Page:Rural Hours.djvu/110

Rh Thursday, 30th.—The springs are all full to overflowing, this season. Some trickling down the hill-sides, through the shady woods, many more sparkling in the open sunshine of the meadows. Happily for us, they flow freely here. We forget to value justly a blessing with which we are so richly endowed, until we hear of other soils, and that within the limits of our own country, too, where the thristy traveller and his weary beast count it a piece of good fortune to find a pure wholesome draught at the close of their day's toil.

This is decidedly a spring county. Mineral waters of powerful medicinal qualities are scattered about within a circuit of twenty miles from the lake. There are several within the limits of the village itself, but these have little strength. Others farther off have long been used for their medicinal properties—vile messes to taste—and sending up an intolerable stench of sulphur, but beautifully clear and cool. There is a salt spring also at no great distance from the lake, said to be the most easterly of the saline springs in this part of the country, and at a distance of some eighty miles from the great salt works of Onondaga.

A portion of our waters are hard, touched with the limestone, through which they find their way to the surface; but there are many more possessing every good quality that the most particular housewife can desire for cooking her viands, or bleaching her linen. Near the farm-house doors you frequently see them falling from a wooden pipe into a trough, hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, the rudest of fountains; and the same arrangement is made here and there, along the highway, for the benefit of the traveller and his cattle.

One likes to come upon a spring in a walk. This afternoon we