(SCENE, _the corner of two principal streets_,[3] _the_ TOWN-PUMP
_talking through its nose_.)
Noon by the north clock! Noon by the east! High noon, too, by these hot
sunbeams, which full, scarcely aslope, upon my head and almost make the
water bubble and smoke in the trough under my nose. Truly, we public
characters have a tough time of it! And among all the town-officers
chosen at March meeting, where is he that sustains for a single year
the burden of such manifold duties as are imposed in perpetuity upon
the town-pump? The title of “town-treasurer” is rightfully mine, as
guardian of the best treasure that the town has. The overseers of the
poor ought to make me their chairman, since I provide bountifully for
the pauper without expense to him that pays taxes. I am at the head of
the fire department and one of the physicians to the board of health.
As a keeper of the peace all water-drinkers will confess me equal to
the constable. I perform some of the duties of the town-clerk by
promulgating public notices when they are posted on my front. To speak
within bounds, I am the chief person of the municipality, and exhibit,
moreover, an admirable pattern to my brother-officers by the cool,
steady, upright, downright and impartial discharge of my business and
the constancy with which I stand to my post. Summer or winter, nobody
seeks me in vain, for all day long I am seen at the busiest corner,
just above the market, stretching out my arms to rich and poor alike,
and at night I hold a lantern over my head both to show where I am and
keep people out of the gutters. At this sultry noontide I am cupbearer
to the parched populace, for whose benefit an iron goblet is chained to
my waist. Like a dramseller on the mall at muster-day, I cry aloud to
all and sundry in my plainest accents and at the very tiptop of my
voice.
Here it is, gentlemen! Here is the good liquor! Walk up, walk up,
gentlemen! Walk up, walk up! Here is the superior stuff! Here is the
unadulterated ale of Father Adam—better than Cognac, Hollands, Jamaica,
strong beer or wine of any price; here it is by the hogshead or the
single glass, and not a cent to pay! Walk up, gentlemen, walk up, and
help yourselves!
It were a pity if all this outcry should draw no customers. Here they
come.—A hot day, gentlemen! Quaff and away again, so as to keep
yourselves in a nice cool sweat.—You, my friend, will need another
cupful to wash the dust out of your throat, if it be as thick there as
it is on your cowhide shoes. I see that you have trudged half a score
of miles to-day, and like a wise man have passed by the taverns and
stopped at the running brooks and well-curbs. Otherwise, betwixt heat
without and fire within, you would have been burnt to a cinder or
melted down to nothing at all, in the fashion of a jelly-fish. Drink
and make room for that other fellow, who seeks my aid to quench the
fiery fever of last night’s potations, which he drained from no cup of
mine.—Welcome, most rubicund sir! You and I have been great strangers
hitherto; nor, to confess the truth, will my nose be anxious for a
closer intimacy till the fumes of your breath be a little less potent.
Mercy on you, man! the water absolutely hisses down your red-hot gullet
and is converted quite to steam in the miniature Tophet which you
mistake for a stomach. Fill again, and tell me, on the word of an
honest toper, did you ever, in cellar, tavern, or any kind of a
dram-shop, spend the price of your children’s food for a swig half so
delicious? Now, for the first time these ten years, you know the flavor
of cold water. Good-bye; and whenever you are thirsty, remember that I
keep a constant supply at the old stand.—Who next?—Oh, my little
friend, you are let loose from school and come hither to scrub your
blooming face and drown the memory of certain taps of the ferule, and
other schoolboy troubles, in a draught from the town-pump? Take it,
pure as the current of your young life. Take it, and may your heart and
tongue never be scorched with a fiercer thirst than now! There, my dear
child! put down the cup and yield your place to this elderly gentleman
who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones that I suspect he is
afraid of breaking them. What! he limps by without so much as thanking
me, as if my hospitable offers were meant only for people who have no
wine-cellars.—Well, well, sir, no harm done, I hope? Go draw the cork,
tip the decanter; but when your great toe shall set you a-roaring, it
will be no affair of mine. If gentlemen love the pleasant titillation
of the gout, it is all one to the town-pump. This thirsty dog with his
red tongue lolling out does not scorn my hospitality, but stands on his
hind legs and laps eagerly out of the trough. See how lightly he capers
away again!—Jowler, did your worship ever have the gout?
Are you all satisfied? Then wipe your mouths, my good friends, and
while my spout has a moment’s leisure I will delight the town with a
few historical remniscences. In far antiquity, beneath a darksome
shadow of venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn
earth in the very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement.
The water was as bright and clear and deemed as precious as liquid
diamonds. The Indian sagamores drank of it from time immemorial till
the fatal deluge of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept
their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his
followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long
beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark.
Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out of
the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and laid
it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it was the
watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the vicinity, whither
all decent folks resorted to purify their visages and gaze at them
afterward—at least, the pretty maidens did—in the mirror which it made.
On Sabbath-days, whenever a babe was to be baptized, the sexton filled
his basin here and placed it on the communion-table of the humble
meeting-house, which partly covered the site of yonder stately brick
one. Thus one generation after another was consecrated to Heaven by its
waters, and cast their waxing and waning shadows into its glassy bosom,
and vanished from the earth, as if mortal life were but a flitting
image in a fountain. Finally the fountain vanished also. Cellars were
dug on all sides and cart-loads of gravel flung upon its source, whence
oozed a turbid stream, forming a mud-puddle at the corner of two
streets. In the hot months, when its refreshment was most needed, the
dust flew in clouds over the forgotten birthplace of the waters, now
their grave. But in the course of time a town-pump was sunk into the
source of the ancient spring; and when the first decayed, another took
its place, and then another, and still another, till here stand I,
gentlemen and ladies, to serve you with my iron goblet. Drink and be
refreshed. The water is as pure and cold as that which slaked the
thirst of the red sagamore beneath the aged boughs, though now the gem
of the wilderness is treasured under these hot stones, where no shadow
falls but from the brick buildings. And be it the moral of my story
that, as this wasted and long-lost fountain is now known and prized
again, so shall the virtues of cold water—too little valued since your
fathers’ days—be recognized by all.
Your pardon, good people! I must interrupt my stream of eloquence and
spout forth a stream of water to replenish the trough for this teamster
and his two yoke of oxen, who have come from Topsfield, or somewhere
along that way. No part of my business is pleasanter than the watering
of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the water-mark on the sides of
the trough, till their capacious stomachs are moistened with a gallon
or two apiece and they can afford time to breathe it in with sighs of
calm enjoyment. Now they roll their quiet eyes around the brim of their
monstrous drinking-vessel. An ox is your true toper.
But I perceive, my dear auditors, that you are impatient for the
remainder of my discourse. Impute it, I beseech you, to no defect of
modesty if I insist a little longer on so fruitful a topic as my own
multifarious merits. It is altogether for your good. The better you
think of me, the better men and women you will find yourselves. I shall
say nothing of my all-important aid on washing-days, though on that
account alone I might call myself the household god of a hundred
families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at
the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to
keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight
bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the
town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and
ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth
while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the
physician whose simple rule of practice is preferable to all the
nauseous lore which has found men sick, or left them so, since the days
of Hippocrates. Let us take a broader view of my beneficial influence
on mankind.
No; these are trifles, compared with the merits which wise men concede
to me—if not in my single self, yet as the representative of a class—of
being the grand reformer of the age. From my spout, and such spouts as
mine, must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of the vast
portion of its crime and anguish which has gushed from the fiery
fountains of the still. In this mighty enterprise the cow shall be my
great confederate. Milk and water—the TOWN-PUMP and the Cow! Such is
the glorious copartnership that shall tear down the distilleries and
brewhouses, uproot the vineyards, shatter the cider-presses, ruin the
tea and coffee trade, and finally monopolize the whole business of
quenching thirst. Blessed consummation! Then Poverty shall pass away
from the land, finding no hovel so wretched where her squalid form may
shelter herself. Then Disease, for lack of other victims, shall gnaw
its own heart and die. Then Sin, if she do not die, shall lose half her
strength. Until now the frenzy of hereditary fever has raged in the
human blood, transmitted from sire to son and rekindled in every
generation by fresh draughts of liquid flame. When that inward fire
shall be extinguished, the heat of passion cannot but grow cool, and
war—the drunkenness of nations—perhaps will cease. At least, there will
be no war of households. The husband and wife, drinking deep of
peaceful joy—a calm bliss of temperate affections—shall pass hand in
hand through life and lie down not reluctantly at its protracted close.
To them the past will be no turmoil of mad dreams, nor the future an
eternity of such moments as follow the delirium of the drunkard. Their
dead faces shall express what their spirits were and are to be by a
lingering smile of memory and hope.
Ahem! Dry work, this speechifying, especially to an unpractised orator.
I never conceived till now what toil the temperance lecturers undergo
for my sake; hereafter they shall have the business to themselves.—Do,
some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to wet my
whistle.—Thank you, sir!—My dear hearers, when the world shall have
been regenerated by my instrumentality, you will collect your useless
vats and liquor-casks into one great pile and make a bonfire in honor
of the town-pump. And when I shall have decayed like my predecessors,
then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain richly sculptured
take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should be erected
everywhere and inscribed with the names of the distinguished champions
of my cause. Now, listen, for something very important is to come next.
There are two or three honest friends of mine—and true friends I know
they are—who nevertheless by their fiery pugnacity in my behalf do put
me in fearful hazard of a broken nose, or even a total overthrow upon
the pavement and the loss of the treasure which I guard.—I pray you,
gentlemen, let this fault be amended. Is it decent, think you, to get
tipsy with zeal for temperance and take up the honorable cause of the
town-pump in the style of a toper fighting for his brandy-bottle? Or
can the excellent qualities of cold water be no otherwise exemplified
than by plunging slapdash into hot water and woefully scalding
yourselves and other people? Trust me, they may. In the moral warfare
which you are to wage—and, indeed, in the whole conduct of your
lives—you cannot choose a better example than myself, who have never
permitted the dust and sultry atmosphere, the turbulence and manifold
disquietudes, of the world around me to reach that deep, calm well of
purity which may be called my soul. And whenever I pour out that soul,
it is to cool earth’s fever or cleanse its stains.
One o’clock! Nay, then, if the dinner-bell begins to speak, I may as
well hold my peace. Here comes a pretty young girl of my acquaintance
with a large stone pitcher for me to fill. May she draw a husband while
drawing her water, as Rachel did of old!—Hold out your vessel, my dear!
There it is, full to the brim; so now run home, peeping at your sweet
image in the pitcher as you go, and forget not in a glass of my own
liquor to drink “SUCCESS TO THE TOWN-PUMP.”