a tinge
of brown because there were always decaying leaves and other rubbish to
stain its purity.

The farmers drained the ponds as fast as they were able, carrying the
water, by open ditches first, and later by underground tile drains, to
lower levels. Finally these trunk drain pipes discharged the water into
streams or lakes. To-day a large proportion of the pond areas of Iowa
has disappeared; the hollow tile of terra-cotta has been the most
efficient means of converting the waste land, covered by ponds, into
fertile fields.

But the ponds that have not been drained are smaller than they used to
be, and are on the straight road to extinction. This process one can see
at any time by visiting a pond. Every year a crop of reeds and a dozen
other species of vigorous water plants dies at the top and adds the
substance of their summer growth to the dust and other refuse that
gathers in the bottom of the pond. Each spring roots and seeds send up
another crop, if possible more vigorous than the last, and this top
growth in turn dies and lies upon the bottom. The pond level varies with
the rainfall of the years, but it averages a certain depth, from which
something is each year subtracted by the accumulations of rotting
vegetable matter in the bottom. Evaporation lowers the water-level,
especially in hot, dry summers. From year to year the water plants draw
in to form a smaller circle, the grassy meadow land encroaches on all
sides. The end of the story is the filling up of the pond basin with the
rotting substance of its own vegetation. This is what is happening to
ponds and inland marshes by slow degrees. The tile drain pipes
obliterate the pond in a single season. Nature is more deliberate. She
may require a hundred years to fill up a single pond which the farmer
can rid himself of by a few days of work and a few rods of tiling.

THE RIDDLE OF THE LOST ROCKS

Outside of my window two robins are building a nest in the crotch of a
blossoming red maple tree. And just across the hedge, men are digging a
big square hole in the ground--the cellar of our neighbour's new house.
It looks now as if the robins would get their house built first, for
they need but one room, and they do not trouble about a cellar. I shall
watch both houses as they grow through the breezy March days.

The brown sod was first torn up by a plough, which uncovered the red New
Jersey soil. Two men, with a team hitched to a scraper, have carried