Judge Trunkey, who presided over the Venango court a dozen years and was then elected to the Supreme Bench, was hearing a case of desertion. An Oil-City lawyer, proud of his glossy black beard, represented the forsaken wife, a comely young woman from Petroleum Centre, who dandled a bright baby of twenty months on her knee. Mother and baby formed a pretty picture and the lawyer took full advantage of it in his closing appeal to the jury. At a brilliant climax he turned to his client and said: “Let me have the child!” He was raising it to his arms, to hold before the men in the box and describe the heinous meanness of the wretch who could leave such beauty and innocence to starve. The baby spoiled the fun by springing up, clutching the attorney’s beard and screaming: “Oh, papa!” The audience fairly shrieked. Judge Trunkey laughed until the tears flowed and it was five minutes before order could be restored. That ended the oratory and the jury salted the defendant handsomely. Hon. James S. Connelly, an Associate Judge, who now resides in Philadelphia and enjoys his well-earned fortune, was also on the bench at the moment. Judge Trunkey, one of the purest, noblest men and greatest jurists that ever shed lustre upon Pennsylvania, passed to his reward six years ago. In your wide peregrinations from the poles to the equator, Should you hear some ignoramus—let out of his incubator— Say the heavy-oil of Franklin is not earth’s best lubricator, Do as did renown’d Tom Corwin, the great Buckeye legislator, When a jabberwock in Congress sought to brand him as a traitor, Just “deny the allegation and defy the allegator!” [Illustration: MILLER & SIBLEY’S PROSPECT-HILL STOCK FARM FRANKLIN, PA.] KEEPING STEP. The Shasta was Karns City’s first well. Missouri has two wells producing oil. North Dakota has traces of natural-gas. Ninety wells in Japan pump four-hundred barrels. Elk City, in the Clarion field, once had two-thousand population. The Rob Roy well, at Karns City, has produced a quarter-million barrels of oil. Alaska-oil is cousin of asphalt-pitch, very heavy, and thick as New-Orleans molasses in midwinter. Wade Hampton, postmaster of Pittsburg, and cousin of Governor Wade Hampton, organized one of the first petroleum companies in the United States. General Herman Haupt, of Philadelphia, now eighty-one years old, surveyed the route and constructed the first pipe-line across Pennsylvania. Robert Nevin, founder of the Pittsburg _Times_, drilled a dry-hole four-hundred feet, ten miles west of Greensburg, in 1858, a year before Drake’s successful experiment in Oil Creek. The Powell Oil-Company, superintended by Col. A. C. Ferris, still a resident of New York, paid fifty-thousand dollars in cash for the Shirk farm, half way between Franklin and Oil City, drilled a dry-hole and abandoned the property.