business gives me more pleasure
than the watering of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the watermark
on the sides of the trough, till their capacious stomachs are moistened
with a gallon or two apiece, and they can afford time to breathe, with
sighs of calm enjoyment! Now they roll their quiet eyes around the brim
of their monstrous drinking vessel. An ox is your true toper.

I hold myself the grand reformer of the age. From the Town Pump, as from
other sources of water supply, must flow the stream that will cleanse
our earth of a vast portion of the crime and anguish which have gushed
from the fiery fountains of the still. In this mighty enterprise, the
cow shall be my great confederate. Milk and water!

Ahem! Dry work this speechifying, especially to all unpracticed orators.
I never conceived, till now, what toil the temperance lecturers undergo
for my sake. Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to wet
my whistle. Thank you, sir. But to proceed.

The Town Pump and the Cow! Such is the glorious partnership that shall
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 itself. Then
Disease, for lack of other victims, shall gnaw his own heart and die.
Then Sin, if she do not die, shall lose half her strength.

Then there will be no war of households. The husband and the wife,
drinking deep of peaceful joy, a calm bliss of temperate affections,
shall pass hand in hand through life, and lie down, not reluctantly, at
its protracted close. To them the past will be no turmoil of mad dreams,
nor the future an eternity of such moments as follow the delirium of a
drunkard. Their dead faces shall express what their spirits were, and
are to be, by a lingering smile of memory and hope.

Drink, then, and be refreshed! The water is as pure and cold as when it
slaked the thirst of the red hunter, and flowed beneath the aged bough,
though now this gem of the wilderness is treasured under these hot
stones, where no shadow falls but from the brick buildings. But still is
this fountain the source of health, peace, and happiness, and I behold,
with certainty and joy, the approach of the period when the virtues of
cold water, too little valued since our father's days, will be fully
appreciated and recognized by all.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 29: By Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American writ