Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle Jap mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well. He discovered oil sand, not a lake. Then he mortgaged his land, every stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells. It was a case of Bernard Palissy. Was Bernard a married man? I forget. If so, did he consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed? Did she protest? It is a fact that Uncle Jap's Lily did not protest. She looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of silence across her wrinkled impassive countenance. When every available cent had been raised and sunk, the oil spouted out. Who looked at the fountain in the patch of lawn by the old fig trees? Possibly Mrs. Panel. Not Uncle Jap. He, the most temperate of men, became furiously drunk on petroleum. He exuded it from every pore. Of course he was acclaimed by the county and the State (the Sunday editions published his portrait) as the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there. At this point we must present, with apologies, the agent of the Autocrat, _the_ agent, the High-muck-a-muck of the Pacific Slope, with a salary of a hundred thousand a year and _perks_! In his youth Nat Levi smelt of fried fish, unless the smell was overpowered by onions, and he changed his lodgings more often than he changed his linen. Now you meet him as Nathaniel Leveson, Esquire, who travelled in his private car, who assumed the God, when the God was elsewhere, who owned a palace on Nob Hill, and some of the worst, and therefore the most paying, rookeries in Chinatown, who never refused to give a cheque for charitable purposes when it was demanded in a becomingly public manner, who, like the Autocrat, had endowed Christian Churches, and had successfully eliminated out of his life everything which smacked of the Ghetto, except his nose. Nathaniel Leveson visited our county, opened an office, and began to lay his pulpy white hands upon everything which directly or indirectly might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle Jap to dine with him at the Paloma Hotel, in San Lorenzo. The old man, with the hayseed in his hair, and the stains of bitumen upon his gnarled hands, ate and drank of the best, seeing a glorified vision of his Lily crowned with diamonds at last. The vision faded somewhat when Nathaniel began to talk dollars and cents. Even to Uncle Jap, unversed in such high matters as finance, it seemed plain that Leveson & Company were to have the dollars, and that to him, the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there were to be apportioned the cents. "Lemme see," he said, with the slow, puzzled intonation of the man who does not understand; "I own this yere oil----" "Subject to the mortgage, Mr. Panel, I believe?" "That don't amount to shucks," said Uncle Jap. "Quite so. Forgive me for interrupting you."