"But it seems that he knows something of road-making and grading."
"Which also are accomplishments that might be put to good use here, if there were any one to pay for the work."
"I have it!" Grace said. "The very thing! Don't you dare laugh at me until I tell it all. You know—or I do—that Doctor Taggess thinks Claybanks would be far less malarious if the swamp lands could be drained. He says the malarious exhalation, whatever it is, seems to be heavier than the air, and is therefore comparatively local in its effects, for he has known certain towns and other small localities to be entirely free from it, though the surrounding country was full of it. Now, if some surveyor and engineer—say Mary Truett's brother—could find out how to drain our Claybanks swamps, it might make this a healthy town. Is that a very silly notion?"
"Silly? Not a bit of it! But, my dear girl, do you know what such an enterprise would cost?"
"No, but I do know what I suffered on the day of my awful malarial attack and that I shall never forget the spectacle of a poor, dear, little, helpless, innocent baby shaking with a chill!"
"Poor girl! Poor baby! But don't you suppose that our swamp lands have been studied for years by the men most interested in them—the farmers and other owners?—studied and worked at?"
"Perhaps they have, but Doctor Taggess says farmers always do things in the hardest way; they've not time and money to try any other. Besides, since I began to think of it I've often recalled a case somewhat similar. In our town in western New York the railway station was very inconvenient; it was on a bridge crossing the track, and everything and everybody had to go up and down stairs or up and down hill to get to or from it. It was talked of at town meetings and the post-office and other places, and public-spirited citizens roamed the line from one end of town to the other, looking for a spot where the station could be placed near the level of the track.
"At last they subscribed money to pay for a new site, if the company would move its station to the level, and one day a surveyor and his men came up, and he looked about with an instrument, and a few days afterward a little cutting at one place and a little filling just back of it did the business, and all the village wiseacres called themselves names for not thinking of the same thing, but Grandpa said, 'It takes a shoemaker to make shoes.' You know the swamps are almost dry now, because of the hot weather; don't you suppose a surveyor and engineer, or even a sensible man who's studied physical geography in school, might be able to go over the ground and learn where and what retains the water? Now laugh, if you like."
"Grace, you ought to have been a man!"
"No, thank you—not unless you had been a woman. But you really think my plan isn't foolish?"