The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”

Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.

There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill; there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there; but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the grandfather himself,—as they took the fact that the ground was under their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.

In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood—well, it had rested there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.

Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark, still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from the crack in the floor that had let it in.

That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious in the sleeping house,—a sound as of a small stream of water falling from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.

Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could never have forgotten the cost and value of water.

If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,” you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.”

Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far West known as the “arid belt.”