It was about a hundred feet across and in the deepest part about four feet deep. The bottom was nothing but mud, rich, thick, sticky mud. We could always count at least on catching some sort of a cat-fish and with great luck might pull out an eel a foot long. What we longed for was a boat. We sometimes made rafts of any old logs or boards that came handy, but rafts have a way of upsetting when there is more than one boy aboard.
Rafts become water-logged when left in the water and sink in a horrible manner when many get on.
After much collecting the boards we finally got together the makings of a boat. About boat making I and the other boys knew nothing. Being inlanders we had seen nothing of the boat building that goes on whenever there is water enough to float a boat. We had read of Noah's Ark, but the working directions for making such a boat are not given very definitely in the Bible. We finally did build a boat about ten feet long.