o home and work the weather, John W. Merlin."

It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he was the worst
weather-failure in the kingdom. Whenever he ordered up the
danger-signals along the coast there was a week's dead calm, sure,
and every time he prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats.
But I kept him in the weather bureau right along, to undermine
his reputation. However, that shot raised his bile, and instead
of starting home to report my death, he said he would remain
and enjoy it.

My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged,
for they had traveled double tides. They had pack-mules along,
and had brought everything I needed--tools, pump, lead pipe,
Greek fire, sheaves of big rockets, roman candles, colored fire
sprays, electric apparatus, and a lot of sundries--everything
necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle. They got their
supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through a
solitude so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed
the required conditions. We took possession of the well and its
surroundings. My boys were experts in all sorts of things, from
the stoning up of a well to the constructing of a mathematical
instrument. An hour before sunrise we had that leak mended in
ship-shape fashion, and the water began to rise. Then we stowed our
fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to bed.

Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well again; for there
was a deal to do yet, and I was determined to spring the miracle
before midnight, for business reasons: for whereas a miracle
worked for the Church on a week-day is worth a good deal, it is
worth six times as much if you get it in on a Sunday. In nine hours
the water had risen to its customary level--that is to say, it was
within twenty-three feet of the top. We put in a little iron pump,
one of the first turned out by my works near the capital; we bored
into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer wall of the
well-chamber and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long
enough to reach to the door of the chapel and project beyond
the threshold, where the gushing water would be visible to the
two hundred and fifty acres of people I was intending should be
present on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at
the proper time.

We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and hoisted this
hogshead to the flat roof of the chapel, where we clamped it do