They would, if possible, forsake Thames water, calling it dirty, saying it is hard. So hard they say it is, that it requires three spoonfuls of tea instead of two in every man’s pot, two pounds of soap for one in every man’s kitchen. So they would fetch soft water from a Gathering Ground in Surrey, adopting an example set in Lancashire; from rain-fall on the heaths between Bagshot and Farnham, and from tributaries of the River Wey, they would collect water in covered reservoirs, and bring it by A COVERED AQUEDUCT to London. In London, they would totally abolish cisterns, and all intermittence of supply. Water in London they would have to be, as at Nottingham, accessible in all rooms at all times. They would have water, at high pressure, climbing about every house in every court and alley. They would place water, so to speak, at the finger’s end, limiting no household as to quantity. They would enable every man to bathe. They would revolutionize the sewer-system, and have the town washed daily, like a good Mahometan, clean to the finger-nails. They hint that all this might not even be expensive; that the cost of disease and degradation is so much greater than the cost of health and self-respect, as to pay back, possibly, our outlay, and then yield a profit to the nation. They say that, even if it were a money loss, it would be moral gain; and they ask whether we have not spent millions, ere now, upon less harmless commodities than water? An ingenious fellow had a fiddle—all, he said, made out of his own head; and wood enough was left to make another. He must have been a sanitary man; his fiddle was a crotchet. Still farther to illustrate their own capacity of fiddle-making, these good but misguided people have been rooting up some horrible statistics of the filth and wretchedness which our back-windows overlook, with strange facts anent fever, pestilence, and the communication of disease. All this I purposely suppress; it is peculiarly disagreeable. Delicate health we like, and will learn gladly how to obtain it; but results we are content with, and can spare the details, when those details bring us into contact, even upon paper, with the squalid classes. If these outcries of the Water Party move the public to a thirst for change, it would be prudent for us ægritudinary men not rashly to swim against the current. Let us adopt a middle course, a patronizing tone. It is in our favor that a large number of the facts which these our foes have to produce, are, by a great deal too startling to get easy credit. A single Pooh! has in it more semblance of reason than a page of facts, when revelations of neglected hygiene are on the carpet. If the case of the Sanitary Reformers had been only half as well made out, it would be twice as well supported. VIII. Filling The Grave.