RECLAIMED SWAMPS. 189 



courses, thus making a congenial home for snakes, frogs, turtles 

 and other amphibious reptiles, and producing a medium growth 

 of bog grass, small bushes and kindred growth, the meadow 

 being so low in most parts that a common shower rendered it 

 necessary to pole out what little it produced, as no team could 

 walk upon the water-covered surface. The water of the brook 

 was subsequently confined by digging a ditch about three feet 

 deep, and four feet wide, to limits beyond which, in ordinary 

 circumstances, it was not arrogant to proclaim, hitherto shalt 

 thou come and no further ; and here shall thy, hitherto, over- 

 flowing and flooding waters, be staid. 



The natural descent of this brook thus confined- is in most 

 parts not more than about four inches to a hundred feet. The 

 ditch is stoned up about two feet on each side, and the remain- 

 ing height, grassed over, standing back, at an angle of forty-five 

 degrees, thus making the tops about six feet wide. The cost of 

 this ditch and finishing in the manner described, was not less 

 than $2.75 per rod, an expense not necessary for merely agri- 

 cultural purposes, but being situated so conspicuously and sur- 

 rounded with dwellings situated in its immediate proximity, it 

 seemed to require this additional expense. Every three or four 

 hundred feet, a dam is put across this brook in order to raise 

 the water, during summer, to within about fifteen inches of the 

 surface, and also in time of a freshet, to stop the water at proper 

 seasons of the year, thus causing a rich and fertilizing sediment 

 from the high land to be deposited on the surface of the ground. 

 The confining of this brook to one channel, would have had but 

 little beneficial effect, had not the cold subterranean springs 

 been cut off at the sides of the meadow grounds. This was 

 effected in most cases by digging a ditch on the border of the 

 hard land adjoining, to the depth of three feet at least, and lay- 

 ing a covered drain with stones, say about one foot in the clear, 

 and covering the whole with gravel to the depth of two or three 

 inches, in order to fill all the insterstices, so that no sediment 

 would be carried into the covered drain by the action of the 

 water, percolating through the same from the top. Cheaper 

 methods have been adopted to drain lands, — such as filling the 

 ditches with small stones, setting up flat stones edgewise in a 

 slanting manner, meeting at the top, — but drains tluis con- 

 structed, in most cases will, in a very few years, be totally unfit 



