Where Theres a Will | Page 2

Patty
Jennings gave me that winter. The blotters were a great success. Below
the picture it said, "Yours for health," and in the body of the blotter, in
red lettering, "Your system absorbs the health-giving drugs in Hope
Springs water as this blotter soaks up ink."
The "Yours for health" was my idea.
I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen
years. My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism,
and as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend
thousands of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured
rheumatism, and then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time
he bent over to fill a glass with it.
Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house
over to me.
"It's a difficult situation, my girl," he said. "Lots of people think it's
simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over the
railing. Why, I tell you a barkeeper's a high-priced man mostly, and his
job's a snap to this. I'd like to know how a barkeeper would make out if
his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember
whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or 'chill off'. And another
thing: if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have to
ask him what he's doing for it, and listen while he tells how much
weight he lost in a blanket sweat? No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and
lets it go at that."

Father passed away the following winter. He'd been a little bit delirious,
and his last words were: "Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of salt, sir?" Poor
father! The spring had been his career, you may say, and I like to think
that perhaps even now he is sitting by some everlasting spring
measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of the old tin dipper. I
said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt quite sure that I was right,
and that where father was the water would be appreciated. He had
heard of father.
Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy. Then I found things
were coming my way. I've got the kind of mind that never forgets a
name or face and can combine them properly, which isn't common.
And when folks came back I could call them at once. It would do your
heart good to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from
the free bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house
where everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a
rap whether he's the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the
navy. If he's been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my
tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about the
rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are. And in ten
minutes he's sitting in a bridge game and trotting to the spring to have
his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he'd grown up in the
place. The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the
sanatorium.
He depended on me a good bit--the old doctor did--and that winter he
was pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of
making it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young.
Finally he got to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of
senility in the end.)
He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it
had been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in
the summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings
aloud while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.
"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake is

up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was you
who persuaded me not to, Minnie."
And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss Patty
Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the
spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian
emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty
was for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we
read that the prince's mother was in favor of the match and it might go
through. Miss Patty and her