set to at the iron handle. This was too large for their little hands to
grasp, and by means of some grievance inside, or perhaps through a cruel
trick of the plumber, up went the long handle every time small fingers
were too confiding, and there it stood up like the tail of a rampant
cow, or a branch inaccessible, until an old shawl or the cord of a
peg-top could be cast up on high to reduce it. But some engineering boy,
"highly gifted," like Uncle Sam's self, "with machinery," had discovered
an ingenious cure for this. With the help of the girls he used to fasten
a fat little thing, about twelve months old, in the bend at the middle
of the handle, and there (like a ham on the steelyard) hung this baby
and enjoyed seesaw, and laughed at its own utility.

I never saw this, and the splashing and dribbling and play and bright
revelry of water, without forgetting all sad counsel and discretion,
and rushing out as if the dingy pump were my own delicious Blue River.
People used to look at me from the windows with pity and astonishment,
supposing me to be crazed or frantic, especially the Germans. For to run
out like this, without a pocket full of money, would have been insanity;
and to run out with it, to their minds, was even clearer proof of that
condition. For the money went as quickly as the water of the pump; on
this side and on that it flew, each child in succession making deeper
drain upon it, in virtue of still deeper woes. They were dreadful little
story-tellers, I am very much afraid; and the long faces pulled, as
soon as I came out, in contrast with all the recent glee and frolic,
suggested to even the youngest charity suspicions of some inconsistency.
However, they were so ingenious and clever that they worked my pockets
like the pump itself, only with this unhappy difference, that the former
had no inexhaustible spring of silver, or even of copper.

And thus, by a reason (as cogent as any of more exalted nature), was
I driven back to my head-quarters, there to abide till a fresh supply
should come. For Uncle Sam, generous and noble as he was, did not mean
to let me melt all away at once my share of the great Blue River nugget,
any more than to make ducks and drakes of his own. Indeed, that rock of
gold was still untouched, and healthily reposing in a banker's cellar
in the good town of Sacramento. People were allowed to go in and see
it upon payment of a dollar, and they came out so thirsty from feasting
upon it