d fat cigars. Uncle
Jap refused both. He was not going to be "flimflammed," no, sir! Not
twice in his life, _no, Siree Bob_! He, by the Jumping Frog of
Calaveras, proposed to paddle his own canoe into and over the lake of
oil. If the boys wished him to forgo the delights of that voyage, let
'em pungle up half a million--or get.

They got.

Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle
Jap mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well.
He discovered oil sand, not a lake. Then he mortgaged his land, every
stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells. It was a case of
Bernard Palissy. Was Bernard a married man? I forget. If so, did he
consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed? Did she
protest? It is a fact that Uncle Jap's Lily did not protest. She
looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of
silence across her wrinkled impassive countenance.

When every available cent had been raised and sunk, the oil spouted
out. Who looked at the fountain in the patch of lawn by the old fig
trees? Possibly Mrs. Panel. Not Uncle Jap. He, the most temperate of
men, became furiously drunk on petroleum. He exuded it from every
pore. Of course he was acclaimed by the county and the State (the
Sunday editions published his portrait) as the star-spangled epitome
of Yankee grit and get-there.

At this point we must present, with apologies, the agent of the
Autocrat, _the_ agent, the High-muck-a-muck of the Pacific Slope,
with a salary of a hundred thousand a year and _perks_! In his
youth Nat Levi smelt of fried fish, unless the smell was overpowered
by onions, and he changed his lodgings more often than he changed his
linen. Now you meet him as Nathaniel Leveson, Esquire, who travelled
in his private car, who assumed the God, when the God was elsewhere,
who owned a palace on Nob Hill, and some of the worst, and therefore
the most paying, rookeries in Chinatown, who never refused to give a
cheque for charitable purposes when it was demanded in a becomingly
public manner, who, like the Autocrat, had endowed Christian Churches,
and had successfully eliminated out of his life everything which
smacked of the Ghetto, except his nose.

Nathaniel Leveson visited our county, opened an office, and began to
lay his pulpy white hands upon everything which directly or indirectly
might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle Jap to dine
with him at the Paloma H