The insatiable city was drowning land everywhere with dammed-up water, but the undammed people were flowing outward like water. In 1869 there was a drought and the four great reservoirs were all empty. No water came in at all save from the Croton River. A new reservoir was established at High Bridge to take care of the colony increasing in Washington Heights. A reservoir was made at Boyd’s Corner to hold nearly three hundred million gallons. The next year the city laid its great hands upon a part of Westchester County, and not content to reach out for water annexed the land as well. Recalling when it had seemed a ridiculous boast that New York would one day reach the Harlem River, RoBards already saw its boundary pushed north to Yonkers and eastward along the banks of his Bronx. He felt as if the city were some huge beast clumsily advancing toward his home. Its thirst was its excuse, and when the next shortage of water forced the town to make a house-to-house inspection of plumbing to cut down the waste, the engineers went out to hunt new ponds, while its ambassadors marched on Albany and forced the state to cede it three more lakes in the Croton watershed. The property owners on their shores filled up the outlets and fought the octopus in vain; and RoBards once more distinguished himself for his brilliant rear-guard actions, ending always with defeat in the courts. At Middle Branch on the Croton, a reservoir of four thousand million gallons failed to satisfy the town, and in 1880 began the two driest years ever heard of. All the reservoirs were drained and even the Croton wearied. The thirty million gallons a day it poured into the city’s dusty gullet fell to ten million. The public fountains were sealed, the hydrants turned off, the Mayor urged the citizens to thrift, thrift, thrift. Isaac Newton, the Chief Engineer, proposed a second aqueduct to drain the Croton region, a great dam below the old, a tunnel, the longest in the world, to the city and a great inverted siphon under the Harlem’s oozy bed. And this was decreed; and in time accomplished under Engineer Fteley. But the promise of these two hundred and fifty million gallons a day was not enough; and now the city turned its eyes to the Bronx River, and RoBards felt that his doom was announced. The sacred stream had kept its liberty in the face of greedy projects since it was first named in 1798 as a victim of the all-swallowing town. In place of the sixty thousand population then, there were twelve hundred thousand people now, and buildings were lifted so high that people were living six stories in air. They expected the city to pump water to their faucets. It did, while the supply held.