d piece of sharp steel, with long handles coming up from
it, so that a man could hold it in place. It looked like this:--

[Illustration]

"I brought a two-horse plough because it's virgin soil," the man said.
Margery wondered what in the world he meant; it had not been
cultivated, of course, but what had that do with the kind of plough?
"What does he mean, father?" she whispered, when she got a chance. "He
means that this land has not been ploughed before; it will be hard to
turn the soil, and one horse could not pull the plough," said her
father.

It took the man two hours to plough the little strip of land. He drove
the sharp end of the plough into the soil, and held it firmly so, while
the horses drew it along in a straight line. Margery found it
fascinating to watch the long line of dark earth and green grass come
rolling up and turn over, as the knife passed it. She could see that it
took real skill and strength to keep the line even, and to avoid the
stones. Sometimes the plough struck a hidden stone, and then the man was
jerked almost off his feet. But he only laughed, and said, "Tough piece
of land; it will be a lot better next year."

When he had ploughed, the man went back to his cart and unloaded another
farm implement. This one was like a three-cornered platform of wood,
with a long, curved, strong rake under it. It was called a harrow, and
it looked like the diagram on the next page.

The man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform
and drove all over the strip of land. It was fun to watch, but perhaps
it was a little hard to do. The man's weight kept the harrow steady,
and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it
did not stay in ridges.

"He scrambles the ground, father!" said Margery.

"It needs 'scrambling,'" laughed her father. "We are going to get more
weeds than we want on this fresh soil, and the more the ground is
broken, the fewer there will be."

[Illustration]

After the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and Margery's
father said that he himself would do the rest of the work in the late
afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too
much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he
was a boy. So Margery did not see any more done until the next day.

But the next day there was hard work for Margery's father! Every bit of
that ground had to be broken up still more with a spade, and t