roofs during heavy or protracted rains. In some localities where the
supply of water is excessively hard or is so meager that it is not
sufficient for all household purposes, pipes from the eaves are
connected with an underground cistern, thus conserving the prized rain
water. Otherwise, the common practice is simply to equip leaders or
down-spouts with "quarter-bend" sections at the lower ends to keep
water away from the foundation. This is a cheap and easy way; but if
the land does not slope away from the house enough so that this water
drains rapidly, pools and mud puddles are the result. Worse still,
water may filter through foundation walls and leave a small lake in
the cellar after every heavy rain. The disadvantages of the latter are
obvious.

The remedy is a dry well for each down-spout. They are simple and
inexpensive, being small pits dug six to ten feet away from foundation
walls and reaching below the frost line. They are filled to a depth of
about two feet with broken stone, fragments of brick, or like material
and connected with the down-spouts by glazed tile pipes. A cover of
roofing paper is added and the earth then replaced. The rain water is
thus absorbed below ground, instead of being left to wear small
gullies into an otherwise well-kept lawn.

Sometimes the contour of land about the house is such that it
resembles a relief map of the Finger Lake country after each heavy
rain or spring freshet. Subsurface drainage is the answer. In other
words, a line of land tile like the fields of the septic tank. Through
it this mislocated water may drain into a dry well, open ditch, or the
gutter along the highway.

Several years ago, highway improvement presented us with such a
problem. The road gang put in a culvert through which flowed the
drainage from a hill on the opposite side of the road. There was no
redress from the Town Fathers. Technically ours was farm land and the
established custom was that highway water could wander as it would and
drain as natural slope dictated. It was be flooded or do something. A
subsurface drain, some fifty feet long and connected with the gutter
of an intersecting road, took care of the lawn. For the rest of the
water to which we were made heir by the same fit of highway
betterment, two local odd-job specialists dug an open trench across a
little-used field. It terminated at an old subsurface drainage line
constructed years ago when some one, who had the gift, brought for