Acres of Diamonds | Page 6

put a mill upon a stream that ran
through that ranch, and one day his little girl brought some wet sand
from the raceway into their home and sifted it through her fingers
before the fire, and in that falling sand a visitor saw the first shining
scales of real gold that were ever discovered in California. The man
who had owned that ranch wanted gold, and he could have secured it
for the mere taking. Indeed, thirty-eight millions of dollars has been
taken out of a very few acres since then. About eight years ago I
delivered this lecture in a city that stands on that farm, and they told me
that a one-third owner for years and years had been getting one hundred
and twenty dollars in gold every fifteen minutes, sleeping or waking,
without taxation. You and I would enjoy an income like that--if we
didn't have to pay an income tax.
But a better illustration really than that occurred here in our own
Pennsylvania. If there is anything I enjoy above another on the platform,
it is to get one of these German audiences in Pennsylvania before me,
and fire that at them, and I enjoy it to-night. There was a man living in
Pennsylvania, not unlike some Pennsylvanians you have seen, who
owned a farm, and he did with that farm just what I should do with a
farm if I owned one in Pennsylvania--he sold it. But before he sold it he
decided to secure employment collecting coal-oil for his cousin, who
was in the business in Canada, where they first discovered oil on this
continent. They dipped it from the running streams at that early time.
So this Pennsylvania farmer wrote to his cousin asking for employment.
You see, friends, this farmer was not altogether a foolish man. No, he
was not. He did not leave his farm until he had something else to do.
_*Of all the simpletons the stars shine on I don't know of a worse one
than the man who leaves one job before he has gotten another_. That
has especial reference to my profession, and has no reference whatever
to a man seeking a divorce. When he wrote to his cousin for
employment, his cousin replied, ``I cannot engage you because you
know nothing about the oil business.''
Well, then the old farmer said, ``I will know,'' and with most
commendable zeal (characteristic of the students of Temple University)
he set himself at the study of the whole subject. He began away back at

the second day of God's creation when this world was covered thick
and deep with that rich vegetation which since has turned to the
primitive beds of coal. He studied the subject until he found that the
drainings really of those rich beds of coal furnished the coal-oil that
was worth pumping, and then he found how it came up with the living
springs. He studied until he knew what it looked like, smelled like,
tasted like, and how to refine it. Now said he in his letter to his cousin,
``I understand the oil business.'' His cousin answered, ``All right, come
on.''
So he sold his farm, according to the county record, for $833 (even
money, ``no cents''). He had scarcely gone from that place before the
man who purchased the spot went out to arrange for the watering of the
cattle. He found the previous owner had gone out years before and put
a plank across the brook back of the barn, edgewise into the surface of
the water just a few inches. The purpose of that plank at that sharp
angle across the brook was to throw over to the other bank a
dreadful-looking scum through which the cattle would not put their
noses. But with that plank there to throw it all over to one side, the
cattle would drink below, and thus that man who had gone to Canada
had been himself damming back for twenty-three years a flood of
coal-oil which the state geologists of Pennsylvania declared to us ten
years later was even then worth a hundred millions of dollars to our
state, and four years ago our geologist declared the discovery to be
worth to our state a thousand millions of dollars. The man who owned
that territory on which the city of Titusville now stands, and those
Pleasantville valleys, had studied the subject from the second day of
God's creation clear down to the present time. He studied it until he
knew all about it, and yet he is said to have sold the whole of it for
$833, and again I say, ``no sense.''
But I need another illustration. I found it in Massachusetts, and I am
sorry I did because that is the state