[p. 41]
A rill from the town pump.
(With apologies to
Hawthorne.)
Because of recent inquiry, though it seems like ‘carrying coals to
Newcastle’ to even try to improve upon ‘The Pump in the
Market-place,’ so excellently presented before the Historical Society by
Miss Gill,
1 we call attention to our frontispiece, and quote from
Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Rill,’ a favorite selection, always read with interest in our school days.
In far antiquity, beneath a darksome shadow of venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn earth, in the very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement.
The water was as bright and clear, and deemed as precious, as liquid diamonds.
The Indian Sagamores drank of it from time immemorial, till the fearful deluge of fire-water burst upon the red men, and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. . . . Governor Winthrop on his journey afoot from Boston drank here from the hollow of his hand.
And we may claim a similar genesis for the
Medford town pump, in an ‘ancient spring’ whose existence may have been the deciding factor in the location of the original ‘ferme-house’ built by
Matthew Cradock's ‘servants’ near the old Indian trail, through what is Medford Square today to the river's fording place.
And it is just as certain that the governor refreshed himself with its cool water after crossing the
Mistick on his long tramp to
Salem.
But we may not follow
Hawthorne's pump rill into the baptismal water placed on the communion table, for alas!
Medford had no meetinghouse then, nor yet for sixty years, and when she did, the clear water of Marrabel's brook was nearer by.
But as at
Salem, in the lapse of years
Medford men
vanished from the earth as if mortal life were but a flitting image in a fountain.
Finally the fountain vanished also.
Cellars were dug on all sides, and cart-loads of gravel flung upon its source, whence oozed a turbid stream, forming a mud-puddle at the corner
