This pioneer, inventor, and true Captain of Industry, real creator of wealth, has ever since had his neck bent to the pressure of hands too heavy for him. While all over the earth homes are brighter, knowledge is more easily got, and civilization forwarded, because of what his head has thought and his hands have done, he has retired to what is, in fact, a life of penal exile. He has been cut off from the darlings of his brain. Like the political prisoners of Siberia, he can eat and sleep and dress, but he cannot go into the world. His mind is at work there, in every factory and pipe line and lamp; but he must sit, unknown and unrewarded, in his pine cottage on unpaved Maurice Street, ploughed up in the prairies on the outskirts of Buffalo. Dearer than money to him, as to all such creative minds, would be the privilege of feeding the appealing activities of his brain with work. But he is banished from work. He has been set down outside the frontier of industry, and commanded never to return. No one dares buy or sell of him, nor adventure labor or money with him. He is an outcast. This is his greatest grief. The day I visited him he came into the sitting-room from the patch of garden behind the house. "I keep busy," he said, "to keep my mind off--anything to keep busy, if it is only pulling weeds." He is glad to see visitors. "I have been knocked out," he said, "so that nobody now comes to see me." His clear gray-blue eyes, tall, strong frame, firm mouth, large features and limbs, eager face, fit the facts of his career. He is one of the type of country-bred, hard-working American manhood of the last generation. There are no visionary lines in his face, as in his life there have been no impracticabilities, except his too great trustfulness. Gambling oil exchanges, wild oil-land speculations, inside "deals" with railroad freight agents, have never caught him. He has been a money-maker--not a money-taker. To-day, at eighty, the only thing he asks is that he may have the chance to work out his ideas. He talks patiently and courteously, with perfect intelligence and memory, but every once in a while breaks in with an outburst of what is evidently an unceasing refrain within--"I want to make oil." The diminutive room we are in is stark in its simplicity and poverty. A paragraph in the morning paper on the table tells of "a massive oaken case, similar to a bookcase," which one of the chief reapers where Van Syckel has sowed is having put into his stable in New York. "It has doors of polished oak, with brass hinges, and heavy plate-glass. The inside will be lined with purple plush, and, when completed, the bits which shine in the mouths of his trotters and coach-horses will be arranged inside of this magnificent case in rows, ready for use, as well as an appropriate ornament for the stable."