The Reed well put Cherry Run at the head of the procession. Within sixty days it enriched Reed, Criswell and Frazer nearly seven-hundred-thousand dollars. The new owners drilled three more on the same acre, getting back every cent of their purchase-money and fifty per cent. extra for good measure. In other words, the five-acre collection of rocks and stumps, with eleven producing wells and one duster, harvested two-million dollars! The Mountain well mounted high, the Phillips & Egbert was a fillip and the Wadsworth & Wynkoop rolled out oil in wads worth a wine-coop of gold-eagles. The fever to lease or buy a spot to plant a derrick burned fiercely. The race to gorge the ravine with rigs and drilling appliances would shut out Edgar Saltus in his “Pace that Kills.” Soon three-hundred wells lined the flats and lofty banks guarding the purling streamlet. Clanking tools, wheezy engines and creaking pumps assailed the ears. Smoke from a myriad soft-coal fires attacked the eyes. An endless cavalcade of wagons churned the soil into vicious batter. The activities of the Foster, McElhenny, Farrell, Davison and Tarr farms were condensed into one surging, foaming caldron, quickening the pulse-beats and sending the brain see-sawing. Across the run the Curtin Oil-Company farmed out forty acres. The Baker well, an October biscuit, flowed one-hundred barrels a day all the winter of 1864-5 and pumped six years. Water, bane of flannel-suits and uncased oil-wells, deluged it and its neighbors. Hugh Cropsey, a New-York lawyer and last owner of the well nearest the Baker, “ran engine,” saved a trifle, pulled up stakes in 1869 and tried his luck at Pleasantville. Returning to Cherry Run, he resuscitated a well on the hill and was suffocated by gas in a tank containing a few inches of fresh crude. His heirs sold me the old well, which pumped nine months without varying ten gallons in any week and repaid twice its cost. Unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, its production was the steadiest in the chronicles of grease. One Saturday evening N. P. Stone, superintendent of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, bought it from me at the original price. His men took charge of it at noon on Tuesday. At five o’clock the well quit forever, “too dead to skin!” Cleaning out, drilling deeper, casing, torpedoing and weeks of pumping could not persuade it to shed another drop of oil or water. This close shave was a small by-play in a realistic drama teeming with incidents far stranger than “The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown.” B. H. Hulseman, president of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, was a wealthy leather-merchant in Philadelphia. He spent much of his time on Cherry Run, lost heavily in speculations, entered the oil-exchange and died at Oil City. Kind-hearted, sincere and unpretending, his good remembrance is a legacy to cherish lovingly.