SPRINGS 45 



use and for pleasure. Nothing degrades it, and 

 nothing can enhance its beauty. It is picture and 

 parable, and an instrument of music. It is servant 

 and divinity in one. The milk of forty cows is 

 cooled in it, and never a drop gets into the cans, 

 though they are plunged to the brim. It is as 

 insensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold. 

 It is planted upon the sand, and yet it abideth like 

 a house upon a rock. It evidently has some rela- 

 tion to a little brook that flows down through a 

 deep notch in the hills half a mile distant, because 

 on one occasion, when the brook was being ditched 

 or dammed, the spring showed great perturbation. 

 Every nymph in it was filled with sudden alarm 

 and kicked up a commotion. 



In some sections of the country, when there is 

 no spring near the house, the farmer, with much 

 labor and pains, brings one from some uplying field 

 or wood. Pine and poplar logs are bored and laid 

 in a trench, and the spring practically moved to the 

 desired spot. The ancient Persians had a law that 

 whoever thus conveyed the water of a spring to a 

 spot not watered before should enjoy many immu- 

 nities under the state not granted to others. 



Hilly and mountainous countries do not always 

 abound in good springs. When the stratum is ver- 

 tical, or has too great a dip, the water is not col- 

 lected in large veins, but is rather held as it falls 

 and oozes out slowly at the surface over the top of 

 the rock. On this account one of the most famous 

 grass and dairy sections of New York is poorly sup- 



