hitherto; nor, to confess the truth, will my nose be anxious for a closer intimacy till the fumes of your breath be a little less potent.  Mercy on you, man! the water absolutely hisses down your red-hot gullet and is converted quite to steam in the miniature Tophet which you mistake for a stomach.  Fill again, and tell me, on the word of an honest toper, did you ever, in cellar, tavern, or any kind of a dram-shop, spend the price of your children’s food for a swig half so delicious?  Now, for the first time these ten years, you know the flavor of cold water.  Good-bye; and whenever you are thirsty, remember that I keep a constant supply at the old stand.—­Who next?—­Oh, my little friend, you are let loose from school and come hither to scrub your blooming face and drown the memory of certain taps of the ferule, and other schoolboy troubles, in a draught from the town-pump?  Take it, pure as the current of your young life.  Take it, and may your heart and tongue never be scorched with a fiercer thirst than now!  There, my dear child! put down the cup and yield your place to this elderly gentleman who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones that I suspect he is afraid of breaking them.  What! he limps by without so much as thanking me, as if my hospitable offers were meant only for people who have no wine-cellars.—­Well, well, sir, no harm done, I hope?  Go draw the cork, tip the decanter; but when your great toe shall set you a-roaring, it will be no affair of mine.  If gentlemen love the pleasant titillation of the gout, it is all one to the town-pump.  This thirsty dog with his red tongue lolling out does not scorn my hospitality, but stands on his hind legs and laps eagerly out of the trough.  See how lightly he capers away again!—­Jowler, did your worship ever have the gout?

Are you all satisfied?  Then wipe your mouths, my good friends, and while my spout has a moment’s leisure I will delight the town with a few historical remniscences.  In far antiquity, beneath a darksome shadow of venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn earth in the very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement.  The water was as bright and clear and deemed as precious as liquid diamonds.  The Indian sagamores drank of it from time immemorial till the fatal deluge of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains.  Endicott and his followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring.  The richest goblet then was of birch-bark.  Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out of the hollow of his hand.  The elder Higginson here wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child.  For many years it was the watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the vicinity, whither all decent folks resorted to purify their visages and gaze at them afterward—­at least, the pretty maidens did—­in the mirror which it made.  On Sabbath-days, whenever a babe