to bring up
nothing but common earth.

"I suppose," said my optimist to me, one morning, "that you must soon
come to water, and if you do I hope it will be hot water."

"Hot water!" I exclaimed. "I do not want that."

"Oh, yes, you would, if you had thought about it as much as I have," he
replied. "I lay awake for hours last night, thinking what would happen
if you struck hot water. In the first place, it would be absolutely
pure, because, even if it were possible for germs and bacilli to get
down so deep, they would be boiled before you got them, and then you
could cool that water for drinking. When fresh it would be already
heated for cooking and hot baths. And then--just think of it!--you
could introduce the hot-water system of heating into your house, and
there would be the hot water always ready. But the great thing would
be your garden. Think of the refuse hot water circulating in pipes up
and down and under all your beds! That garden would bloom in the
winter as others do in the summer; at least, you could begin to have
Lima-beans and tomatoes as soon as the frost was out of the air."

I laughed. "It would take a lot of pumping," I said, "to do all that
with the hot water."

"Oh, I forgot to say," he cried, with sparkling eyes, "that I do not
believe you would ever have any more pumping to do. You have now gone
down so far that I am sure whatever you find will force itself up. It
will spout high into the air or through all your pipes, and run always."

Phineas Colwell was by when this was said, and he must have gone down
to Mrs. Betty Perch's house to talk it over with her, for in the
afternoon she came to see me.

"I understand," said she, "that you are trying to get hot water out of
your well, and that there is likely to be a lot more than you need, so
that it will run down by the side of the road. I just want to say that
if a stream of hot water comes down past my house some of the children
will be bound to get into it and be scalded to death, and I came to say
that if that well is going to squirt b'iling water I'd like to have
notice so that I can move, though where a widow with so many orphans is
going to move to nobody knows. Mr. Colwell says that if you had got
him to tell you where to put that well there would have been no danger
of this sort of thing."

The next day the optimist came to me, his face fairly blazing with a
new idea. "I rode over on purpose to urge you," he cried, "i