The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification of a hoary superstition. Personally, I like best to work at night, and some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But you cannot drive your brain at night when you've been driving your body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming. Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden and Mike sowing peas. "Can I have the horse to-morrow?" said I. "Yez cannot," said Mike. "Sure, we'll be another day at the least gettin' the garden ready." "But I want to grade my lawn," I said. "The day after, then?" "Maybe," said Mike. "Yez must make lawns when there's nothin' else at all to do." "Yes, sir," I replied, and he grinned. That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider to order the trellis lumber for me. Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of carbolic solution, I gouged out a few--only a few--of the worst cavities in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of the work to a dentist's filling teeth. If every tree died, I told myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed, carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed, and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden. Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled grass (for the orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the barrow back for it.