to keep it from the house.
The mounds were a great assistance to him in hemming it in, but he had
hard enough work of it notwithstanding; and soon perceived that at one
spot it would get the better of him in a few minutes, and make straight
for the back-door. He ran at once and opened the sluice in the well, and
away the stream gurgled underground.

Before morning the water it left had all disappeared. It had soaked
through the mounds, and into the gravel, but comforting the hot roots as
it went, and feeding them with dissolved minerals. Doubtless, also, it
lay all night in many a little hidden pool, which the heat of the next
day's sun drew up, comforting again, through the roots in the earth, and
through the leaves in the air, up into the sky. Willie could not help
thinking that the garden looked refreshed; the green was brighter,
he thought, and the flowers held up their heads a little better; the
carrots looked more feathery, and the ferns more palmy; everything
looked, he said, just as he felt after a good drink out of the Prior's
Well. At all events, he resolved to do the same every night after sunset
while the hot weather lasted--that was, if his father had no objection.

Mr Macmichael said he might try it, only he must mind and not go to bed
and leave the water running, else they would have a cartload of mud in
the house before morning.

So Willie strengthened and heightened his barriers, and having built a
huge one at the last point where the water had tried to get away, as
soon as the sun was down shut the sluice, and watched the water as it
surged up in the throat of the well, and rushed out to be caught in the
toils he had made for it. Before it could find a fresh place to get out
at, the whole upper part of the garden was one network of lakes and
islands.

Willie kept walking round and round it, as if it had been a wild beast
trying to get out of its cage, and he had to watch and prevent it at
every weak spot; or as if he were a magician, busily sustaining the
charm by which he confined the gad-about creature. The moment he saw it
beginning to get the better of him, he ran to the sluice and banished it
to the regions below. Then he fetched an old newspaper, and sitting down
on the borders of his lake, fashioned boat after boat out of the paper,
and sent them sailing like merchant ships from isle to blooming isle.

Night after night he flooded the garden, and always before morning the
water had sunk awa