The people congratulated themselves upon this achievement of their city single-handed in a time of national financial prostration. In the memoir written by the chief engineer, J. B. Jervis, he proudly compared the new aqueduct with the great works of Rome, built under contracts with private speculators, paid for with the plunder of ruined peoples, and “cemented with the blood of slavery.” The Croton work was a triumph of a city of 280,000 inhabitants, who wrought a task, said Jervis, “on a scale greatly beyond their actual or any near future wants, but which, designed to endure for ages, would bear record to those ages, however distant, of a race of men who were content to incur present burdens for the benefit of a posterity they could not know. Magnificent as may be the works of conquerors and kings, they have not equaled in forecast of design, and beneficence of result, the noble aqueduct, constructed at their own cost, by the freemen of the single city of New York.” Much eloquence, much of the bold and braggart Yankee eloquence so distasteful to foreigners and to foreign-hearted Americans, was squandered on that feat of theirs; but before they talked, they had toiled; they sweat before they boasted; they fought the epic before they chanted it; and their words were not so big as the stones they heaved into place. Their phrases were less ponderous than the majestic forty-six-mile sentence in stone they wrote across the green valley of the Westchester hills, through rock and air, over hills and ravines, through villages and streams, across the Harlem River and down into the heart of Manhattan Island. But the massive High Bridge was yet to build and the Croton had yet to reach the lower fountains and the homes of the citizens. They had waited long for it, and it meant miraculous relief to have the river from far away magically bubbling in the very houses at the wizard twist of a faucet handle, and sending up geysers of beauty in the hot parks. Many of the New Yorkers who marveled told how they had in their day paid a penny a gallon for water from the carts that peddled the product of the “Tea Water Pump.” Even David and Patty RoBards could remember when they fled the town and thought it doomed to die of drouth and pestilence. The city felt that this immortal benison must be commemorated fittingly. When the New River had entered London the Lord Mayor had addressed it in his full splendor. When the waters of Lake Erie had come through the canal to New York they had been married to those of the ocean with grandiose ceremonial.