His whisper followed her, but she did not go back. Her path led straight to her own kitchen, where she could sit down and smoke. She had n't been good to him; he had nagged her into it. She filled her pipe and lighted it, drawing in drafts. of bitterness. It was unlikely that Mrs. Sanders would ever think to give her another mince-turnover. Little dainty, delightful wisps of its smell lingered in the kitchen. So Deb sat through the hours, her cornmeal mush forgotten, thinking only to refill the stove and her pipe at intervals, and this mechanically. She was far back in that year when Sam Woodruff, with no more possessions than a muzzle-loading rifle and a handful of bullets, had come down from the mountains. He licked both the Jenkins boys, bullies of the valley, at a dance, and the next day he married her. She reached toward the stove to knock out her pipe, and paused with arm in midair. Somebody was screaming. Was it the Jenkins boys' sister, running out of old Pete Abare's kitchen to try to stop the fight? No; it sounded as though it might come from the Griggs house. Deb got up, and went leisurely out to the back steps. Martha Griggs stood in the doorway of her own kitchen, frantically pumping her arms up and down. "He 's gone!" she shrieked. "Petey 's gone!" "Aw right," called Deb. "I'll be over there in a minute." She had answered many cries of that kind, more than she could remember, and there was nothing to get excited about. She went into the house and carefully closed the drafts in the stove. "I'm darned glad I give him that pie," she mumbled, but with the trembling of sincerity in her old voice. "Them that 's dead is almighty dead; you can't do nothin' for 'em no more." MY Pedometer By CHRISTOPHER MORLEY Y thoughts beat out in sonnets while I walk, I find the rhythm of my marching feet Throbs into verses (though the rhyme may balk). I think the sonneteers were walking men. The form is dour and rigid, like a clamp; But with the swing of legs the tramp, tramp, tramp Lo! while you seek a rhyme for hook or crook, Vanished your shabby coat, and you are kith And Shakspere, Wordsworth, Keats, and Rupert Brooke. A ridge made in a Tunisian olive orchard to keep water from flowing to the right from the left-hand row of trees The New Farmer and his By J. RUSSELL SMITH Author of "Two-story Farming," "The Dry Farmers of Rome," etc. WEET are the rains of heaven, a SWEET great blessing, and quite indispensable; yet they have ever harassed us. In the time of Noah they came too thick and fast, and in the time of Joseph they were too few and far between; nor have they changed their habits one iota since those ancient days. In an age of science they obey none of our laws, and the would-be rain-maker is a jest. Always at some place arise the lament of drought and the prayer for rain, while in some other place poor man bewails the wetness of the soil and the flood. Some sunshiny morning the man in Boston or San Francisco gives a moment's attention to the head-line narrative of water in city streets and the drowning of a dozen men or more in a distant State, along with the loss of millions of property. In times of stunning calamity such as befell Johnstown in 1889 and Dayton in 1913 we think about the matter for several days, and give some money to relieve the sufferers for a week or two; but the river rolls on. The episode has passed, but the problem remains quite untouched, increased, indeed, by the works of man. A great river in flood is the most appalling problem that man has yet essayed to conquer, and thus far he has not conquered it; at best he has made only poor and temporary truce. We are failing at flood control because of our almost complete dependence. upon mere structures, engineering constructions. This is a great oversight, for flood control is in large part an agricultural question. Fortunately, some yet little-known discoveries in agriculture give an easy and at the same time a profitable solution. The engineers offer only two devices and two serious recommendations: one, the building of levees to hold the water in bank, and the other the building of reservoirs on head-water streams to hold the water back for a time. Both are most dis couraging, for both contain the essence of failure, and at times display the fact of failure convincingly. The levee is the most tempting, yet the worse of these two devices. It is doubly bad in that the longer it succeeds, the worse it fails. Man builds up the bank of the river to keep it from overflowing the wide, rich lowlands. The river accepts the challenge, and as the banks rise it builds up its bottom by dropping mud and sand. The race is on. Man builds. The river builds. The river-bottom piles up naturally as the river-bank is built up by sweat and toil. If man lasts a century, the river lasts one hundred and one years. If man lasts a millennium, the river is certainly good for two. There is little that is new about this device of man. Julius Cæsar was familiar with it, and on some of the rivers of Lombardy it has been kept up since his time, with the result that the beds of the streams are higher than the tops of the houses alongside. These inverted rivers can be seen from afar as mysterious low ridges stretching across a flat flood plain. China, too, has tried it, with results that are crystallized in the name "China's Sorrow," applied to the great river Hwang-ho. At intervals. this muddy river breaks out of its high walled prison and spreads itself over the rich plain, thick with the homes of men whom it drowns by hundreds of thousands and even by millions. This has occurred nine times during the Christian era. Sometimes the river flows far to the northward of the Shan-tung Peninsula into the Gulf of Petchili, near Peking. Sometimes it reaches the ocean level on the shore of the Yellow Sea, hundreds of miles to the south. Our great Mississippi flood plain, unlike that of the Hwang-ho, is mostly undrained and unsettled, but drainage and settlement are beginning. With this incipient empire at stake, and with the Chinese object-lesson before us, the United States Government and various States are calmly spending millions every year in building levees from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and on many of the branch streams. This action is probably in response to that impulse which makes us, when we are in pain, do something, regardless of whether the thing done helps or hinders. Certainly the Mississippi does flood; certainly we must do something; certainly the levee will hold the water back for a while. So we go with our thousands of men and our millions of money to build a levee, although we know that the ever The gullied lower part of this hill furnishes tons of material for the stream below to carry off winding river will sooner or later eat under the levee, causing it to fall into the river. Even though we have the second levee already prepared, like the second trench of an army, we know that if floods keep coming down, in the future, as in the past, they will break through at times and flood areas bigger than many American States. The more this plain along the Mississippi is settled, the greater becomes the flood menace, and levee-building man is only a calamity-preparer. Levee-building, as a sole dependence, is quite irrational, a kind of frenzy, a peculiar dependence in an age of science. lachians along the head-waters of the streams that pass Pittsburgh. Some of these defiles are in West Virginia, some in Maryland, some in New York, some in Pennsylvania. The engineers reported that the building of dams across fortythree of these defiles, and turning the forty-three valleys above these forty-three dams into forty-three reservoirs, would create storage space sufficient to hold the surplus water until the hour of danger had passed and the flood menace was over. These forty-three reservoirs recommended by the flood commission are estimated to cost $34,000,000, and since every city and farm along the whole river system clear down to the Gulf of Mexico would also benefit, Pittsburgh hesitates. about building the reservoirs even if she had an enabling act from Congress that will permit her to bury farms, villages, towns, highways, and railroads beneath the waters of a series of artificial lakes scattered over several States. Plainly it is a national enterprise; but will it succeed? As now planned, it will not be a permanent cure. The engineers forget the little rills. The reservoirs will fill up with mud, and things will be as they are Meanwhile Pittsburgh calls for reservoirs to hold back the waters. Upon the occasion of a recent hard March rain a Pittsburgh flood reached the unprecedented height of thirty-five feet above. danger-line, destroying lives and millions of property. The citizens felt that something must be done, for the floods are increasing both in frequency and height, owing chiefly to deforestation and bad. farming. A flood commission was appointed, money was given, and engineers. went to work seeking knowledge. After many months of work they reported that the floods could be so tamed as to be made harmless as harmless as steam in a Nearly all of us have taken a walk boiler. There are defiles in the Appa- along some Eastern stream and noted the now. series of small mill-dams filled or filling with mud. These little mill-dams, with their rapidly moving water, are very poor mud-catchers indeed in comparison with the fine, large, still-water reservoirs of the flood commissioners. In a few decades a fine reservoir system built by the French in Algeria has become worthless because the reservoirs became level plains of washed-in earth. The same thing has already happened in some of our Southern States, and it will happen on any stream along which farmers expose considerable areas of bare, sloping fields to that great dirt-carrier, the American thunder-storm. Unfortunately for soil conservation and river control by reservoirs, we have in America two factors strange to Europe, whence most of our reservoir philosophy comes. One is the bare, tilled field required for our monopoly crops of corn, cotton, and tobacco, and the other is the torrential downpour of the thundershower, which removes from these bare fields astounding amounts of soil. In the United States we cannot put our hills to the plow and then with levees and storage reservoirs cure the flood problem by dealing with the streams as streams. TREE TREE and indirectly through the expiration of the better-watered plants. This is not a dream, nor can it be dismissed as a pretty theory. I have found it working in three places as widely separated as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and northern Africa. At Susa, in northeastern Tunis, where the uncertain rainfall averages only fifteen inches a year, and where the sirocco blows out of the Sahara, the Arab has had abundant opportunity these last thousand years. to observe closely the value of an inch or two of rain. He knows that one or two good rains at a critical time make all the difference between olives and no olives, barley and no barley. If water is so valu How hillsides should be treated. The diagonal lines represent furrows, the water-pockets being built at their intersections Fortunately, relief is to be had from an agricultural invention which is beneficial alike to the farmer, to the farm, and to the great river. The rain can be kept where it falls in little "water-pockets," or field reservoirs. They can be made twenty or one hundred to the acre, according to the needs of agriculture, and the water made to do us its greatest possible service at the same time that it is made harmless. Before it ever gets to a stream it will have done three things: watered the plants that are near, entered the subsoil to increase the supply of wells and springs, and enriched the moisture. supply of the air by direct evaporation, able, why let it run away? There is no answer but "Don't," and he does not. There are plots of ground near Susa from which it is probably true that there has been no surface run-off for several centuries. Such is the belief of agricultural scientists who have given the matter some investigation. This economical end is attained by the very simple device of piling up a ridge of earth a foot high around a plat of nearly level ground. Often the plat is about the size of a tennis-court, with an olive-tree or two standing in the middle. As no water can flow over the little embankment, it must lie within the inclosure until it soaks into the hardbaked desert earth, and the olive-tree gets a chance at every drop of it. This is a great contrast to the swift run-off and surprising flood that often accompany the dashing rainfall of the desert's edge, when it falls on soil as dry as dust, but as hard as a pavement. It is plain that a flood or even a gully is impossible where such a water-pocket system is in use. Centuries of experience prove it to be a good farm practice in Tunis, and I suspect from glimpses I have had from car-windows and from chance |