A young divine preached a sermon at Pithole, on the duty of self-consecration, so effectively that a hearer presented him with a bundle of stock in a company operating on the Hyner farm. The preacher sold his shares for ten-thousand dollars and promptly retired from the pulpit to study law! Rev. S. D. Steadman, while a master of sarcasm that would skewer a hypocrite on the point of irony, was particularly at home in the realm of the affections and of the ideal. In matters of the heart and soul few could with surer touch set aflow the founts of tender pathos. He met his match occasionally. Rallying a friend on his Calvinism, he said, “I believe Christians may fall from grace.” “Brother Steadman,” was the quick rejoinder, “you need not argue that; the flock you’re tending is convincing proof that the doctrine is true of your membership.” A good deal of fun has been poked at the Georgia railroad which had cow-catchers at the rear, to keep cattle from walking into the cars, and stopped in the woods while the conductor went a mile for milk to replenish a crying baby’s nursing-bottle. On my last trip to Pithole by rail there were no other passengers. The conductor sat beside me to chat of former days and the decadence of the town at the northern end of the line. Four miles from Oleopolis fields of wild strawberries “wasted their sweetness on the desert air.” In reply to my hint that the berries looked very tempting, the conductor pulled the bell-rope and stopped the train. All hands feasted on the luscious fruit until satisfied. Coleridge, who observed that “Doubtless the Almighty _could_ make a finer fruit than the wild strawberry, but doubtless He never did,” would have enjoyed the scene. “Don’t hurry too much,” the conductor called after me at Pithole “we can start forty minutes behind time and I’ll wait for you!” The rails were taken up and the road abandoned in the fall, but the strawberry-picking is as fresh as though it happened yesterday. Long ago teamsters would start from the mines with twenty bushels of fifteen-cent coal. By the time they reached Pithole it would swell to thirty-five bushels of sixty-cent coal. With oil for back-loading the teamsters made more money then than a bond-juggler with a cinch on the United-States treasury. A farmer’s wife near Dawson Centre, who had washed dishes for forty years, became so tired of the monotony that, the day her husband leased the farm for oil-purposes, she smashed every piece of crockery in the house and went out on the woodpile and laughed a full hour. It was the first vacation of her married life and dish-washing women will know how to sympathize with the poor soul in her drudgery and her emancipation. Pithole, Shamburg, Red-Hot, Tip-Top, Cash-Up, Balltown and Oleopolis have passed into history and many of their people have gone beyond the vale of this checkered pilgrimage, yet memories of these old times come back freighted with thoughts of joyous days that will return no more forever.