while the water is high."

"Hurrah! now for work!" shouted the boys, who by this time had
finished their breakfast.

"Where's your timber, Sam?" asked Tom, bringing in the axes and adze
out of the tent.

Sam had taken pains to select a proper tree for his purpose, a
gigantic poplar more than three feet in diameter, which lay near the
creek, where it had fallen several years before.

When the boys saw it, they looked at Sam in astonishment.

"Why, Sam, you don't mean to work that great big thing into a dug-out,
do you?" asked Sid Russell.

"Why not, Sid?" asked Sam.

"Why, its bigger'n a dozen dug-outs."

"Yes, that is true, but we're not going to make an ordinary canoe.
We're going to cut out something as nearly like a yawl, or a ship's
launch as possible. She is to be sixteen feet long, and three and a
quarter feet wide amidships."

Sam had learned a good deal about boats during his boyhood in
Baltimore.

"Whew! what do you want such a whopper for?"