limping toward breakfast with the help of buckets of water generously loaned you by your nearest neighbor,—rarely, if ever, does he carry his generosity so far as to help carry the buckets,—that because of this honest soul in overalls, winter has lost the terrors which it held for your great-grandfather.

Revisit your library, and note what the chroniclers of the past thought about winter—'this cousin to Death, father to sickness, and brother to old age' (as Thomas Dekker bitterly called it; and well would your great-grandfather have agreed with him), when 'the first word that a wench speaks on your coming into a room in the morning is, "Prithee send for some faggots."' It is bad enough when—to adapt Dekker's sixteenth-century phraseology—the first word that a wench speaks on your coming into a room in the morning is, 'Prithee send for a plumber'; but how seldom it happens! And because we can send for a plumber, our attitude toward winter is joyfully changed for the better: lovely autumn is no longer regarded as melancholy because winter is coming, nor is backward spring esteemed beyond criticism because winter is over.

Those good old days, after the sun had entered Capricorn, were cold and inconvenient old days. Observe great-grandfather: all his plumbing was a pump, which often froze beyond his simple skill in plumbery; and then he drew water from the well in a dear old oaken bucket (as we like to think of it), emptied it into other buckets, and carried it by hand, even as a man now carries the water loaned him by his generous neighbor, wherever the useful, unintoxicating fluid was needed. No invisible brook flowed through his house, and gushed obligingly at faucets, hot or cold according to great-grandfather's whim; no hot-water pipes suffused his dwelling with grateful warmth. These are our blessings—and it is the plumber, with only a boy to help him, who contends manfully against the forces of nature, and keeps them going. For the life of the house depends nowadays on its healthy circulation of water; and when the house suffers from arteriosclerosis, the plumber is the doctor, and the strange, impassive boy is the trained nurse.

Sometimes in an emergency he arrives without this little companion: I have myself, rising to the same occasion, taken the boy's place. I was a good boy. The plumber admitted it. 'Fill th' kettle again with hot water off th' stove,' said he, over his arched back, as he peered shrewdly down a pipe to see how far away it was frozen, 'there's th' good boy.' Thus I know that the boy is not, as our minor humorists would have us believe, a mere flourish and gaudy appanage to the plumber's autocratically assumed grandeur. His strange, impassive manner is probably nothing more or less than concentrated attention; it is as if he said, with Hamlet, 'Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all foolish, fond regards, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there; and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by Heaven!'

Even in putting in a new washer, I should do better with a boy.

The most nervous and conscientious plumber, I tell you, must at intervals appear, to an observer unacquainted with the art and mystery of plumbery, to be proceeding in a leisurely and perhaps idle fashion. The most methodical and conscientious man, plumber or not, will occasionally forget something, and have to go back for it. The most self-respecting and conscientious minor humorist, after he has exhausted his witty invention making a joke on a plumber, will try to sell it for the highest possible price. And if I, for example, am a little proud of my ability, greater than the plumber's, to write an essay, how shall I accuse him of arrogance if he is a little proud of his ability, greater than mine, to accomplish the more necessary feat of thawing a frozen water-pipe?

He has a heart.

When I was a plumber's boy myself, I walked with my boss to his office in the village to get a tool. It was a Sunday afternoon: I remember that a rooster crowed afar off, and how his lonely clarion enhanced and made more gravely quiet the peace of the Sabbath. And the plumber said, 'I wouldn't have felt right, sitting at home by the fire reading the paper, when I knew you was in trouble and I could pull you out.' He had come, mark you, in his Sunday clothes; he had come in his best, not pausing even for his overalls, so that, in our distressed, waterless home, the lady of the house had herself encircled his honest waist with a gingham apron before he began plumbing. And in all the world there was nobody else whom we would have been so glad to see.

And so, bowing, with my left hand over what I take to be the region of a grateful heart, I extend him this praise of plumber. No plumber came over in the Mayflower; but think not, for that reason, that he is a parvenu. He is of ancient lineage—this good fairy in overalls of our invisible brooks. The Romans knew him as the artifex plumbareus. Cæsar may have interrupted the revision of the Commentaries to send for him. He disappeared, with civilization and water-pipes, in the Dark Ages; he came back, with civilization and water-pipes, when the darkness lifted. Neglected by Art, disregarded by Romance, and unconsidered by the drama, these rich and entertaining expressions of life are as nothing when his presence is called for.

He, too, should have his statue, not of bronze, marble, or granite, but of honest lead, with two figures—the Plumber, holding aloft his torch, and the Plumber's Boy, strange, impassive, and holding in his pendant hands a monkey wrench and the coil of flexible tubing with which his master cunningly directs hot water into the hardened arteries of a suffering house. And on his pedestal I would carve the motto,—

'Did You Ever Know a Plumber Who Had Grown Rich?'