Even in putting in a new washer, I should do better with a boy.
The most nervous and conscientious plumber, I tell you, must at intervals appear, to an observer unacquainted with the art and mystery of plumbery, to be proceeding in a leisurely and perhaps idle fashion. The most methodical and conscientious man, plumber or not, will occasionally forget something, and have to go back for it. The most self-respecting and conscientious minor humorist, after he has exhausted his witty invention making a joke on a plumber, will try to sell it for the highest possible price. And if I, for example, am a little proud of my ability, greater than the plumber's, to write an essay, how shall I accuse him of arrogance if he is a little proud of his ability, greater than mine, to accomplish the more necessary feat of thawing a frozen water-pipe?
He has a heart.
When I was a plumber's boy myself, I walked with my boss to his office in the village to get a tool. It was a Sunday afternoon: I remember that a rooster crowed afar off, and how his lonely clarion enhanced and made more gravely quiet the peace of the Sabbath. And the plumber said, 'I wouldn't have felt right, sitting at home by the fire reading the paper, when I knew you was in trouble and I could pull you out.' He had come, mark you, in his Sunday clothes; he had come in his best, not pausing even for his overalls, so that, in our distressed, waterless home, the lady of the house had herself encircled his honest waist with a gingham apron before he began plumbing. And in all the world there was nobody else whom we would have been so glad to see.
And so, bowing, with my left hand over what I take to be the region of a grateful heart, I extend him this praise of plumber. No plumber came over in the Mayflower; but think not, for that reason, that he is a parvenu. He is of ancient lineage—this good fairy in overalls of our invisible brooks. The Romans knew him as the artifex plumbareus. Cæsar may have interrupted the revision of the Commentaries to send for him. He disappeared, with civilization and water-pipes, in the Dark Ages; he came back, with civilization and water-pipes, when the darkness lifted. Neglected by Art, disregarded by Romance, and unconsidered by the drama, these rich and entertaining expressions of life are as nothing when his presence is called for.
| We may live without painters |
| Or writers or mummers, |
| But civilized man cannot |
| Live without plumbers. |
He, too, should have his statue, not of bronze, marble, or granite, but of honest lead, with two figures—the Plumber, holding aloft his torch, and the Plumber's Boy, strange, impassive, and holding in his pendant hands a monkey wrench and the coil of flexible tubing with which his master cunningly directs hot water into the hardened arteries of a suffering house. And on his pedestal I would carve the motto,—
'Did You Ever Know a Plumber Who Had Grown Rich?'
THE HOME OF THE PORCELAIN TUB
'I AM very glad,' wrote Lord Chesterfield to young Mr. Stanhope, July 30, 1749, 'that my letter, with Dr. Shaw's opinion, has lessened your bathing; for, since I was born, I never heard of bathing four hours a day.'