[to be continued.]
LIFE-BLOOD OF A GREAT CITY.
HOW NEW YORK GETS ITS WATER.
BY JULIAN RALPH.
AQUEDUCT TUNNEL UNDER THE HARLEM.
The furnishing of water to millions of human beings in a city, and the arrangements for giving it to them as they want it, whether merely by the glassful or in the profusion with which it is used in a brewery, are among the most wonderful achievements of civilization. Imagine the way men live when they break their way into a new country; that is the only manner in which we can measure the convenience of a modern water supply. I have seen the settlers on the Canadian plains walking a quarter of a mile—perhaps half a mile—to the Bow River to fill a bucket with water with which to cook and with which to supply drink to a household. Bathing, as we understand the term, was only to be done by going to the same river and plunging in—daring the few months when the river water was warm. Thus it must have been with the first Hollanders who settled Manhattan Island. In time they dug wells in the ground, and then came that more lavish use of the splendid fluid, attended by such economy as used to lead the Dutch mothers to scold the children with that admonition we still may hear in the country, "Do you think the servant-girl has nothing to do but to carry water up stairs for you to waste it as you do?"
Did the reader ever see a medical or anatomical chart of the human body, showing the arteries and veins that carry the blood from our hearts to every main and every minute part of our bodies? How like a tree it looks, with its main stem or trunk, with its great branches, with its delicate boughs and switches and twigs. Well, a Croton-water chart of the system by which a river is brought to our bedrooms, instead of our having to go to the river with our buckets, would be just such another complicated, marvellous, treelike object, only I really think it would be more astonishing in one sense, because it is so wholly the hard brain-work of man instead of the mysterious divine creation of the Almighty, whose works are so profound that their wonders do not surprise us so much as when man produces something a tenth part or a thousandth part as extraordinary.
