There was something about this brace of monsters very fascinating to Miselle. They seemed like subjected genii closed in these dull black cases and this narrow shed, and yet embracing miles of territory in their invisible arms. Even the genius of Aladdin's lamp was not so powerful, for he was obliged to betake himself to the scene of the wonders he was to enact,--and if imprisoned as closely as these, could not have transferred enough oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer to fill his own lamp. Afterward, in rambling through the woods, Miselle often came upon the mound raised above the buried pipe, and always regarded it with the same admiring awe with which the fisherman of Bagdad probably looked at the copper vessel wherein Solomon had so cunningly "canned" the rebellious Afrit. Leaving the shed of the monsters, Miselle followed her guide out of the throng of derricks and tanks, and a short distance up the hill, to the picturesque site of Messrs. Barrows and Hazleton's Refinery, the only one now in operation on Tarr Farm. Entering a low brick building called the still-house, she found herself in a passage between two brick walls, pierced on either hand for five or six oven-doors, while overhead the black roof was divided into panels by a system of iron pipes through which the crude oil was conducted to the caldrons above the iron doors. The presiding genius of the place was a very fat, dirty, but intelligent Irishman, known as Tommy, who came forward with the politeness of his nation to greet the visitors, and explain to them the mysteries under his charge. "And give a guess, Ma'am, if ye plase, at what we've got a-burning undher our big pot here," suggested he, with a hand upon one of the oven-doors. "Soft coal," ventured Miselle, remembering her experience at the glassworks. "Not a bit of it. It's the binzole intirely. We makes the ile cook itself, an' not a hape of fu'l does it git, but what it brings along itself." "Seething the kid in its mother's milk," remarked Miselle to herself. "It's this pipe fetches the binzole from the tank outside, and the mouth of it's widin the door; and this is the stop-cock as lets it on." So saying, Tommy threw open the oven-door, and pointed to the black end of a pipe just within. At the same time he turned a handle on the outside, and let on a stream of benzine or naphtha, which blazed fiercely up with a lurid flame strongly suggestive of the pictured reward of evil-doers in another life. Next, Tommy proceeded to explain, after his own fashion, how the oil in the caldrons above, urged by these fires, departed in steam and agony through long pipes called worms, the only outlet from the otherwise air-tight stills, which worms, wriggling out at the end of the building, plunged into a bath of cold water provided for them in a huge square tank fed by a bright mountain-stream winding down from the bluff above in a fashion so picturesque as to be quite out of keeping with its ultimate destination.