Looking over the Milton diggings one July day, Col. McDonough met an amateur-operator who was superintending the removal of a wooden-tank from a position beside his first and only well. A discussion started regarding the combustibility of the thick sediment collected on the bottom of the tank. The amateur maintained the stuff would not burn and McDonough laughingly replied, “Well, just try it and see!” The fellow lighted a match and applied it to the viscid mass before McDonough could interfere, saying with a grin that he proposed to wait patiently for the result. He didn’t have to wait “until Orcus would freeze over and the boys play shinny on the ice.” In the ninetieth fraction of a second the deposit blazed with intense enthusiasm, quickly enveloping the well-rig and the surroundings in flames. Clouds of smoke filled the air, suggesting fancies of Pittsburg or Sheol. Charred fragments of the derrick, engine-house and tank, with an acre of blackened territory over which the burning sediment had spread, demonstrated that the amateur’s idea had been decidedly at fault. The experiment convinced him as searchingly as a Roentgen ray that McDonough had the right side of the argument. “If the ‘b. s.’ had been as green as the blamed fool, it wouldn’t have burned,” was the Colonel’s appropriate comment. Miss Lizzie Raymond, daughter of the pioneer who founded Raymilton and erected the first grist-mill at Utica, has long taught the infant-class of the Presbyterian Sunday-school at Franklin. Once the lesson was about the wise and the foolish virgins, the good teacher explaining the subject in a style adapted to the juvenile mind. A cute little tot, impressed by the sad plight of the virgins who had no oil in their lamps, innocently inquired: “Miss ’Aymond, tan’t oo tell ’em dirls to turn to our house an’ my papa ’ll div’ ’em oil f’um his wells?” Heaven bless the children that come as sunbeams to lighten our pathway, to teach us lessons of unselfishness and prevent the rough world from turning our hearts as hard as the mill-stone.