and traversing three miles of a lonely section, covered with scrub-oak and small pine, Triumph is reached. It is not the Triumph oil-men knew twentyfive years ago, when it had four-thousand population, four good hotels, two drug-stores, four hardware-stores, a half-dozen groceries and many other places of business. No other oil-field ever held so many derricks upon the same area. The Clapp farm has a production of twelve barrels per day. Traces of the town are almost completely blotted out. The pilgrim traveling over the hill would never suspect that a rousing oil-town occupied the farm on which an industrious Swede has a crop of oats. Along Babylon hill, once dotted with derricks thickly as trees in the forest, nothing remains to indicate the spot where stood the ephemeral town.

Five townships six miles square-Independence, Willing, Alma, Bolivar and Genesee, with Andover, Wellsville, Scio, Wirt and Clarksville northform the southern border of Allegany county, New York. The first well bored for oil in the county-the Honeyoe-was the Wellsville & Alma Oil-Company's duster in Independence township, drilled eighteen-hundred feet in September, 1877. Gas at five-hundred feet caught fire and burned the rig and signs of oil were found at one-thousand feet. The second was O. P. Taylor's Pikeville well, Alma township, finished in November, 1878. Taylor, the father of the Allegany field, decided to try north of Alma and in July of 1879 completed the Triangle No. 1, in Scio township, the first in Allegany to produce oil. It originated the Wellsville excitement and first diverted public attention from Bradford. Triangle No. 2, drilled early in 1880, pumped twelve barrels a day. S. S. Longabaugh, of Duke Centre, sank a dry-hole, the second well in Scio, three miles north-east of Triangle No. 1. Operations followed rapidly. Richburg No. 1, Wirt township, in which Taylor enlisted three associates, responded at a sixty-barrel gait in May of 1881 to a huge charge of glycerine. Samuel Boyle, who had struck the first big well at Sawyer City, completed the second well at Richburg in June, manipulated it as a "mystery" and torpedoed it on July thirteenth. It flowed three-hundred barrels of blue-black oil, forty-two gravity, from fifty feet of porous sand and slate. Taylor's exertions and perseverance showed indomitable will, bravery and pluck. He was a Virginian by birth, a Confederate soldier and a cigar-manufacturer at Wellsville. It is related that while drilling his first Triangle well the tools needed repairs and he had not money to send them to Bradford. His Wellsville acquaintances seemed amazingly "short" when he attempted a loan. His wife had sold her watch to procure food and she gave him the cash. The tools were fixed, the well was completed and it started Taylor on the road to the fortune he and his helpmeet richly earned. The pioneer died in the fall of 1883. The record of his adventures, trials and tribulations in opening a new oil-district would fill a volume. He was prepared for the message: "Child of Earth, thy labors and sorrows are done." The bee-line to the north was squarely on the belt."

O. P. TAYLOR.

Kerosene is often the last scene.

The ladies-God bless them!—are nothing if not consistent at times. It used to be a fad with Bradford wives to keep a stuffed owl in the parlor for ornament and a stuffed club in the hall for the night-owl's benefit.

The Oil Creek girls are the dandy girls,
For their kiss is most intense;
They've got a grip like a rotary-pump
That will lift you over the fence.

The steel of a rimmer was lost in a drilling well on Cherry Run. After fishing for it for a long time the well-owner, becoming discouraged, offered a man one-thousand dollars to take it out. He broomed the end of a tough block, ran it down the well attached to the tools and in ten minutes had the steel out.

The woman who eagerly seized the oil-can
And to pour kerosene in the cook-stove began,
So that people for miles to quench the fire ran,
While she soar'd aloft like a flash in the pan,
Didn't know it was loaded.

At a drilling well near Rouseville the tools were lowered on Monday morning and, after running a full screw, were drawn minus the bit, with the stembox greatly enlarged. After fishing several days for it the drillers were greatly surprised to find the lost bit standing in the slack-tub. The tools had been lowered in the darkness with no bit on.

An Oil-City tramp on the pavement drear
Saw something that seem'd to shine;
He pick'd it up and gave a big cheer-
'Twas a nickel bright, the price of a beer-
And shouted "The world is mine!"

Breathe through the nostrils" is good advice. People should breathe through the nose and not use it so much for talking and singing through. Yet every rule has exceptions. A pair of mules hauled oil at Petroleum Centre in the flush times of the excitement. The mud was practically bottomless. A visitor was overheard telling a friend that the bodies of the mules sank out of sight and that they were breathing through their ears, which alone projected above the ooze. Petroleum Centre and many more departed oil-towns suggest

the old jingle:

"There was an old woman lived under a hill,

If she hadn't moved she'd be there still;
But she moved!"

About St. Valentine's Day in 1866, when the burning of the Tremont House led to the discovery of oil in springs and wells, was a hilarious time at Pithole. Every cellar was fairly flooded with grease. People pumped it from common pumps, dipped it from streams, tasted it in tea, inhaled it from coffee-pots and were afraid to carry lights at night lest the very air should cause explosion and other unhappiness. It became a serious question what to drink. The whiskey could not be watered-there was no water. Dirty shirts could not be washed— the very rain was crude oil. Dirt fastened upon the damask cheeks of Pithole damsels and found an abiding-place in the whiskers of every bronzed fortunehunter. Water commanded an enormous price and intoxicating beverages were cheap, since they could scarcely be taken in the raw. The editor of the Record, a strict temperance man, was obliged to travel fourteen miles every morning by stone-boat to get his glass of water. Stocks of oil-companies were the only thing in the community thoroughly watered. Tramps, hobos, wandering vagrants and unwashed disbelievers that "cleanliness is next to Godliness" pronounced Pithole a terrestrial paradise. They were willing to reverse Muhlenburg's sentiment and “live alway” in that kind of dry territory.

X.

ON THE SOUTHERN TRAIL.

DOWN THE ALLEGHENY-RENO, SCRUBGRASS, BULLION-CLARION DISTRICT-ST. PETERSBURG, ANTWERP, EDENBURG-PARKER TO GREECE CITY-BUTLER'S RICH PASTURES-THE CROSS-BELT-PETROLIA, KARNS, MILLERSTOWN-THORN-CREEK GEYSERS-MCDONALD MAMMOTHS-INVASION OF WASHINGTON-WEST VIRGINIA PLAYS THE DEUCE-GENERAL GLEANINGS.

"I'm comin' from de Souf, Susanna doant yo cry."-Negro Melody.

"Let us battle for elbow-room."-James Parish Steele.

"We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."-Shakespeare.
"Peter Oleum came down like a wolf on the fold."-Byron Parodied.

"Liberal as noontide speeds the ambient ray

And fills each crevice in the world with day."-Lytton. "How soon our new-born-light attains to full-aged noon."-Francis Quarles. "What lavish wealth men give for trifles light and small."-W. S. Hawkins. "Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope henceforward among groundlings?" -Robert Browning.

OUTH and west of Oil Creek for many miles the petroleum-star shed its effulgent luster. Down the Allegheny adventurous operators groped their way patiently, until Clarion, Armstrong, Butler, Washington and West Virginia unlocked their splendid storehouses at the bidding of the drill. Aladdin's wondrous lamp, Stalacta's wand or Ali Babi's magic sesame was not so grand a talisman as the tools which from the bowels of the earth brought forth illimitable spoil. No need of fables to varnish the tales of struggles and triumphs, of disappointments and successes, of weary toil and rich reward that have marked the oildevelopment from the Drake well to the latest strike in Tyler county. Men who go miles in advance of developments to seek new oil-fields run big chances of failure. They understand the risk and appreciate the cold fact that heavy loss may be entailed. But "the game is worth the powder" in their estimation and impossibility is not the sort of ability they swear by. "Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win" is a maxim oil-operators have weighed carefully. The man

who has faith to attempt something is a man of power, whether he hails from Hong Kong or Boston, Johannesburg or Oil City. The man who will not improve his opportunity, whether seeking salvation or petroleum, is a sure loser. His stamina is as fragile as a fifty-cent shirt and will wear out quicker than religion that is used for a cloak only. Muttering long prayers without working to answer them is not the way to angle for souls, or fish, or oil-wells. It demands nerve and vim and enterprise to stick thousands of dollars in a hole ten, twenty, fifty or "a hundred miles from anywhere," in hope of opening a fresh vein of petroleum. Luckily men possessing these qualities have not been lacking since the first well on Oil Creek sent forth the feeble squirt that has grown to a mighty river. Hence prolific territory, far from being scarce, has sometimes been too plentiful for the financial health of the average producer, who found it hard to cipher out a profit selling dollar-crude at forty cents. As old fields exhausted new ones were explored in every direction, those south of the original strike presenting a very respectable figure in the oil-panorama. If "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," eternal hustling is the price of oil

operations. Maria Seidenkovitch, a
fervid Russian anarchist, who would
rather hit the Czar with a bomb than
hit a thousand-barrel well, has written:
"There is no standing still! Even as I pause

The steep path shifts and I slip back apace;
Movement was safety; by the journey's laws
No help is given, no safe abiding-place;
No idling in the pathway, hard and slow-

I must go forward or must backward go!" Down the Allegheny three miles, on a gentle slope facing bold hills across the river, is the remnant of Reno, once a busy, attractive town. It was named from Gen. Jesse L. Reno, who rose to higher rank than any other of the heroes Venango "contributed to the death-roll of patriotism." He spent his boyhood at Franklin, was graduated from West Point in the class with George B. McClellan and "Stonewall" Jackson, served in the Mexican war, was promoted to Major-General and fell at the battle of South Mountain in 1862. The Reno Oil-Company, organized in 1865 as the Reno Oil and Land Company, owns the village-site and twelvehundred acres of adjacent farms. The company and the town owed their creation to the master-mind of Hon. C. V. Culver, to whose rare faculty for developing grand enterprises the oil-regions offered an inviting field. Visiting Venango county early in the sixties, a canvass of the district convinced him that the oil-industry, then an infant beginning to creep, must attain giant proportions. To meet the need of increased facilities for business, he conceived the idea of a system of banks at convenient points and opened the first at Franklin in 1861. Others were established at Oil City, Titusville and suitable trade-centres until the combination embraced twenty banks and bankinghouses, headed by the great office of Culver, Penn & Co. in New York. All enjoyed large patronage and were converted into corporate banks. The speculative mania, unequaled in the history of the world, that swept over the oilregions in 1864-5, deluged the banks with applications for temporary loans to