66 WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING. 



point so low, at least, that no drain running into it 

 should ever be troubled with back-water. Nothing 

 can be more useless than a drain in which water 

 stagnates, choking it with mud. Then I should have 

 bought hundreds of Hemlock or other cheap boards, 

 slit them to a width of four or five inches, and, hav- 

 ing opened the needed drains, laid these in the bot- 

 tom and the tile thereupon, taking care to break joint, 

 by covering the meeting ends of two boards with the 

 middle of a tile. Laying tile in the soft mud of a 

 bog, with nothing beneath to prevent their sinking, 

 is simply throwing away labor and money. I cannot 

 wonder that tile-draining seems to many a humbug, 

 seeing that so many tile are laid so that they can 

 never do any good. 



Having, by successive purchases, become owner of 

 fully half of this swamp, and by repeated blunders 

 discovered that making stone drains in a bog, while 

 it is a capital mode of getting rid of the stone, is no 

 way at all to dry the soil, I closed my series of ex- 

 periments two years since by carefully relaying my 

 generally useless tile on good strips of board, sinking 

 them just as deep as I could persuade the water to 

 run off freely, and, instead of allowing them to dis- 

 charge into a brooklet or open ditch, connecting each 

 with a covered main of four to six-inch tile ; these 

 mains discharging into the running brook which 

 drains all my farm and three or four of those above 

 it just where it runs swiftly off from my land. If a 

 thaw or heavy rain swells the brook (as it sometimes 



