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"Well, for instance, one day he was expecting company. There was a fountain in the middle of the lawn at Blowinghouse, and a statue of Hercules that his old father had brought home from Italy and planted in the middle of it. Josh couldn't bear that statue said the muscles were all wrong.
If the visitor admired the fountain or the statuary he declared quite unnecessarily that he knew nothing of art, but had paid the various artists represented various definite dollars and cents. And never was there a guest of that house that poor Adam did not seek to discredit to his family and to other guests, lest by any chance any one should fail to recognize the host's superiority.
Now it seemed as though Little John's songs were never to get sung, for he had got no farther than this when the door of the inn opened and out came the two brothers of Fountain Abbey, the landlord following them, and, as the saying is, washing his hands with humble soap.
One who saw a good deal of their way of life has written that their chief vice, or debauchery, was that of drunkenness, "which they exercise for the most part with brandy. This they drink as liberally as the Spaniards do clear fountain water. Sometimes they buy together a pipe of wine; this they stave at the one end, and never cease drinking till they have made an end of it.
But afterwards he played Home, sweet Home, with three variations quite the most wonderful thing I have ever heard in music. Though I was close to the piano, the motion of the fingers was entirely invisible a mere mist of rapidity; the hands moving slowly and softly, and the variation, in the ear, like a murmur of a light fountain, far away.
A great deal of the water was led away from the foot of the plateau out of which the fountain issued by ditches constructed to irrigate the rich gardens surrounding the metropolis and the open agricultural country for many miles around.
"If fate should determine that I shall recover, I would raise a monument on the spot where this water gushes out: I would crown the fountain in memory of the comfort which it has afforded me. If I die, and they should not proscribe my remains as they have proscribed my person, I should desire to be buried with my ancestors in the cathedral of Ajaccio, in Corsica.
The latter conducts its votary through all the several mundane wholes up to that great whole the world itself, and thence leads him through the luminous order of incorporeal wholes to that vast whole of wholes, in which all other wholes are centred and rooted, and which is no other than the principle of all principles, and the fountain of deity itself.
A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered kettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and copper-ware stored in the possibility of future need. However carefully handed down from one generation to another, the old objects have a forlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to the compassion rather than the veneration of the witness.
They admire the most trifling thing I have, and add, "God alone brought you amongst us." Their language, though indelicate to us, is not so to them. It is the undisguised speech of a rude people. Went this morning to see El-Beer, or "the well," the real fountain of life in these countries.
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