I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen
years. My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism, and
as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend thousands
of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured rheumatism, and
then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time he bent over to
fill a glass with it.

Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house
over to me.

"It's a difficult situation, my girl," he said. "Lots of people think
it's simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over
the railing. Why, I tell you a barkeeper's a high-priced man mostly, and
his job's a snap to this. I'd like to know how a barkeeper would make
out if his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember
whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or 'chill off'. And another
thing: if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have
to ask him what he's doing for it, and listen while he tells how much
weight he lost in a blanket sweat? No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and
lets it go at that."

Father passed away the following winter. He'd been a little bit
delirious, and his last words were: "Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of
salt, sir?" Poor father! The spring had been his career, you may
say, and I like to think that perhaps even now he is sitting by some
everlasting spring measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of
the old tin dipper. I said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt
quite sure that I was right, and that where father was the water would
be appreciated. He had heard of father.

Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy. Then I found things
were coming my way. I've got the kind of mind that never forgets a name
or face and can combine them properly, which isn't common. And when
folks came back I could call them at once. It would do your heart good
to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from the free
bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house where
everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a rap
whether he's the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the
navy. If he's been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my
tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about
the rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are. And in ten
minutes he's sitting in a bridge game and trotting to