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, let’s 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.  I know he had scarcely gone from the old homestead before the farmer who had bought the homestead went out to dig potatoes, and as he was bringing them in in a large basket through the front gateway, the ends of the stone wall came so near together at the gate that the basket hugged very tight.  So he set the basket on the ground and pulled, first on one side and then on the other side.  Our farms in Massachusetts are mostly stone walls, and the farmers have to be economical with their gateways in order to have some place to put the stones.  That basket hugged so tight there that as he was hauling it through he noticed in the upper stone next the gate a block of native silver, eight inches square; and this professor of mines and mining and mineralogy, who would not work for forty-five dollars a week, when he sold that homestead