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.)

He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it had
been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the
summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud
while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.

"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake
is up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was
you who persuaded me not to, Minnie."

And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss
Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the