It's Sunday.

So next day Pa and Mr. Scott went on digging the well. But they always sent the candle down every morning. There began to be a little water in the well, but it was not enough. The buckets came up full of mud, and Pa and Mr. Scott worked every day in deeper mud. In the mornings when the candle went down, it lighted oozing-wet walls, and candlelight sparkled in rings over the water when the bucket struck bottom. Pa stood knee deep in water and bailed out bucketfuls before he could begin digging in the mud. One day when he was digging, a loud shout came echoing up. Ma ran out of the house and Laura ran to the wall. Pa yelled Mr. Scott to pull. A swishing, gurgling sound echoed down there. Mr. Scott turned the windlass as fast as he could, and Pa came up climbing hand over hand up the rope. Pa gasped that he was blamed if that was not quicksand, as he stepped onto the ground, muddy and dripping. He said that he had been pushing down hard on the spade, when all of a sudden it had gone down, the whole length of the handle, and water had come pouring up all around him. Mr. Scott said that a good six feet of this rope was wet, winding it up. The bucket was full of water. Mr. Scott said to Pa that Pa had showed sense in getting out of that hand over hand, and that water had come up faster than he could pull Pa out. Then Mr. Scott slapped his thigh and shouted that he was blasted if Pa hadn’t brought up the spade. Sure enough, Pa had saved his spade. In a little while the well was almost full of water. A circle of blue sky lay not far down in the ground, and when Laura looked at it, a little girl’s head looked up at her. When she waved her hand, a hand on the water’s surface waved, too. The water was clear and cold and good. Laura thought she had never tasted anything so good as those long, cold drinks of water. Pa hauled no more stale, warm water from the creek. He built a solid platform over the well, and a heavy cover for the hole that let the water-bucket through. Laura must never touch that cover. But whenever she or Mary was thirsty, Ma lifted the cover and drew a dripping bucket of cold, fresh water from that well.