s 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. Y