260 THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 



that too of sundry landowners down-stream to whom he 

 has been gratuitously presenting unexpected " surplus." 



You will remember my mentioning our busy opera- 

 tions raising stone in the river bed for the purpose of 

 repairing the bank. Well, just as we had carted it a 

 short distance, and were about to commence reparation, 

 a young engineer officer came on a visit, whose brains, 

 as he is clever and an enthusiast, I determined to 

 utilise. 



Having walked him down our deep slopes to the scene 

 of action, he at once pointed out, as really is the case, 

 that, however carefully we might face the bank with 

 boulder-stone, still the insidious undercurrent would 

 continue to eat away its base until some morning the 

 whole slice would slip down in hopeless consternated 

 debris into the triumphant tyrant's jaws. He also for- 

 bade our building out piers down stream, the effect of 

 which he showed would be just to divert the current a 

 few yards, only to return exasperated in what is termed 

 a "backwater," to an assault upon the soil below the 

 stonework. Instead, he directed us — and the simple 

 idea at once recommended itself so forcibly even to the 

 gutta-percha-brained labourers employed, that they threw 

 themselves with a will into the work — to build out at 

 intervals of a hundred yards, and at an angle of forty- 

 five degi'ees upstream, half-a-dozen thick walls of a jetty 

 character sloping down from the level of the bank to a 

 stone's thickness on the river bed. He selected the 

 most projecting points of the bank to throw them out 

 from. The result of this work is, that the stream gets 

 caught irretrievably, and there is an elbowful, so to 

 speak, within each jetty, of dead water, which acts as a 

 buffer against the intruding ton-ent, directing it to move 



