I've been hunting for a fountain for a couple of years now, not the Trevi, nothing like that. I would like a small fountain to mount on the wall of my balcony. The idea is to muffle the sound of the traffic below with the gentle trickle of circulating water. So far I haven't found anything small enough to work. I was surfing the net the other day, finding nothing but big two thousand dollar fountains for large gardens, when I bethought me of The Boy with the Boot., a little fountain in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg that I researched way back in my other life. So I looked it up and there - lo and whatever - was an article by me about the Boy. Published by Manitoba Pageant, an historical magazine, in 1957, the piece still has my byline on it. I guess that's about the closest to immortality that I'm ever going to get. Quite thrilling, actually. Suddenly I had total recall of my hunt for information, one of my first big research assignments (self-assigned). I remember I was in New York with my husband and I went to an ironworks rumoured to have been the source of the boy - boyS, for there were similar fountains all over North America, each with its own story, I'm sure . I remember sitting in the library of the Winnipeg Free Press reading micro-fiche reels of past issues of the paper, searching for dates relevant to the Boy's history How different research is now when all you have to do is go online for it. (Caution: check your sources.) The lesson is still the same. Be patient. Seek and ye shall find. And one of these days I'm going to find a fountain for my balcony,