feet by a powder-explosion, people might well exclaim: “This beats the Old Scratch!” To provide tankage was the first concern. Teams were dispatched for lumber and carpenters hurried to the scene. Near the well a mudhole, between two stumps, could not be avoided. In this one of the wagons stuck fast and had to be pried out, John A. Mather chanced to come along with his photograph apparatus. The men posed an instant, the horses “looked pleasant,” the wagon didn’t stir and he secured the artistic picture reproduced here thirty-five years after. It is an interesting souvenir of former times—times that deserve the best work of pen and pencil, camera and brush, “to hold them in everlasting remembrance.” [Illustration: STUCK IN A MUDHOLE NEAR THE SHERMAN WELL IN 1862.] The Sherman well “whooped it up” bravely, averaging nine-hundred barrels daily for two years and ceasing to spout in February of 1864. Pumping restored it to seventy-five barrels, which dwindled to six or eight in 1867, when fire consumed the rig and the veteran was abandoned. The product sold at prices ranging from fifty cents to thirteen dollars a barrel, the total aggregating seventeen-hundred-thousand dollars! How was that for a return? It meant one-hundred-thousand dollars for the man who traded “Pete,” one-hundred-thousand for the man who invested eighty dollars and a rusty gun, one-hundred-thousand for the two men who furnished the second-hand engine, and a million—deducting the royalty—for the man who had neither cash nor credit for a load of coal! None of the other fifty or sixty wells on the Foster farm, some of them Sherman’s, was particularly noteworthy. The broad flat, the sluggish stream and the bluffs across the creek remain as in days of yore, but the wells, the shanties, the tanks, the machinery and the workmen have vanished. Sherman, long hale and hearty, struck a spouter in Kentucky, operated two or three years at Bradford and took up his abode at Warren. It was a treat to hear his vivid descriptions of life on Oil Creek in the infancy of developments—life crowded with transformations far surpassing the fantastic changes of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He died at Cleveland last year. Among the teamsters who hauled oil from the Sherman well in its prime was “Con” O’Donnell, a fun-loving, impulsive Irishman. He saved his earnings, secured leases for himself, owned a bevy of wells at Kane City and operated in the Clarion field. Marrying a young lady of Ellicottville, N. Y., his early home, he lived some years at Foxburg and St. Petersburg. He was the rarest of practical jokers and universally esteemed. Softening of the brain afflicted him for years, death at last stilling as warm and kindly a heart as ever throbbed in a manly breast. “Con” often regaled me with his droll witticisms as we rode or drove through the Clarion district. “Peace to his ashes.”