“Hello!” I called to him over the telephone, “aren’t you going to do that job for me?”
This neighbor is a most useful colored citizen, with a complete line of avocations, cleaning cesspools nocturnally and on Saturday afternoons being one of these sporadic and subsidiary callings.
“Hello!” he answered; “I most assuredly am! And exceedingly sorry I am, too, for this delay.” (He had been coming for one year and six months now.) “But my business grows enormously. It is really more than I can administer. The fact is, professor, I must increase my equipment. I can’t dip any longer. I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.”
“I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” Divine! I like the sound. For it is the true measure of life as set over against that which life may merely appear to be. To trudge along through life beside your humble cart of the long-handled dipper, and to know that your dipper is approaching the proportions of a pump is to know that you are greater than you know.
I saw yesterday in the Sunday newspaper the lovely face of a girl, who, “rumor has it,” ran the legend, “will be the next Queen of England.” She, too, like my colored neighbor, like us all, is approaching the proportions of a pump. We are all the stuff that pumps and dreams are made of, and great art, and great literature.
I spoke of Joel Moore here in the next house to me. For twenty-six years he was chained to a milk-route, covering Lovell’s Corner, East Weymouth, and our back wood-road; but he always drove it in a trotting sulky.
From behind the bushes I have seen him calming the leg-weary team as it labored up the humps in the road, his feet braced, his arms extended to the slack lines, his eyes fixed on the Judge’s Stand ahead, while he maneuvered against Ed Geers and Ben Hur and all the Weymouths for the pole.
He came home in that lumbering, rattling milk-cart as if it wore winged wheels, and were being drawn by the steeds of Aurora around the half-mile track at the great Brockton Fair.
It was sixteen years ago that Joel drove home with Flora IV, a black mare without a leg to stand on, but with a record of 2.12¾ There was large fixing of the little barn for her, and much rubbing-down of withers.
One day Joel was seen wandering over the knoll here near the house, kicking stones around. Something was the matter. I sauntered out toward my barn casually and called to him. Picking up a piece of rock in the pasture, he staggered with it to the fence, and fixing it into the wall, said with labored breath, “Flora IV has a foal!” And, lifting another stone off the wall, for ballast, he strode up the hill and over, and down to his barn, not knowing the “Magnificat,” it may be, but singing it in his heart all the way down.