When I first bought land (in 1853) I fully purposed to provide for irrigating my nearly level acres at will, and I constructed two dams across my upland stream with that view; but they were so badly planned that they went off in the flood caused by a tremendous rain the next Spring; and, though I rebuilt one of them, I submitted to a miscalculation which provided for taking the water, by means of a syphon, out of the pond at the top and over the bank that rose fifteen or twenty feet above the surface of the water. Of course, air would work into the pipe after it had carried a stream unexceptionably for two or three days, and then the water would run no longer. Had I taken it from the bottom of the pond through my dam, it would have run forever, (or so long as there was water covering its inlet in the pond;) but bad engineering flung me; and I have never since had the heart (or the means) to revise and correct its errors. My next attempt was on a much humbler scale, and I engineered it myself. Toward the north end of my farm, the hill-side which rises east of my lowland is broken by a swale or terrace, which gives me three or four acres of tolerably level upland, along the upper edge of which five or six springs, which never wholly fail, burst from the rocks above and unite to form a petty runnel, which dries up in very hot or dry weather, but which usually preserved a tiny stream to be lost in the swamp below. North of the gully cut down the lower hill-side by this streamlet, the hill-side of some three acres is quite steep, still partially wooded, and wholly devoted to pasturage. Making a petty dam across this runnel at the top of the lower acclivity, I turned the stream aside, so that it should henceforth run along the crest of this lower hill, falling off gradually so as to secure a free current, and losing its contents at intervals through variable depressions in its lower bank. Dam and artificial water-course together cost me $90, which was about twice what it should have been. That rude and petty contrivance has now been ten years in operation, and may have cost $5 per annum for oversight and repairs. Its effect has been to double the grass grown on the two acres it constantly irrigates, for which I paid $280, or more than thrice the cost of my irrigation. But more: my hill-side, while it was well grassed in Spring, always gave out directly after the first dry, or hot week; so that, when I most needed feed, it afforded none; its herbage being parched up and dead, and thus remaining till refreshed by generous rains. I judge, therefore, that my irrigation has _more_ than doubled the product of those two acres, and that these are likely to lose nothing in yield or value so long as that petty irrigating ditch shall be maintained.