importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life
runs on in the middle key.

A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case went
prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered Abraham.
It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the farmer had
ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed with something
stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own crass ignorance.
He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for typhoid. But he
prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with the full weight and
breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick; Abraham's build was that
of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje Broderick.

On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry, there
was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the
trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and
cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to the
house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an
acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame
among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation;
would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference,
and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the
fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease in
the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was an
act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved the
very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had taken
hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and clung as
fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question of water
supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and kept up its
illicit connection with the drain.