d be
done during recreation hours at school. We had intended building a cave
on our island that summer, but our vacation came to an end before we got
around to it. There seemed no reason why we shouldn't dig one in the
woods at the back of the schoolhouse.

A CAVE-IN.

Bill had read somewhere that if you dig a cave under a tree the roots of
the tree will support the ground on top and make a natural and
substantial roof. It sounded very reasonable, we thought; in fact, we
never questioned the truth of the statement, because we had somehow
gotten the notion that books were never wrong, and that whatever was set
up in type must surely be so. But events proved that the man who wrote
that book had never attempted to build a cave in the manner he
described, at least not in the loose, sandy soil of south Jersey. A
large spreading cedar was selected as the tree which should support the
roof of our cave. It was situated on a mound at the edge of the woods.
First a passageway, or ditch, was dug at the bottom, and then we begun
tunneling in the side of the mound under the roots of the tree. For a
while the ground above held, and our tunnel had reached a length of
about four feet, when suddenly, without the slightest warning, the sandy
soil gave way and we were engulfed. Bill, who was furthest within the
cave, was almost entirely covered, while I was buried to the shoulders.
A crowd of boys came to our assistance and dug us out. Poor Bill was
almost smothered before they scooped the sand away from around his mouth
and nose. The boys made slow work of it, having to dig with their hands
and a couple of shingles, because the two spades we had were buried with
us at the bottom of the cave.

Of course, this little episode gave us a scare, but it was only
temporary. We swore every one to secrecy, so that Mr. Clark, the
principal, wouldn't hear of the mishap and suppress any further cave
building. It was obvious that the only roof we could depend on for our
cave would be a wooden roof. If we had been at Willow Clump Island we
would have gotten any amount of slabs from the lumber mills across the
river.

One of our schoolmates, a day scholar, came to the rescue. His name was
Chester Hill, a little bit of a chap, about the shortest for his age
that I have ever seen. His name was so at variance to his size that we
called him "Hillock," for short. Now Hillock lived on a farm about eight
miles from school, and used to drive in every day