-dirt, but it did not assay very heavy in worms; it was low-grade ore and the worms ran small to middling. We talked a good deal while we worked, and we decided to call the mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine. We got so interested in mining worms and in making it a first-class mine that we forgot all about fishing. It was bully to think that we were probably the first worm miners the world ever knew, and that this was the only worm mine in the world. So, from then on, whenever we wanted worms, we went down to the shack and mined some. And that was what the Five Friends’ Worm Mine was, and that old shack was the “shaft-house” where we met to talk over the plans of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. We began planning while it was daylight, but before we were through we had lighted our lanterns.