a gallon or two apiece, and they can afford time to breathe, with sighs of
calm enjoyment! Now they roll their quiet eyes around the brim of their
monstrous drinking vessel. An ox is your true toper.

12. I hold myself the grand reformer of the age. From my spout, and such
spouts as mine, must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of a
vast portion of its crime and anguish, which have gushed from the fiery
fountains of the still. In this mighty enterprise, the cow shall be my
great confederate. Milk and water!

13. Ahem! Dry work this speechifying, especially to all unpracticed
orators. I never conceived till now what toil the temperance lecturers
undergo for my sake. Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just
to wet my whistle. Thank you, sir. But to proceed.

14. The Town Pump and the Cow! Such is the glorious partnership that shall
finally monopolize the whole business of quenching thirst. Blessed
consummation! Then Poverty shall pass away from the land, finding no hovel
so wretched where her squalid form may shelter itself. Then Disease, for
lack of other victims, shall gnaw his own heart and die. Then Sin, if she
do not die, shall lose half her strength.

15. Then there will be no war of households. The husband and the wife,
drinking deep of peaceful joy, a calm bliss of temperate affections, shall
pass hand in hand through life, and lie down, not reluctantly, at its
protracted close. To them the past will be no turmoil of mad dreams, nor
the future an eternity of such moments as follow the delirium of a
drunkard. Their dead faces shall express what their spirits were, and are
to be, by a lingering smile of memory and hope.