The “Yours for health” was my idea.

I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen years.  My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism, and as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend thousands of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured rheumatism, and then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time he bent over to fill a glass with it.

Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house over to me.

“It’s a difficult situation, my girl,” he said.  “Lots of people think it’s simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over the railing.  Why, I tell you a barkeeper’s a high-priced man mostly, and his job’s a snap to this.  I’d like to know how a barkeeper would make out if his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or ‘chill off’.  And another thing:  if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have to ask him what he’s doing for it, and listen while he tells how much weight he lost in a blanket sweat?  No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and lets it go at that.”

Father passed away the following winter.  He’d been a little bit delirious, and his last words were:  “Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of salt, sir?” Poor father!  The spring had been his career, you may say, and I like to think that perhaps even now he is sitting by some everlasting spring measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of the old tin dipper.  I said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt quite sure that I was right, and that where father was the water would be appreciated.  He had heard of father.

Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy.  Then I found things were coming my way.  I’ve got the kind of mind that never forgets a name or face and can combine them properly, which isn’t common.  And when folks came back I could call them at once.  It would do your heart good to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from the free bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house where everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a rap whether he’s the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the navy.  If he’s been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about the rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are.  And in ten minutes he’s sitting in a bridge game and trotting to the spring to have his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he’d grown up in the place.  The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the sanatorium.

He depended on me a good bit—­the old doctor did—­and that winter he was pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he’d got in the habit of making it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young.  Finally he got to being eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility in the end.)