most wonderful achievements of civilization. Imagine the way
men live when they break their way into a new country; that is the only
manner in which we can measure the convenience of a modern water supply.
I have seen the settlers on the Canadian plains walking a quarter of a
mile--perhaps half a mile--to the Bow River to fill a bucket with water
with which to cook and with which to supply drink to a household.
Bathing, as we understand the term, was only to be done by going to the
same river and plunging in--daring the few months when the river water
was warm. Thus it must have been with the first Hollanders who settled
Manhattan Island. In time they dug wells in the ground, and then came
that more lavish use of the splendid fluid, attended by such economy as
used to lead the Dutch mothers to scold the children with that
admonition we still may hear in the country, "Do you think the
servant-girl has nothing to do but to carry water up stairs for you to
waste it as you do?"

Did the reader ever see a medical or anatomical chart of the human body,
showing the arteries and veins that carry the blood from our hearts to
every main and every minute part of our bodies? How like a tree it
looks, with its main stem or trunk, with its great branches, with its
delicate boughs and switches and twigs. Well, a Croton-water chart of
the system by which a river is brought to our bedrooms, instead of our
having to go to the river with our buckets, would be just such another
complicated, marvellous, treelike object, only I really think it would
be more astonishing in one sense, because it is so wholly the hard
brain-work of man instead of the mysterious divine creation of the
Almighty, whose works are so profound that their wonders do not surprise
us so much as when man produces something a tenth part or a thousandth
part as extraordinary.

If we could cut away all the earth of the island, leaving the
water-mains bare, and if we could tear down all the buildings of the
city so as to allow the water-pipes to stand up, bare and naked, just as
they now stand up in their covers of brick and plaster, I suppose the
sight of that wonderful forest of big and little pipes would be as
surprising as anything that any human being ever saw. Just try to fancy
Manhattan Island all under a tangle of towering pipes and crisscrossed
tubes, and then, while we are about it, just fancy a lot of savages
landing here and tampering with those pipes until one