Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1869 — The Well Sweep, a Fable. [ARTICLE]

The Well Sweep, a Fable.

A prototype of those leaders of the Democratic party who cannot comprehend that some things have passed away, is found by the New York Sun in the story “of a deacon who lived in the good old days when everybody on the easterly side of the Hudson drank New England rum. This deacon was accustomed for the space of fifty years to take his eleven o'clock and four o’clock refresher of that orthodox beverage. At these precise hours he was wont to go to the well, and with the old oaken bucket that hung from the antique sweep draw a pail of water to cool and mollify his morning and evening dram. In process of time, full of years and honors, the deacon was gathered to his fathers. But the well-sweep still lived; and such was the force of habit upon it, coupled with its incapacity to forget anything it had once learned, that for long years after the deacon was dead the wcU sweep continued to go up and down so regularly at eleven and four o’clock that, all the fools in the neighborhood set their watches by it. So it is with a few of the leaders of the Democratic party. Forgetting that negro slavery and all its concomitants, and the Calhoun dogma of State Rights and all its consequences, are as dead as the Connecticut deacon, they go up and down the gamut of their praises with the regularity of his well sweep, while many of their deluded followers keep step with the music.”