A Rill from the Town Pump

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Published: 1837
Categorie(s): Fiction, Short Stories
Source: http://en.wikisource.org

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About Hawthorne:
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachu-
setts, where his birthplace is now a museum. William Hathorne, who
emigrated from England in 1630, was the first of Hawthorne's ancestors
to arrive in the colonies. After arriving, William persecuted Quakers.
William's son John Hathorne was one of the judges who oversaw the
Salem Witch Trials. (One theory is that having learned about this, the au-
thor added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after
graduating from college.) Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr.,
was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever, when Hawthorne
was only four years old, in Raymond, Maine. Hawthorne attended Bow-
doin College at the expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1824, befriending
classmates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin
Pierce. While there he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Until
the publication of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote in the
comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the family
home. As he looked back on this period of his life, he wrote: "I have not
lived, but only dreamed about living." And yet it was this period of
brooding and writing that had formed, as Malcolm Cowley was to de-
scribe it, "the central fact in Hawthorne's career," his "term of apprentice-
ship" that would eventually result in the "richly meditated fiction."
Hawthorne was hired in 1839 as a weigher and gauger at the Boston
Custom House. He had become engaged in the previous year to the illus-
trator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home
for himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist utopian com-
munity at Brook Farm in 1841; later that year, however, he left when he
became dissatisfied with farming and the experiment. (His Brook Farm
adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Ro-
mance.) He married Sophia in 1842; they moved to The Old Manse in
Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years. There he
wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse.
Hawthorne and his wife then moved to Salem and later to the
Berkshires, returning in 1852 to Concord and a new home The Wayside,
previously owned by the Alcotts. Their neighbors in Concord included
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Like Hawthorne,
Sophia was a reclusive person. She was bedridden with headaches until
her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem
to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long marriage, often taking
walks in the park. Sophia greatly admired her husband's work. In one of
her journals, she writes: "I am always so dazzled and bewildered with

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the richness, the depth, the… jewels of beauty in his productions that I
am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and
muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts." In 1846,
Hawthorne was appointed surveyor (determining the quantity and
value of imported goods) at the Salem Custom House. Like his earlier
appointment to the custom house in Boston, this employment was vul-
nerable to the politics of the spoils system. A Democrat, Hawthorne lost
this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the pres-
idential election of 1848. Hawthorne's career as a novelist was boosted by
The Scarlet Letter in 1850, in which the preface refers to his three-year
tenure in the Custom House at Salem. The House of the Seven Gables
(1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) followed in quick succession.
In 1852, he wrote the campaign biography of his old friend Franklin
Pierce. With Pierce's election as president, Hawthorne was rewarded in
1853 with the position of United States consul in Liverpool. In 1857, his
appointment ended and the Hawthorne family toured France and Italy.
They returned to The Wayside in 1860, and that year saw the publication
of The Marble Faun. Failing health (which biographer Edward Miller
speculates was stomach cancer) prevented him from completing several
more romances. Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Ply-
mouth, New Hampshire while on a tour of the White Mountains with
Pierce. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachu-
setts. Wife Sophia and daughter Una were originally buried in England.
However, in June 2006, they were re-interred in plots adjacent to Nath-
aniel. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una, Julian,
and Rose. Una was a victim of mental illness and died young. Julian
moved out west, served a jail term for embezzlement and wrote a book
about his father. Rose married George Parsons Lathrop and they became
Roman Catholics. After George's death, Rose became a Dominican nun.
She founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne to care for victims of
incurable cancer. Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Hawthorne:

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 • The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• The Marble Faun (1860)
• Fire Worship (1843)

Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks

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Noon by the north clock! Noon by the east! High noon, too, by these hot
sunbeams, which full, scarcely aslope, upon my head and almost make
the water bubble and smoke in the trough under my nose. Truly, we
public characters have a tough time of it! And among all the town-of-
ficers chosen at March meeting, where is he that sustains for a single year
the burden of such manifold duties as are imposed in perpetuity upon
the town-pump? The title of "town-treasurer" is rightfully mine, as
guardian of the best treasure that the town has. The overseers of the poor
ought to make me their chairman, since I provide bountifully for the
pauper without expense to him that pays taxes. I am at the head of the
fire department and one of the physicians to the board of health. As a
keeper of the peace all water-drinkers will confess me equal to the con-
stable. I perform some of the duties of the town-clerk by promulgating
public notices when they are posted on my front. To speak within
bounds, I am the chief person of the municipality, and exhibit, moreover,
an admirable pattern to my brother-officers by the cool, steady, upright,
downright and impartial discharge of my business and the constancy
with which I stand to my post. Summer or winter, nobody seeks me in
vain, for all day long I am seen at the busiest corner, just above the mar-
ket, stretching out my arms to rich and poor alike, and at night I hold a
lantern over my head both to show where I am and keep people out of
the gutters. At this sultry noontide I am cupbearer to the parched popu-
lace, for whose benefit an iron goblet is chained to my waist. Like a
dramseller on the mall at muster-day, I cry aloud to all and sundry in my
plainest accents and at the very tiptop of my voice.
Here it is, gentlemen! Here is the good liquor! Walk up, walk up, gen-
tlemen! Walk up, walk up! Here is the superior stuff! Here is the unadul-
terated ale of Father Adam—better than Cognac, Hollands, Jamaica,
strong beer or wine of any price; here it is by the hogshead or the single
glass, and not a cent to pay! Walk up, gentlemen, walk up, and help
yourselves!
It were a pity if all this outcry should draw no customers. Here they
come.—A hot day, gentlemen! Quaff and away again, so as to keep
yourselves in a nice cool sweat.—You, my friend, will need another cup-
ful to wash the dust out of your throat, if it be as thick there as it is on
your cowhide shoes. I see that you have trudged half a score of miles to-
day, and like a wise man have passed by the taverns and stopped at the
running brooks and well-curbs. Otherwise, betwixt heat without and fire
within, you would have been burnt to a cinder or melted down to noth-
ing at all, in the fashion of a jelly-fish. Drink and make room for that

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other fellow, who seeks my aid to quench the fiery fever of last night's
potations, which he drained from no cup of mine.—Welcome, most rubi-
cund sir! You and I have been great strangers hitherto; nor, to confess the
truth, will my nose be anxious for a closer intimacy till the fumes of your
breath be a little less potent. Mercy on you, man! the water absolutely
hisses down your red-hot gullet and is converted quite to steam in the
miniature Tophet which you mistake for a stomach. Fill again, and tell
me, on the word of an honest toper, did you ever, in cellar, tavern, or any
kind of a dram-shop, spend the price of your children's food for a swig
half so delicious? Now, for the first time these ten years, you know the
flavor of cold water. Good-bye; and whenever you are thirsty, remember
that I keep a constant supply at the old stand.—Who next?—Oh, my little
friend, you are let loose from school and come hither to scrub your
blooming face and drown the memory of certain taps of the ferule, and
other schoolboy troubles, in a draught from the town-pump? Take it,
pure as the current of your young life. Take it, and may your heart and
tongue never be scorched with a fiercer thirst than now! There, my dear
child! put down the cup and yield your place to this elderly gentleman
who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones that I suspect he is afraid
of breaking them. What! he limps by without so much as thanking me, as
if my hospitable offers were meant only for people who have no wine-
cellars.—Well, well, sir, no harm done, I hope? Go draw the cork, tip the
decanter; but when your great toe shall set you a-roaring, it will be no af-
fair of mine. If gentlemen love the pleasant titillation of the gout, it is all
one to the town-pump. This thirsty dog with his red tongue lolling out
does not scorn my hospitality, but stands on his hind legs and laps
eagerly out of the trough. See how lightly he capers away
again!—Jowler, did your worship ever have the gout?
Are you all satisfied? Then wipe your mouths, my good friends, and
while my spout has a moment's leisure I will delight the town with a few
historical remniscences. In far antiquity, beneath a darksome shadow of
venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn earth in the
very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement. The water
was as bright and clear and deemed as precious as liquid diamonds. The
Indian sagamores drank of it from time immemorial till the fatal deluge
of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept their whole race away
from the cold fountains. Endicott and his followers came next, and often
knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest
goblet then was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot
from Boston, drank here out of the hollow of his hand. The elder

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Higginson here wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first town-
born child. For many years it was the watering-place, and, as it were, the
washbowl, of the vicinity, whither all decent folks resorted to purify
their visages and gaze at them afterward—at least, the pretty maidens
did—in the mirror which it made. On Sabbath-days, whenever a babe
was to be baptized, the sexton filled his basin here and placed it on the
communion-table of the humble meeting-house, which partly covered
the site of yonder stately brick one. Thus one generation after another
was consecrated to Heaven by its waters, and cast their waxing and wan-
ing shadows into its glassy bosom, and vanished from the earth, as if
mortal life were but a flitting image in a fountain. Finally the fountain
vanished also. Cellars were dug on all sides and cart-loads of gravel
flung upon its source, whence oozed a turbid stream, forming a mud-
puddle at the corner of two streets. In the hot months, when its refresh-
ment was most needed, the dust flew in clouds over the forgotten birth-
place of the waters, now their grave. But in the course of time a town-
pump was sunk into the source of the ancient spring; and when the first
decayed, another took its place, and then another, and still another, till
here stand I, gentlemen and ladies, to serve you with my iron goblet.
Drink and be refreshed. The water is as pure and cold as that which
slaked the thirst of the red sagamore beneath the aged boughs, though
now the gem of the wilderness is treasured under these hot stones,
where no shadow falls but from the brick buildings. And be it the moral
of my story that, as this wasted and long-lost fountain is now known and
prized again, so shall the virtues of cold water—too little valued since
your fathers' days—be recognized by all.
Your pardon, good people! I must interrupt my stream of eloquence
and spout forth a stream of water to replenish the trough for this team-
ster and his two yoke of oxen, who have come from Topsfield, or some-
where along that way. No part of my business is pleasanter than the wa-
tering of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the water-mark 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 it in 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.
But I perceive, my dear auditors, that you are impatient for the re-
mainder of my discourse. Impute it, I beseech you, to no defect of mod-
esty if 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 bet-
ter men and women you will find yourselves. I shall say nothing of my

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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 com-
bustible 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 con-
cede 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 brew-
houses, 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, trans-
mitted 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 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 the drunkard. Their dead faces shall express what their spir-
its were and are to be by a lingering smile of memory and hope.
Ahem! Dry work, this speechifying, especially to an unpractised
orator. I never conceived till now what toil the temperance lecturers un-
dergo for my sake; hereafter they shall have the business to

8
themselves.—Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to wet
my whistle.—Thank you, sir!—My dear hearers, when the world shall
have been regenerated by my instrumentality, you will collect your use-
less vats and liquor-casks into one great pile and make a bonfire in honor
of the town-pump. And when I shall have decayed like my predecessors,
then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain richly sculptured
take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should be erected every-
where and inscribed with the names of the distinguished champions of
my cause. Now, listen, for something very important is to come next.
There are two or three honest friends of mine—and true friends I
know they are—who nevertheless by their fiery pugnacity in my behalf
do put me in fearful hazard of a broken nose, or even a total overthrow
upon the pavement and the loss of the treasure which I guard.—I pray
you, gentlemen, let this fault be amended. Is it decent, think you, to get
tipsy with zeal for temperance and take up the honorable cause of the
town-pump in the style of a toper fighting for his brandy-bottle? Or can
the excellent qualities of cold water be no otherwise exemplified than by
plunging slapdash into hot water and woefully scalding yourselves and
other people? Trust me, they may. In the moral warfare which you are to
wage—and, indeed, in the whole conduct of your lives—you cannot
choose a better example than myself, who have never permitted the dust
and sultry atmosphere, the turbulence and manifold disquietudes, of the
world around me to reach that deep, calm well of purity which may be
called my soul. And whenever I pour out that soul, it is to cool earth's
fever or cleanse its stains.
One o'clock! Nay, then, if the dinner-bell begins to speak, I may as well
hold my peace. Here comes a pretty young girl of my acquaintance with
a large stone pitcher for me to fill. May she draw a husband while draw-
ing her water, as Rachel did of old!—Hold out your vessel, my dear!
There it is, full to the brim; so now run home, peeping at your sweet im-
age in the pitcher as you go, and forget not in a glass of my own liquor to
drink "SUCCESS TO THE TOWN-PUMP."

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