quite unreasonable when we refused. That night there was a shower, and the brook rose a trifle. When we hastened down through the orchard after breakfast the new channel had curved itself still farther, as streams do when once they get started off the straight line, and had washed the southeast flower bed half away. Stella, with a cry of grief, ran down the brook into the pines, and came back with sadly bedraggled _Phlox Drummondi_ plants in her hands, their trailing roots washed white, their blooms broken. "Horrid brook," she said. "Let's put it right back into its proper place. I don't like it any more." "A sudden change of habit is always dangerous," said I. "Put the plants in the mud somewhere till we can set 'em in again." We now took away the boards from the new dam, which had begun to harden nicely. The next thing to do was to stake out the pool above it. As the dam was 10 feet below the line between the proposed bench and the front door of the house, the other end of the pool was marked off 20 feet upstream, and between the two extremes we dug out the soil into an oval basin. This was easily accomplished by chopping out the turf with a grub hoe, and then hitching Dobbin to the drag scraper. The soil was a black, loamy sand, which came up easily, and was hauled over and dumped for dressing on the site of our little lawn beyond the pool. When we had the basin excavated to a depth of about a foot, all three of us (for Peter was once more on the job) scattered to find stones to hold the banks. New England farms are traditionally stony--till you want stones. We ended by taking some here and there from the stone walls after we had scoured the pasture behind the barn for half a barrow load. When once the circumference of the pool had been ringed with stones, stood up on edge, we raked the bottom smooth, sprinkled clean sand upon it, and were ready to let the water against the dam as soon as the concrete hardened. We gave it one more day, and then shovelled away the temporary dam, filled up the new channel where it turned out of the old, and stood beside the dam while the current, with a first muddy rush, swirled against it, eddied back, and began very slowly to rise. "She holds, she holds!" I cried. "But we've forgotten to put stones for the water to fall over upon. It will undermine the structure if we don't." "'Structure' is good," laughed Stella, regarding our little six-foot long and eighteen-inch high piece of engineering. We shouted for Peter, and ran to the nearest stone wall, tugging back some flat stones which we placed directly below the dam for the overflow to fall on. Then, while Stella sat on the bank and watched the water rise, I shovelled some of the earth removed from the basin into the now abandoned temporary channel, and packed it down. "Say, we can have fish in here," cried Peter, who was also watching the water rise.