went out to arrange for the watering
the cattle and he found that the previous owner had arranged the
matter very nicely. There is a stream running down the hillside there,
and the previous owner had gone out and put a plank across that stream
at an angle, extending across the brook and down edgewise a few inches
under the surface of the water. The purpose of the plank across that
brook was to throw over to the other bank a dreadful-looking scum
through which the cattle would not put their noses to drink above the
plank, although they would drink the water on one side below it. Thus
that man who had gone to Canada had been himself damming back for
twenty-three years a flow of coal oil which the State Geologist of
Pennsylvania declared officially, as early as 1870, was then worth to
our State a hundred millions of dollars. The city of Titusville now
stands on that farm and those Pleasantville wells flow on, and that
farmer who had studied all about the formation of oil since the second
day of God's creation clear down to the present time, sold that farm
for $833, no cents--again I say "no sense."

But I need another illustration, and I found that in Massachusetts,
and I am sorry I did, because that is my old State. This young man I
mention went out of the State to study--went down to Yale College and
studied Mines and Mining. They paid him fifteen dollars a week during
his last year for training students who were behind their classes in
mineralogy, out of hours, of course, while pursuing his own studies.
But when he graduated they raised his pay from fifteen dollars to
forty-five dollars and offered him a professorship. Then he went
straight home to his mother and said, "Mother, I won't work for
forty-five dollars a week. What is forty-five dollars a week for a man
with a brain like mine! Mother, lets go out to California and stake
out gold claims and be immensely rich." "Now" said his mother, "it is
just as well to be happy as it is to be rich."

But as he was the only son he had his way--they always do; and they
sold out in Massachusetts and went to Wisconsin, where he went into
the employ of the Superior Copper Mining Company, and he was lost from
sight in the employ of that company at fifteen dollars a week again.
He was also to have an interest in any mines that he should discover
for that company. But I do not believe that he has ever discovered a
mine--I do not know anything about it, but I do not believe he has