MANUSCRIPT: HCL (B 183). Pencil.

PUBLICATION: FF 261-262.

"Maria Pearl" ws a nickname for Maria Whitney, who had her own cottage at Lake Placid. The reference to the siphon and the dam has to do with some accident in the town waterworks, of which Ned's father was president. The allusion to Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), celebrated physicist and mathematician, was probably clear to Ned, who may have mentioned to his aunt that he had become acquainted with the "Torricellian vacuum," or barometer, in a college science course.