load after load of the loose earth to a heap on the back of the lot,
while two other men with pickaxes dug into the hard subsoil, loosening
it, so that the scraper could scoop it up.

This subsoil is heavy, like clay, and it breaks apart into hard clods.
At the surface the men found a network of tree roots, about which the
soil easily crumbled. Often I hear a sharp, metallic stroke, unlike the
dull sound of the picks striking into the earth. The digger has struck a
stone, and he must work around it, pry it up and lift it out of the way.
A row of these stones is seen at one side of the cellar hole, ranged
along the bank. They are all different in size and shape, and red with
clay, so I can't tell what they are made of. But from this distance I
see plainly that they are irregular in form and have no sharp corners.
The soil strewn along the lot by the scraper is full of stones, mostly
irregular, but some rounded; some are as big as your head, others grade
down to the sizes of marbles.

When I went down and examined this red earth, I found pebbles of all
shapes and sizes, gravel in with the clay, and grains of sand. This
rock-sprinkled soil in New Jersey is very much like soil which I know
very well in Iowa; it looks different in colour, but those pebbles and
rock fragments must be explained in the same way here as there.

These are not native stones, the outcrop of near-by hillsides, but
strangers in this region. The stones in Iowa soil are also imported.

The prairie land of Iowa has not many big rocks on the surface, yet
enough of them to make trouble. The man who was ploughing kept a sharp
lookout, and swung his plough point away from a buried rock that showed
above ground, lest it should break the steel blade. One of the farmer's
jobs for the less busy season was to go out with sledge and dynamite
sticks, and blast into fragments the buried boulders too large to move.
Sometimes building a hot fire on the top of it, and throwing on water,
would crack the stubborn "dornick" into pieces small enough to be loaded
on stone-boats.

I remember when the last giant boulder whose buried bulk scarcely showed
at the surface, was fractured by dynamite. Its total weight proved to be
many tons. We hauled the pieces to the great stone pile which furnished
materials for walling the sides of a deep well and for laying the
foundation of the new house. Yet for years stones have been
accumulating, all of them turned out of the same fa