“In after years I often saw crowds of people waiting their turns to fill their pails with the good water from Sweet, Harding and Crescent Springs. These scenes would give a new and vivid meaning to a picture on one of the cards I received at Sunday School: ‘Women waiting at the well.’ I would use my childish imagination and wonder if an angel was hidden in some dim corner by the bath house to ‘trouble the water’ so that the people who came to bathe could receive miraculous healing.
“Property values in those days were based considerably on the proximity to some good spring. Consequently the homes of the well-to-do people were not located on the hill-tops but on the lower levels where water was plentiful and easy to obtain. We poor folks lived higher up on the hill where rent was cheaper. Generally, we didn’t have to pay any rent at all, but, of course, we had to carry our water a long ways and up the steep hillside.
“I recall that my brother, who had an inventive turn of mind, built a rolling water keg so that he could ‘horse’ the water up the mountain side and not have to carry it. My sister and I would frequently help him pull the keg up the steep places on the trail. But living that way on the very tip-top of Eureka’s sun-kissed hills had its compensations. We, the poorest of the poor, did actually ‘look down’ on the poor rich people on the lower levels.
“Another advantage of living high up on the hill was the wonderful view. My brother some how got hold of an old Civil War telescope about three feet long and we would look through it and count the chickens in the yards on East Mountain. I would sometimes lie for hours on my stomach in our little yard and travel far away among the pines and cedars growing on the distant ridges. One time I saw a boy and girl sitting together on a distant hillside with their arms around each other and when they kissed I almost passed out for I was only seven or eight years old at the time. I saw other things through that old telescope that I should not have witnessed at my age, but let’s skip that. Many happy hours did I spend with the old ‘seeing eye’ and I am quite sure that my passionate love for Nature stems from the beautiful things I saw through it from Crescent Hill.