And was it not simple? One bored a hole deep down into the ground and out came wealth--oil and gas, followed by the coming of the factories. If we, in our town, did not quite “cut it,” did not “make the grade,” could not become later another fragrant Akron or blissful Youngstown, Ohio, it wasn’t because we didn’t try. A hole was being bored at the edge of the town in a field near a grove of hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrel shooting on the fall days. In the field--a meadow--there had also been a baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tents there; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually required depth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. The well-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or two before a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through the streets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was going on. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillers were in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some of that crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. One couldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to be caught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting the well.” Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysterious whisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot and counterplot; dark doings among the capitalists--“stand back, villain, unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams”--ah! an explosion at the mysterious hour of dawn, far down in the bowels of Mother Earth. Old Mother Earth to be given an emetic of a stirring sort. Forth would flow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself. One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these new glories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was more excited than father who had never owned a share of stock in anything. He ceased speaking of the crafts and only shook his head in sorrow. “I’d just like to be alive two hundred years from now,” he said. “Why, I’ll tell you what; there’ll be a vast city right here--right on the very spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be a huge office building, like as not.” So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became in his fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himself magnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when, because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters had treated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night came and it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we then lived and presently came down with a package of papers in his hand. Were they old love letters, from the ladies he had known in his youth, or unpaid grocery bills? It is a mystery that may never be solved.