ing for a continued trial of it. I suppose that people
at a distance thought that if there had been carelessness once there
might be again. Very likely, too, they suspected that the water had
never been so pure as we had declared it to be. Owners of other springs
who had put water on the market improved the opportunity to circulate
reports that Rose-Quartz water would not "keep." We got possession of
three circulars in which that damaging statement had been sent
broadcast.

There is probably no commodity in the world that depends so much on a
reputation for purity as spring water. By September the orders for water
had fallen off to a most disheartening extent. Scarcely three hundred
gallons were called for.

In the hope that this was merely a temporary set-back, and knowing that
there was no fault in the water itself, the old Squire spent a thousand
dollars in advertisements to stem the tide of adverse criticism. So far
as we could discover, the effort produced little or no effect on sales.
The opinion had gone abroad that the water would not keep pure for any
great length of time. By the following spring sales had dwindled to such
an extent that it was hardly worth while to continue the business.
Considered as a commercial asset, the Rose-Quartz Spring was dead.

Regretfully we gave up the enterprise and let the spring fall into
disuse. It was then, I remember, that the old Squire said, "It takes us
one lifetime to learn how to do things."

CHAPTER XIII

FOX PILLS

ABOUT this time an affair which had long been worrying Addison and
myself came to a final settlement.

Up in the great woods, three or four miles from the old Squire's farm,
there was a clearing of thirty or forty acres in which stood an old
house and barn, long unoccupied. A lonelier place can hardly be
imagined. Sombre spruce and fir woods inclosed the clearing on all
sides; and over the tree-tops on the east side loomed the three rugged
dark peaks of the Stoss Pond mountains.

Thirty years before, Lumen Bartlett, a young man about twenty years old,
had cleared the land with his own labor, built the house and barn, and a
little later gone to live there with his wife, Althea, who was younger
even than he.

Life in so remote a place must have been somewhat solitary; but they
were very happy, it is said, for a year and a half. Then one morning
they fell to quarreling bitterly over so trifling a thing as a cedar
broom. In the anger of the m