"If you say that I'll take your clothes away," declared Hiram promptly. "You've got to eat many a gallon of Miss Pringle's broth and porridge before you get a chance to leave Sunnyside."
"'Sunnyside,'" repeated Orrin Post wistfully. "Is that the name of this farm, Mr. Strong?"
"Yes."
"It must be a pleasant place."
"I don't know that myself yet," laughed Hiram, "I have been here so short a time."
And for the next few days Hiram Strong was so busy that he was not at all sure whether or not he would like it himself at Sunnyside Farm.
He set a gang of a dozen men to ditching in the twenty acre lot. He could have made much better time with a ditching machine; but of course it would not have paid to hire such an implement for this small job.
He had been all over the wheat field and had made a mental plan of what he wished to do before a spadeful of earth was thrown. He proposed running a ditch the entire length of the field, through the middle and parallel with the road on which the twenty-acre piece bordered. On the wetter portion of the piece he proposed having transverse ditches every hundred feet. Where the land seemed naturally better drained he would have the cross ditches dug less frequently.
The county ditch beside the road was deep enough and clean enough to carry off an immense volume of water. The natural drainage of the land was toward the road; therefore nobody could complain of his using the county ditch as he intended.
With a cross-cut saw they fitted the logs to match at the intersection of the ditches and there he laid a cap of heavy planking which chanced to be about the place. Any bit of rough lumber answered this purpose.