The post-holes were soon dug, and while I held the posts, she adjusted the level against them, our hands and faces close together, and we both kicked the dirt in with our feet. Then I climbed on the step-ladder and levelled the top piece, which I nailed down. Then, while I was cutting a semicircle out of the wire, for the arch, she nailed the trellis strips across the piers, grasping the hammer halfway up to the head, and frowning earnestly as she tapped with little, short, jablike blows. She was so intent on this task that I laughed aloud. "What are you laughing at?" said she. "You," said I. "You drive a nail as if it were an abstruse problem in differential calculus." "It is, for me," she answered, quite soberly. "I don't suppose I've driven a dozen nails in my life--only tacks in the plaster to hang pictures on. And it's very important to drive them right, because this is a rose trellis." "When I first came here," said I, "I was pretty clumsy with my hands, too. I'd lost my technique, as you might say. I remember one afternoon when I was trimming the orchard that I didn't think a single thought beyond the immediate problem each branch presented. And yet it was immensely stimulating. Personally, I believe that the educational value of manual dexterity has only begun to be appreciated." Miss Goodwin marked off the place for the next strip, and started nailing. At the last blow she relaxed her frown. "Maybe," she said. "No, probably. But the manual work, it seems to me, has got to be connected up in some way with--well, with higher things. I can't think of a word to fit, because my head is so full of the 'hy' group. You, for instance, were sawing your _own_ orchard, and you were working for better fruit, and more beautiful trees, and a lovely home. You saw the work in its higher relations, its relations to the beauty of living." "And your nails?" I asked. "I see the aqueduct of roses," she smiled. "You will see them, I trust," said I. "You _shall_ see them. You must stay till they bloom." Her brow suddenly clouded, and she shook her head. "I--I shall have to go back to the 'I's,'" she said. "But I shall know the roses are here. You must send me a picture of them." Somehow I was less enthusiastic over the next arch, but her spirits soon came back, and she sawed the next batch of stripping with greater precision and skill in the use of the saw--and a more reckless show of stocking. "See!" she cried, "how much I'm improving! I didn't splinter any of the ends this time!" "Fine," said I. "You can tackle the firewood in the orchard soon!" We got up two more arches, working close together, intent upon our task. As each arch, with its piers, took up eight feet, and the central arch would take up twelve, we should need exactly a dozen arches to complete the trellis. Here were four of them done! "Hooray!" cried the girl, as the fourth was finished. "How we are getting on!"