operation a half century at least, affords the best
evidence possible, both of the utility and the durability of tile
drainage.

CHAPTER XXII.

DRAINAGE OF CELLARS.

Wet Cellars Unhealthful.--Importance of Cellars in New England.--A
Glance at the Garret, by way of Contrast.--Necessity of
Drains.--Sketch of an Inundated Cellar.--Tiles best for
Drains.--Best Plan of Cellar Drain; Illustration.--Cementing will
not do.--Drainage of Barn Cellars.--Uses of them.--Actual Drainage
of a very Bad Cellar described.--Drains Outside and Inside;
Illustration.

No person needs to be informed that it is unhealthful, as well as
inconvenient, to have water, at any time of the year, in the cellar. In
New England, the cellar is an essential part of the house. All sorts of
vegetables, roots, and fruit, that can be injured by frost, are stored
in cellars; and milk, and wine, and cider, and a thousand "vessels of
honor," like tubs and buckets, churns and washing-machines, that are
liable to injury from heat or cold, or other vicissitude of climate,
find a safe retreat in the cellar. Excepting the garret, which is, as
Ariosto represents the moon to be, the receptacle of all things useless
on earth, the cellar is the greatest "curiosity shop" of the
establishment.

The poet finds in the moon,

"Whate'er was wasted in our earthly state,
Here safely treasured--each neglected good,
Time squandered, and occasion ill-bestowed;
There sparkling chains he found, and knots of gold,
The specious ties that ill-paired lovers hold;
Each toil, each loss, each chance that men sustain,
Save Folly, which alone pervades them all,
For Folly never quits this earthly ball."

In the garret, are the old spinning wheel, the clock reel, the linen
wheel with its distaff, your grandfather's knapsack and cartridge-box
and Continental coat, your great-aunt's Leghorn bonnet and side-saddle,
or pillion, great files of the village newspapers--the "_Morning Cry_"
and "_Midnight Yell_," besides worn out trunks and boxes without number.
In the cellar, are the substantiate--barrels of beef, and pork, and
apples, "taters" and turnips; in short, the Winter stores of the family.

Many, perhaps most, of the cellars in New England are in some way
drained, usually by a stone culvert, laid a little lower than the bottom
of the cellar, into which the water is conducted, in the Spring, when it
bursts t