f 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 affec