was a man in the maturity of youth, and if the estate on which he lived
had not belonged to his mother, he would have spent much time and money
in investigating its natural phenomena. He often drove over to see me,
and always told me how glad he would be if he had an opportunity of
digging a well.

"I have the wildest desire," he said, "to know what is in the earth
under our place, and if it should so happen in the course of time that
the limits of earthly existence should be reached by--I mean if the
estate should come into my hands--I would go down, down, down, until I
had found out all that could be discovered. To own a plug of earth
four thousand miles long and only to know what is on the surface of the
upper end of it is unmanly. We might as well be grazing beasts."

He was sorry that I was digging only for water, because water is a very
commonplace thing, but he was quite sure I would get it, and when my
well was finished he was one of the first to congratulate me.

"But if I had been in your place," said he, "with full right to do as I
pleased, I would not have let those men go away. I would have set them
to work in some place where there would be no danger of getting
water,--at least, for a long time,--and then you would have found out
what are the deeper treasures of your land."

Having finished my well, I now set about getting the water into my
residence near by. I built a house over the well and put in it a
little engine, and by means of a system of pipes, like the arteries and
veins of the human body, I proposed to distribute the water to the
various desirable points in my house.

The engine was the heart, which should start the circulation, which
should keep it going, and which should send throbbing through every
pipe the water which, if it were not our life, was very necessary to it.

When all was ready we started the engine, and in a very short time we
discovered that something was wrong. For fifteen or twenty minutes
water flowed into the tank at the top of the house, with a sound that
was grander in the ears of my wife and myself than the roar of Niagara,
and then it stopped. Investigation proved that the flow had stopped
because there was no more water in the well.

It is needless to detail the examinations, investigations, and the
multitude of counsels and opinions with which our minds were filled for
the next few days. It was plain to see that although this well was
fully able to meet