"I think just in the open place on top of the ridge."
"Won't it be too warm in summer? If you're going to have gold fish you don't want to boil them."
"The water would get pretty hot in the sun, wouldn't it?" considered her cousin. "What do you think of a place under that tree?"
"It ought not to be too near the tree because the roots will grow out a long way from the trunk of the tree and they might get under the pool and break up the concrete."
"Oh, could a tender little thing like a root break concrete that's as hard as stone?"
"It certainly can. Grandfather showed me a crack in a concrete wall of his on the farm that was made by the root of a big tree not far off."
"Well, then we can't have our pool anywhere near a tree. A shrub wouldn't hurt it, though; why can't it go near those shrubs that are going to separate the flower garden from the vegetable garden?"
"That place would be all right because there's a tall spruce there that throws a shadow over the shrubs for a part of the day. That's all you need; you don't want to take away all the sunshine from the pool."
So the exact spot was decided on and marked so that Patrick should make no mistake, and then the girls rushed off on a search for shallow basins and a tub.
It was not the Ethels and Dorothy alone who appeared at the "new place" the next afternoon to make the experiments with concrete. Helen, Ethel Brown's elder sister, and her friend, Margaret Hancock, of Glen Point, were so interested in the younger girls' account of what they were going to do with Mr. Anderson's help that they came too.
As they puffed up the steep knoll on which the new house was to stand they stopped beside the cellar hole to see what progress had been made since the day before.
"They have just frisked along!" Dorothy exclaimed when she saw that not only was the inside fence-mold all built but that the concrete floor was laid and that the men were pouring the mixture in between the planks and the earth wall and pounding it down as they poured.
"Mr. Anderson said 'you can't fool round when you're working with concrete,'" Ethel Brown repeated. "They aren't, are they?"
The men were all working as fast as they could move, some of them shovelling the materials into the mixer, others running the machine, others wheeling the wet concrete in iron barrows to the men at the edge of the cellar who tamped it down as fast as it was poured into the narrow space that defined the growing wall.