"Maybe when you see her drive by you'll be sorry," Mrs. Bert smiled. "I shall be working on the south side of the house," I retorted. I had not been long at my place, indeed, I had scarcely finished watering my seed bed and carting out my daily stint of two barrow loads of slash from the orchard, when I heard the road scraper rattling over the bridge by the brook. Mike came from the vegetable garden and met his "frind Morrissy," to whom I was ceremoniously presented. The scraper was a large affair with flat-tired iron wheels and a blade eight feet long. It was drawn by four horses, and Mr. Morrissy himself was driving, while a younger man manipulated the levers. We drove in behind the woodshed to the proposed lawn, I explained what I wanted done, and the scraper went to work, with me trotting anxiously alongside, quite useless but convinced that I was helping, like Marceline at the Hippodrome. The way that eight-foot blade, with four horses hauling it, peeled off the old furrows and brought the top soil down from the high side to the low made my poor efforts with the scoop look puny enough. After a few trips it began to look as if my lawn could be fairly level after all. Where I had worked an hour to lower the ground six inches, the scraper accomplished the same result in five minutes and on four times as wide a strip. I soon saw, too, that Mike and Joe were useless in the garden, so long as "frind Morrissy" and his helper were here on the lawn, so I set them to spreading the loose dirt at the lower end, as fast as the scraper brought it down, taking a hand myself. The lawn was shaping up so fast that I began once more to grow expansive. "It really won't be square," thought I, "because my pergola will cut off twelve feet of the length, and if I have flower beds by the roses, they'll cut off some more. I guess those roses ought to be 112 feet from the house." I threw down my shovel, went over to the row of stakes, and moved them south again, twenty-five feet, having added thirteen feet as I walked; then I called out to "frind Morrissy" to bring his scraper. "Sure," said Mike, "you'll get it right yet. But I was goin' to put me cauliflowers there." The scraper went at the new twenty-five foot strip, and in an hour that, too, was down eight inches at the west end and up as much at the east. The lawn still sloped, and though an afternoon with the scraper could probably have put it nearly level, and I was tempted to have it done, Mike pointed out that we were already getting perilously close to the subsoil, and if we went deeper we'd get into tough sledding, and I'd end, besides, by getting a surface which wouldn't grow grass. So I took his advice, paid "frind Morrissy"--for the town!--as the far-off noon whistle at Slab City blew, and took my lunch down to the brook while the scraper rattled off down the road.