seed-bag swelled, a stop-cock was placed on the tubing and thenceforth it was easy to regulate the flow. When oil was wanted the stop-cock was opened and wooden troughs conveyed the stuff to boats drawn up the creek by horses, the chief mode of transportation for years. The oil was forty-four gravity and four-thousand barrels a day gushed out! In June of 1862, when Phillips and Major Frew, with their wives and a party of friends, inspected the well, a careful gauge showed it was doing thirty-six-hundred-and-sixty barrels! The Phillips well held the champion-belt twenty-seven years. It produced until 1871, getting down to ten or twelve barrels and ceasing altogether the night James Tarr expired, having yielded nearly _one-million_ barrels! Cargoes of the oil were sold to boatmen at five cents a barrel, thousands of barrels were wasted, tens of thousands were stored in underground tanks and much was sold at three to thirteen dollars. [Illustration: WOODFORD WELL. TARR FARM IN 1862. PHILLIPS WELL.] N. S. Woodford, Noble & Delamater’s contractor, had the foresight to lease the ground between the Crescent and the Phillips No. 2. His three-thousand barreler, finished in December, 1861, drew its grist from the Phillips crevice and interfered with the mammoth gusher. When the two became pumpers neither would give out oil unless both were worked. If one was stopped the other pumped water. Ultimately the Phillips crowd paid Woodford a half-million for his well and lease, a wad for which a man would ford even the atrocious Tarr-farm mud and complacently whistle “Ta-ra-ra.” He retired to his pleasant home, with six-hundred-thousand dollars to show for eighteen months’ operations on Oil Creek, and never bothered any more about oil. The Woodford well repaid its enormous cost. Lockhart and Frew bought out their partners at a high price and put the Phillips-Woodford interests into a stock-company capitalized at two-million dollars. The Phillips well—one result of a keen-eyed boatman’s observing an oily scum on the Allegheny River—enriched all concerned. Had Phillips failed to see the speck of grease that September day, who can tell how different oil-region history might have been? Happily for a good many persons, the Orphan Boy was not one of the “Ships that Pass in the Night.” What a field Oil Creek presents for the fervid fancy of a Dumas, a Dickens, a Wilkie Collins or a Charles Reade!