Early in my married life I bought a small country estate which my wife
and I looked upon as a paradise. After enjoying its delight for a
little more than a year our souls were saddened by the discovery that
our Eden contained a serpent. This was an insufficient water-supply.
It had been a rainy season when we first went there, and for a long
time our cisterns gave us full aqueous satisfaction, but early this
year a drought had set in, and we were obliged to be exceedingly
careful of our water.
It was quite natural that the scarcity of water for domestic purposes
should affect my wife much more than it did me, and perceiving the
discontent which was growing in her mind, I determined to dig a well.
The very next day I began to look for a well-digger. Such an
individual was not easy to find, for in the region in which I lived
wells had become unfashionable; but I determined to persevere in my
search, and in about a week I found a well-digger.
He was a man of somewhat rough exterior, but of an ingratiating turn of
mind. It was easy to see that it was his earnest desire to serve me.
"And now, then," said he, when we had had a little conversation about
terms, "the first thing to do is to find out where there is water.
Have you a peach-tree on the place?" We walked to such a tree, and he
cut therefrom a forked twig.
"I thought," said I, "that divining-rods were always of hazel wood."
"A peach twig will do quite as well," said he, and I have since found
that he was right. Divining-rods of peach will turn and find water
quite as well as those of hazel or any other kind of wood.
He took an end of the twig in each hand, and, with the point projecting
in front of him, he slowly walked along over the grass in my little
orchard. Presently the point of the twig seemed to bend itself
downward toward the ground.
"There," said he, stopping, "you will find water here."
"I do not want a well here," said I. "This is at the bottom of a hill,
and my barn-yard is at the top. Besides, it is too far from the house."
"Very good," said he. "We will try somewhere else."
His rod turned at several other places, but I had objections to all of
them. A sanitary engineer had once visited me, and he had given me a
great deal of advice about drainage, and I knew what to avoid.
We crossed the ridge of the hill into the low ground on the other side.
Here were no buildings, nothing which would interfere with the purity
of a well. My well-digger walked slowly over the ground with his
divining-rod. Very soon he exclaimed: "Here is water!" And picking
up a stick, he sharpened one end of it and drove it into the ground.
Then he took a string from his pocket, and making a loop in one end, he
put it over the stick.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I am going to make a circle four feet in diameter," he said. "We have
to dig the well as wide as that, you know."
"But I do not want a well here," said I. "It's too close to the wall.
I could not build a house over it. It would not do at all."
He stood up and looked at me. "Well, sir," said he, "will you tell me
where you would like to have a well?"
"Yes," said I. "I would like to have it over there in the corner of the
hedge. It would be near enough to the house; it would have a warm
exposure, which will be desirable in winter; and the little house which
I intend to build over it would look better there than anywhere else."
He took his divining-rod and went to the spot I had indicated. "Is
this the place?" he asked wishing to be sure he had understood me.
"Yes," I replied.
He put his twig in position, and in a few seconds it turned in the
direction of the ground. Then he drove down a stick, marked out a
circle, and the next day he came with two men and a derrick, and began
to dig my well.
When they had gone down twenty-five feet they found water, and when
they had progressed a few feet deeper they began to be afraid of
drowning. I thought they ought to go deeper, but the well-digger said
that they could not dig without first taking out the water, and that
the water came in as fast as they bailed it out, and he asked me to put
it to myself and tell him how they could dig it deeper. I put the
question to myself, but could find no answer. I also laid the matter
before some specialists, and it was generally agreed that if water came
in as fast as it was taken out, nothing more could be desired. The
well was, therefore, pronounced deep enough. It was lined with great
tiles, nearly a yard in diameter, and my well-digger, after
congratulating me on finding water so easily, bade me good-by and
departed with his men and his derrick.
On the other side of the wall which bounded my grounds, and near which
my well had been dug, there ran a country lane, leading nowhere in
particular, which seemed to be there for the purpose of allowing people
to pass my house, who might otherwise be obliged to stop.
Along this lane my neighbors would pass, and often strangers drove by,
and as my well could easily be seen over the low stone wall, its
construction had excited a great deal of interest. Some of the people
who drove by were summer folks from the city, and I am sure, from
remarks I overheard, that it was thought a very queer thing to dig for
water. Of course they must have known that people used to do this in
the olden times, even as far back as the time of Jacob and Rebecca, but
the expressions of some of their faces indicated that they remembered
that this was the nineteenth century.
My neighbors, however, were all rural people, and much more intelligent
in regard to water-supplies. One of them, Phineas Colwell by name,
took a more lively interest in my operations than did any one else. He
was a man of about fifty years of age, who had been a soldier. This
fact was kept alive in the minds of his associates by his dress, a part
of which was always military. If he did not wear an old fatigue-jacket
with brass buttons, he wore his blue trousers, or, perhaps, a waistcoat
that belonged to his uniform, and if he wore none of these, his
military hat would appear upon his head. I think he must also have
been a sailor, judging from the little gold rings in his ears. But
when I first knew him he was a carpenter, who did mason-work whenever
any of the neighbors had any jobs of the sort. He also worked in
gardens by the day, and had told me that he understood the care of
horses and was a very good driver. He sometimes worked on farms,
especially at harvest-time, and I know he could paint, for he once
showed me a fence which he said he had painted. I frequently saw him,
because he always seemed to be either going to his work or coming from
it. In fact, he appeared to consider actual labor in the light of a
bad habit which he wished to conceal, and which he was continually
endeavoring to reform.
Phineas walked along our lane at least once a day, and whenever he saw
me he told me something about the well. He did not approve of the
place I had selected for it. If he had been digging a well he would
have put it in a very different place. When I had talked with him for
some time and explained why I had chosen this spot, he would say that
perhaps I was right, and begin to talk of something else. But the next
time I saw him he would again assert that if he had been digging that
well he would not have put it there.
About a quarter of a mile from my house, at a turn of the lane, lived
Mrs. Betty Perch. She was a widow with about twelve children. A few
of these were her own, and the others she had inherited from two
sisters who had married and died, and whose husbands, having proved
their disloyalty by marrying again, were not allowed by the indignant
Mrs. Perch to resume possession of their offspring. The casual
observer might have supposed the number of these children to be very
great,--fifteen or perhaps even twenty,--for if he happened to see a
group of them on the door-step, he would see a lot more if he looked
into the little garden; and under some cedar-trees at the back of the
house there were always some of them on fine days. But perhaps they
sought to increase their apparent number, and ran from one place to
another to be ready to meet observation, like the famous clown
Grimaldi, who used to go through his performances at one London
theatre, and then dash off in his paint and motley to another, so that
perambulating theatre-going men might imagine that there were two
greatest clowns in the world.
When Mrs. Perch had time she sewed for the neighbors, and, whether she
had time or not, she was always ready to supply them with news. From
the moment she heard I was going to dig a well she took a vital
interest in it. Her own water-supply was unsatisfactory, as she
depended upon a little spring which sometimes dried up in summer, and
should my well turn out to be a good one, she knew I would not object
to her sending the children for pails of water on occasions.
"It will be fun for them," she said, "and if your water really is good
it will often come in very well for me. Mr. Colwell tells me," she
continued, "that you put your well in the wrong place. He is a
practical man and knows all about wells, and I do hope that for your
sake he may be wrong."
My neighbors were generally pessimists. Country people are
proverbially prudent, and pessimism is prudence. We feel safe when we
doubt the success of another, because if he should succeed we can say
we were glad we were mistaken, and so step from a position of good
judgment to one of generous disposition without feeling that we have
changed our plane of merit. But the optimist often gets himself into
terrible scrapes, for if he is wrong he cannot say he is glad of it.
But, whatever else he may be, a pessimist is depressing, and it was,
therefore, a great pleasure to me to have a friend who was an
out-and-out optimist. In fact, he might be called a working optimist.
He lived about six miles from my house, and had a hobby, which was
natural phenomena. He was always on the lookout for that sort of
thing, and when he found it he would study its nature and effect. He
was a man in the maturity of youth, and if the estate on which he lived
had not belonged to his mother, he would have spent much time and money
in investigating its natural phenomena. He often drove over to see me,
and always told me how glad he would be if he had an opportunity of
digging a well.
"I have the wildest desire," he said, "to know what is in the earth
under our place, and if it should so happen in the course of time that
the limits of earthly existence should be reached by--I mean if the
estate should come into my hands--I would go down, down, down, until I
had found out all that could be discovered. To own a plug of earth
four thousand miles long and only to know what is on the surface of the
upper end of it is unmanly. We might as well be grazing beasts."
He was sorry that I was digging only for water, because water is a very
commonplace thing, but he was quite sure I would get it, and when my
well was finished he was one of the first to congratulate me.
"But if I had been in your place," said he, "with full right to do as I
pleased, I would not have let those men go away. I would have set them
to work in some place where there would be no danger of getting
water,--at least, for a long time,--and then you would have found out
what are the deeper treasures of your land."
Having finished my well, I now set about getting the water into my
residence near by. I built a house over the well and put in it a
little engine, and by means of a system of pipes, like the arteries and
veins of the human body, I proposed to distribute the water to the
various desirable points in my house.
The engine was the heart, which should start the circulation, which
should keep it going, and which should send throbbing through every
pipe the water which, if it were not our life, was very necessary to it.
When all was ready we started the engine, and in a very short time we
discovered that something was wrong. For fifteen or twenty minutes
water flowed into the tank at the top of the house, with a sound that
was grander in the ears of my wife and myself than the roar of Niagara,
and then it stopped. Investigation proved that the flow had stopped
because there was no more water in the well.
It is needless to detail the examinations, investigations, and the
multitude of counsels and opinions with which our minds were filled for
the next few days. It was plain to see that although this well was
fully able to meet the demands of a hand-pump or of bailing buckets,
the water did not flow into it as fast as it could be pumped out by an
engine. Therefore, for the purposes of supplying the circulation of my
domestic water system, the well was declared a failure.
My non-success was much talked about in the neighborhood, and we
received a great deal of sympathy and condolence. Phineas Colwell was
not surprised at the outcome of the affair. He had said that the well
had been put in the wrong place. Mrs. Betty was not only surprised,
but disgusted.
"It is all very well for you," she said, "who could afford to buy water
if it was necessary, but it is very different with the widow and the
orphan. If I had not supposed you were going to have a real well, I
would have had my spring cleaned out and deepened. I could have had it
done in the early summer, but it is of no use now. The spring has
dried up."
She told a neighbor that she believed the digging of my well had dried
up her spring, and that that was the way of this world, where the widow
and the orphan were sure to come out at the little end.
Of course I did not submit to defeat--at least, not without a struggle.
I had a well, and if anything could be done to make that well supply me
with water, I was going to do it. I consulted specialists, and, after
careful consideration of the matter, they agreed that it would be
unadvisable for me to attempt to deepen my present well, as there was
reason to suppose there was very little water in the place where I had
dug it, and that the very best thing I could do would be to try a
driven well. As I had already excavated about thirty feet, that was so
much gain to me, and if I should have a six-inch pipe put into my
present well and then driven down and down until it came to a place
where there was plenty of water, I would have all I wanted.
How far down the pipe would have to be driven, of course they did not
know, but they all agreed that if I drove deep enough I would get all
the water I wanted. This was the only kind of a well, they said, which
one could sink as deep as he pleased without being interfered with by
the water at the bottom. My wife and I then considered the matter, and
ultimately decided that it would be a waste of the money which we had
already spent upon the engine, the pipes, and the little house, and, as
there was nothing else to be done but to drive a well, we would have a
well driven.
Of course we were both very sorry that the work must be begun again,
but I was especially dissatisfied, for the weather was getting cold,
there was already snow upon the ground, and I was told that work could
not be carried on in winter weather. I lost no time, however, in
making a contract with a well-driver, who assured me that as soon as
the working season should open, which probably would be very early in
the spring, he would come to my place and begin to drive my well.
The season did open, and so did the pea-blossoms, and the pods actually
began to fill before I saw that well-driver again. I had had a good
deal of correspondence with him in the meantime, urging him to prompt
action, but he always had some good reason for delay. (I found out
afterwards that he was busy fulfilling a contract made before mine, in
which he promised to drive a well as soon as the season should open.)
At last--it was early in the summer--he came with his derricks, a
steam-engine, a trip-hammer, and a lot of men. They took off the roof
of my house, removed the engine, and set to work.
For many a long day, and I am sorry to say for many a longer night,
that trip-hammer hammered and banged. On the next day after the
night-work began, one of my neighbors came to me to know what they did
that for. I told him they were anxious to get through.
"Get through what?" said he. "The earth? If they do that, and your
six-inch pipe comes out in a Chinaman's back yard, he will sue you for
damages."
When the pipe had been driven through the soft stratum under the old
well, and began to reach firmer ground, the pounding and shaking of the
earth became worse and worse. My wife was obliged to leave home with
our child.
"If he is to do without both water and sleep," said she, "he cannot
long survive." And I agreed with her.
She departed for a pleasant summer resort where her married sister with
her child was staying, and from week to week I received very pleasant
letters from her, telling me of the charms of the place, and dwelling
particularly upon the abundance of cool spring water with which the
house was supplied.
While this terrible pounding was going on I heard various reports of
its effect upon my neighbors. One of them, an agriculturist, with whom
I had always been on the best of terms, came with a clouded brow.
"When I first felt those shakes," he said, "I thought they were the
effects of seismic disturbances, and I did not mind, but when I found
it was your well I thought I ought to come over to speak about it. I
do not object to the shaking of my barn, because my man tells me the
continual jolting is thrashing out the oats and wheat, but I do not
like to have all my apples and pears shaken off my trees. And then,"
said he, "I have a late brood of chickens, and they cannot walk,
because every time they try to make a step they are jolted into the air
about a foot. And again, we have had to give up having soup. We like
soup, but we do not care to have it spout up like a fountain whenever
that hammer comes down."
I was grieved to trouble this friend, and I asked him what I should do.
"Do you want me to stop the work on the well?" said I.
"Oh, no," said he, heartily. "Go on with the work. You must have
water, and we will try to stand the bumping. I dare say it is good for
dyspepsia, and the cows are getting used to having the grass jammed up
against their noses. Go ahead; we can stand it in the daytime, but if
you could stop the night-work we would be very glad. Some people may
think it a well-spring of pleasure to be bounced out of bed, but I
don't."
Mrs. Perch came to me with a face like a squeezed lemon, and asked me
if I could lend her five nails.
"What sort?" said I.
"The kind you nail clapboards on with," said she. "There is one of
them been shook entirely off my house by your well. I am in hopes that
before the rest are all shook off I shall get in some money that is
owing me and can afford to buy nails for myself."
I stopped the night-work, but this was all I could do for these
neighbors.
My optimist friend was delighted when he heard of my driven well. He
lived so far away that he and his mother were not disturbed by the
jarring of the ground. Now he was sure that some of the internal
secrets of the earth would be laid bare, and he rode or drove over
every day to see what we were getting out of the well. I know that he
was afraid we would soon get water, but was too kind-hearted to say so.
One day the pipe refused to go deeper. No matter how hard it was
struck, it bounced up again. When some of the substance it had struck
was brought up it looked like French chalk, and my optimist eagerly
examined it.
"A French-chalk mine," said he, "would not be a bad thing, but I hoped
that you had struck a bed of mineral gutta-percha. That would be a
grand find."
But the chalk-bed was at last passed, and we began again to bring up
nothing but common earth.
"I suppose," said my optimist to me, one morning, "that you must soon
come to water, and if you do I hope it will be hot water."
"Hot water!" I exclaimed. "I do not want that."
"Oh, yes, you would, if you had thought about it as much as I have," he
replied. "I lay awake for hours last night, thinking what would happen
if you struck hot water. In the first place, it would be absolutely
pure, because, even if it were possible for germs and bacilli to get
down so deep, they would be boiled before you got them, and then you
could cool that water for drinking. When fresh it would be already
heated for cooking and hot baths. And then--just think of it!--you
could introduce the hot-water system of heating into your house, and
there would be the hot water always ready. But the great thing would
be your garden. Think of the refuse hot water circulating in pipes up
and down and under all your beds! That garden would bloom in the
winter as others do in the summer; at least, you could begin to have
Lima-beans and tomatoes as soon as the frost was out of the air."
I laughed. "It would take a lot of pumping," I said, "to do all that
with the hot water."
"Oh, I forgot to say," he cried, with sparkling eyes, "that I do not
believe you would ever have any more pumping to do. You have now gone
down so far that I am sure whatever you find will force itself up. It
will spout high into the air or through all your pipes, and run always."
Phineas Colwell was by when this was said, and he must have gone down
to Mrs. Betty Perch's house to talk it over with her, for in the
afternoon she came to see me.
"I understand," said she, "that you are trying to get hot water out of
your well, and that there is likely to be a lot more than you need, so
that it will run down by the side of the road. I just want to say that
if a stream of hot water comes down past my house some of the children
will be bound to get into it and be scalded to death, and I came to say
that if that well is going to squirt b'iling water I'd like to have
notice so that I can move, though where a widow with so many orphans is
going to move to nobody knows. Mr. Colwell says that if you had got
him to tell you where to put that well there would have been no danger
of this sort of thing."
The next day the optimist came to me, his face fairly blazing with a
new idea. "I rode over on purpose to urge you," he cried, "if you
should strike hot water, not to stop there. Go on, and, by George! you
may strike fire."
"Heavens!" I cried.
"Oh, quite the opposite," said he. "But do not let us joke. I think
that would be the grandest thing of this age. Think of a fire well,
with the flames shooting up perhaps a hundred feet into the air!"
I wish Phineas Colwell had not been there. As it was, he turned pale
and sat down on the wall.
"You look astonished!" exclaimed the optimist, "but listen to me. You
have not thought of this thing as I have. If you should strike fire
your fortune would be made. By a system of reflectors you could light
up the whole country. By means of tiles and pipes this region could be
made tropical. You could warm all the houses in the neighborhood with
hot air. And then the power you could generate--just think of it!
Heat is power; the cost of power is the fuel. You could furnish power
to all who wanted it. You could fill this region with industries. My
dear sir, you must excuse my agitation, but if you should strike fire
there is no limit to the possibilities of achievement."
"But I want water," said I. "Fire would not take the place of that."
"Oh, water is a trifle," said he. "You could have pipes laid from
town; it is only about two miles. But fire! Nobody has yet gone down
deep enough for that. You have your future in your hands."
As I did not care to connect my future with fire, this idea did not
strike me very forcibly, but it struck Phineas Colwell. He did not say
anything to me, but after I had gone he went to the well-drivers.
"If you feel them pipes getting hot," he said to them, "I warn you to
stop. I have been in countries where there are volcanoes, and I know
what they are. There's enough of them in this world, and there's no
need of making new ones."
In the afternoon a wagoner, who happened to be passing, brought me a
note from Mrs. Perch, very badly spelled, asking if I would let one of
my men bring her a pail of water, for she could not think of coming
herself or letting any of the children come near my place if spouting
fires were expected.
The well-driving had gone on and on, with intermissions on account of
sickness in the families of the various workmen, until it had reached
the limit which I had fixed, and we had not found water in sufficient
quantity, hot or cold, nor had we struck fire, or anything else worth
having.
The well-drivers and some specialists were of the opinion that if I
were to go ten, twenty, or perhaps a hundred feet deeper, I would be
very likely to get all the water I wanted. But, of course, they could
not tell how deep they must go, for some wells were over a thousand
feet deep. I shook my head at this. There seemed to be only one thing
certain about this drilling business, and that was the expense. I
declined to go any deeper.
"I think," a facetious neighbor said to me, "it would be cheaper for
you to buy a lot of Apollinaris water,--at wholesale rates, of
course,--and let your men open so many bottles a day and empty them
into your tank. You would find that would pay better in the long run."
Phineas Colwell told me that when he had informed Mrs. Perch that I was
going to stop operations, she was in a dreadful state of mind. After
all she had undergone, she said, it was simply cruel to think of my
stopping before I got water, and that after having dried up her spring!
This is what Phineas said she said, but when next I met her she told me
that he had declared that if I had put the well where he thought it
ought to be, I should have been having all the water I wanted before
now.
My optimist was dreadfully cast down when he heard that I would drive
no deeper.
"I have been afraid of this," he said. "I have, been afraid of it.
And if circumstances had so arranged themselves that I should have
command of money, I should have been glad to assume the expense of
deeper explorations. I have been thinking a great deal about the
matter, and I feel quite sure that even if you did not get water or
anything else that might prove of value to you, it would be a great
advantage to have a pipe sunk into the earth to the depth of, say, one
thousand feet."
"What possible advantage could that be?" I asked.
"I will tell you," he said. "You would then have one of the grandest
opportunities ever offered to man of constructing a gravity-engine.
This would be an engine which would be of no expense at all to run. It
would need no fuel. Gravity would be the power. It would work a pump
splendidly. You could start it when you liked and stop it when you
liked."
"Pump!" said I. "What is the good of a pump without water?"
"Oh, of course you would have to have water," he answered. "But, no
matter how you get it, you will have to pump it up to your tank so as
to make it circulate over your house. Now, my gravity-pump would do
this beautifully. You see, the pump would be arranged with cog-wheels
and all that sort of thing, and the power would be supplied by a
weight, which would be a cylinder of lead or iron, fastened to a rope
and run down inside your pipe. Just think of it! It would run down a
thousand feet, and where is there anything worked by weight that has
such a fall as that?"
I laughed. "That is all very well," said I. "But how about the power
required to wind that weight up again when it got to the bottom? I
should have to have an engine to do that."
"Oh, no," said he. "I have planned the thing better than that. You
see, the greater the weight the greater the power and the velocity.
Now, if you take a solid cylinder of lead about four inches in
diameter, so that it would slip easily down your pipe,--you might
grease it, for that matter,--and twenty feet in length, it would be an
enormous weight, and in slowly descending for about an hour a day--for
that would be long enough for your pumping--and going down a thousand
feet, it would run your engine for a year. Now, then, at the end of
the year you could not expect to haul that weight up again. You would
have a trigger arrangement which would detach it from the rope when it
got to the bottom. Then you would wind up your rope,--a man could do
that in a short time,--and you would attach another cylinder of lead,
and that would run your engine for another year, minus a few days,
because it would only go down nine hundred and eighty feet. The next
year you would put on another cylinder, and so on. I have not worked
out the figures exactly, but I think that in this way your engine would
run for thirty years before the pipe became entirely filled with
cylinders. That would be probably as long as you would care to have
water forced into the house."
"Yes"' said I, "I think that is likely."
He saw that his scheme did not strike me favorably. Suddenly a light
flashed across his face.
"I tell you what you can do with your pipe," he said, "just as it is.
You can set up a clock over it which would run for forty years without
winding."
I smiled, and he turned sadly away to his horse; but he had not ridden
ten yards before he came back and called to me over the wall.
"If the earth at the bottom of your pipe should ever yield to pressure
and give way, and if water or gas, or--anything, should be squirted out
of it, I beg you will let me know as soon as possible."