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Soon all the inhabitants had comfortable foot-wear, which put them all in fine humor. Then the Wizard began to proclaim a great war and the coming of King Theophile. He stood on the green, near the town-pump, and at first only the geese listened to him, stretching out their long necks and opening their red bills. But this did not discourage the Wizard, for he knew that after geese come men.
So much and so long had Mr. Dodge respired a moral atmosphere of this community-character, and gregarious propensity, that he had, in many things, lost all sense of his individuality; as much so, in fact, as if he breathed with a pair of county lungs, ate with a common mouth, drank from the town-pump, and slept in the open air.
But the next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and awful sacrilege! on the very door of the meeting- house, an Unprecedented Attraction!
They seem a feature of the bygone village life of Charlesbridge, and accord pleasantly with the town-pump and the public horse-trough, and the noble elm that by night droops its boughs so pensively, and probably dreams of its happy younger days when there were no canker-worms in the world.
Higginbotham cared about posthumous renown, his untimely ghost would have exulted in this tumult. Our friend Dominicus in his vanity of heart forgot his intended precautions, and, mounting on the town-pump, announced himself as the bearer of the authentic intelligence which had caused so wonderful a sensation.
For instance, at Bungay there was a public feast in the Market Place, and on the town-pump the Messrs. Childs erected a printing-press, which they kept hard at work all day printing off papers intended to do honour to the great event their fellow-townsmen were celebrating in so jovial a manner.
French children gazed in wonder women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major, a Captain, a Teacher, and I with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. The audience was framed in smoke.
As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. O, certainly not; but yet I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town.
Swinnerton's, his shrunken, frosty figure, and its feeble movement, all these characteristics had a wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's infirm and reverend presence. But, alas! it was a terrible mistake.
And now, as if it were a monument raised to commemorate those dismal times, there stands, at a point where all the crossing footpaths meet, a huge town-pump, near ten feet high, carved and painted, with a great ball upon its top, and an iron ladle chained to its nose.
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