Chapter 14

to go up to the spring for our usual supply of water. But we kept Jim Doane there under instructions to attend carefully to the putting up of the water. It was his sole business, and he seemed to be attending to it properly. He was at the spring every day and boarded at the house of a neighbor, named Murch, who lived nearer to Nubble Hill than we did. Every day, too, we noticed the smoke of the fire under the kettle in which he heated water for scalding out the casks.

The first hint we had that things were going wrong was when Willis Murch told Addison that Doane had been on a spree, and that for several days he had been so badly under the influence of liquor that he did not know what he was about.

On hearing that news Addison and the old Squire hastened to the spring. Jim was there, sober enough now, and working industriously. But he looked bad, and his account of how he had done his work for the last week was far from clear. The old Squire gave him another job at the dowel mill and stationed his brother, Asa Doane, a strictly temperate man, at the spring. We could not learn just what had happened during the past ten days, but we hoped that no serious neglect had occurred.

But there had.

Toward the middle of July a letter of complaint came--the first we had ever received. "This barrel of water from your spring is not keeping good," were the exact words of it. I remember them well, for we read them over and over again. Addison replied at once, and sent another barrel in its place.

Before another week had passed a second complaint came. "This last barrel of water from your spring is turning 'ropy,'" it said. Another customer sent his barrel back when half full, with a letter saying, "It isn't fit to drink. The barrel is slimy inside."

Addison examined the barrel carefully, and found that there was, indeed, an appreciable film of vegetable growth on the staves inside. The taste of the water also was quite different.

Within a fortnight four more barrels and kegs were returned to us, in at least two cases accompanied by sharp words of condemnation. "No better than pond water," one customer wrote.

We carefully examined the inside of all these barrels and kegs as soon as they came back. Besides invisible impurities in the water, there was in every one more or less visible dirt, even bits of grass and slivers of wood.

There was only one conclusion to reach: Jim Doane had not been careful in filling the kegs and had not properly cleansed and scalded them. As nearly as we could discover from bits of information that came out subsequently, there were days and days when he was too "hazy" to know whether he had cleansed the barrels or not. He had filled them and sent them off in foul condition.

Addison wrote more than fifty letters to customers, defending the purity of Rose-Quartz Spring water, relating the facts of this recent "accident" and asking for a continued trial of it. I suppose that people at a distance thought that if there had been carelessness once there might be again. Very likely, too, they suspected that the water had never been so pure as we had declared it to be. Owners of other springs who had put water on the market improved the opportunity to circulate reports that Rose-Quartz water would not "keep." We got possession of three circulars in which that damaging statement had been sent broadcast.

There is probably no commodity in the world that depends so much on a reputation for purity as spring water. By September the orders for water had fallen off to a most disheartening extent. Scarcely three hundred gallons were called for.

In the hope that this was merely a temporary set-back, and knowing that there was no fault in the water itself, the old Squire spent a thousand dollars in advertisements to stem the tide of adverse criticism. So far as we could discover, the effort produced little or no effect on sales. The opinion had gone abroad that the water would not keep pure for any great length of time. By the following spring sales had dwindled to such an extent that it was hardly worth while to continue the business. Considered as a commercial asset, the Rose-Quartz Spring was dead.

Regretfully we gave up the enterprise and let the spring fall into disuse. It was then, I remember, that the old Squire said, "It takes us one lifetime to learn how to do things."