248 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



about twenty feet apart, on6 was dug deeper than the other one, 

 which took the sink water, too, but the fluid inside of each stood 

 at one level, generally, except in a very dry time. 



This arrangement made tombstones necessary for your first wife 

 and her two children, besides causing thirty-one cases of fearful 

 sickness, and seven funerals among the neighbors who came both- 

 ering around your well buckets. All this occurred, moreover, 

 without anybody being the wiser at the time. Not one of the 

 preachers of those ten funeral sermons, nor one of the doctors prac- 

 ticing in those sixteen families, let a word of suspicion drop against 

 the water in your well. At that time there was no board of health 

 and no cattle commission kicking up bobberies in the State. 



This '' luck " of yours was current medical, scientific and theolo- 

 gical salvation in spots during very recent dark ages. My story of 

 the " wolf and the lamb" is condensed, we must understand, from 

 many true ones, as I presume iEsop's was. 



The second wife happened to be a school-ma'am, who had 

 boarded around and seen a great variety of back-doors. She scented 

 Bluebeard about yours at once. She made you clean the well and 

 move the privy to a fresh spot. You also fixed a nice leaching, 

 untrapped and unventilated cess-pool, separately, to keep the wash- 

 sink and chamber water out of the privy. 



You were always a good provider, were making money, had 

 plenty of the usual kitchen help, and no pigs or chickens to keep 

 swill from going into the sink, where at every douse of liquid the 

 cess-pool returned an equivalent bulk of foul air. 



More sickness and more funerals resulted, all charged to an "in- 

 scrutable Providence," except that a "little medical whiffett," sus- 

 pected of being " an infidel," who attended in your family, told you 

 to your very head that filth from your cess-pool had been draining 

 into the well for a long time; and though he lost your practice, you 

 learned from him, after a little reflection, the sorrowful facts in the 

 case. 



The next marriage was performed upon "business" principles. 

 It brought money into the family, and involved a new house upon 

 a new site with " modern improvements," and direct sewer connec- 

 tions with all the filth in the town. 



How many times did we change hoppers, or traps, or have the 

 whole drainage system of the house ripped up and renewed ? 

 Never mind how many. We know that plumbers, architects. 



