8 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
much hay the first season, hardly any in fact; the 
second year was when it began to hump itself. By 
the second year all furrows were pretty well leveled 
down or washed away; then the land was irrigated 
by flooding. Large ditches were placed across the 
heads of the fields, with lesser ones transversely 
lower down. The head ditches were provided with 
dams hastily thrown up across them from the sand 
of the ditch bottom. Then as big a head as could 
be mustered was turned in and all of it turned out 
in one place. The irrigator got out with his shovel, 
often in bare feet, and helped it flow this way and 
that, spreading it so that it covered that part of the 
field with an even-flowing sheet of water a few inches 
deep. When it had flowed a few hours the dam was 
broken, ‘the stream carried further along to another 
turnout. By this simple plan of irrigation the writer 
unaided one summer watered about 90 acres of land. 
That was a happy summer. He had a big white 
burro, ‘‘Old Nig,’’? which he kept saddled most of 
the time. Nig knew the work about as well as the 
boy knew it, and he would gallop merrily up the 
road to the top of the field in the morning, about 
two miles from the cabin, stand patiently under a 
cottonwood tree till the work was done there; then 
with his master on deck gallop cheerily down to the 
next field, and soon till all the water had been given 
attention. There is a great fascination in working 
with water and the writer yet thinks irrigation 
farming one of the finest schemes in the world. 
The making of the hay was hard work, but not 
