No latter-day work on petroleum, no book, pamphlet, sketch or magazine article of any pretensions has failed to reproduce part of a letter purporting to have been sent in 1750 to General Montcalm, the French commander who perished at Quebec nine years later, by the commander of Fort Du Quesne, now Pittsburg. A sherry-cobbler minus the sherry would have been pronounced less insipid than any oil-publication omitting the favorite extract. It has been quoted as throwing light upon the religious character of the Indians and offered as evidence of their affinity with the fire-worshippers of the orient! Official reports printed and endorsed it, ministers embodied it in missionary sermons and it posed as infallible history. This is the paragraph: “I would desire to assure you that this is a most delightful land. Some of the most astonishing natural wonders have been discovered by our people. While descending the Allegheny, fifteen leagues below the mouth of the Conewango and three above the Venango, we were invited by the chief of the Senecas to attend a religious ceremony of his tribe. We landed and drew up our canoes on a point where a small stream entered the river. The tribe appeared unusually solemn. We marched up the stream about half-a-league, where the company, a band, it appeared, had arrived some days before us. Gigantic hills begirt us on every side. The scene was really sublime. The great chief then recited the conquests and heroism of their ancestors. The surface of the stream was covered with a thick scum, which, upon applying a torch at a given signal, burst into a complete conflagration. At the sight of the flames the Indians gave forth the triumphant shout that made the hills and valleys re-echo again. Here, then, is revived the ancient fire-worship of the East; here, then, are the Children of the Sun.” The style of this popular composition, in its adaptation to the occasion and circumstances, rivals Chatterton’s unsurpassed imitations of the antique. Montcalm was a gallant soldier who lost his life fighting the English under General Wolfe, the hero whose noble eulogy of the poet Gray—“I would rather be the author of the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ than the captor of Quebec”—should alone crown him with unfading laurels. The commander of Fort Du Quesne also “lived and moved and had a being.” The Allegheny River meanders as of yore, the Conewango empties into it at Warren, the “Venango” is the French Creek which joins the Allegheny at Franklin. The “small stream” up which they marched “about half-a-league” was Oil Creek and the destination was the oil-spring of Joncaire and “Nat” Cary. The “gigantic hills” have not departed, although the “thick scum” is stored in iron tanks. But neither of the French commanders ever wrote or read or heard of the much-quoted correspondence, for the excellent reason that it had not been evolved during their sojourn on this mundane sphere!