l it to you.

I told him of a man out in California in 1847 who owned a ranch. He
heard they had discovered gold in southern California, and so with a
passion for gold he sold his ranch to Colonel Sutter, and away he went,
never to come back. Colonel Sutter put a mill upon a stream that ran
through that ranch, and one day his little girl brought some wet sand
from the raceway into their home and sifted it through her fingers
before the fire, and in that falling sand a visitor saw the first
shining scales of real gold that were ever discovered in California. The
man who had owned that ranch wanted gold, and he could have secured it
for the mere taking. Indeed, thirty-eight millions of dollars has
been taken out of a very few acres since then. About eight years ago I
delivered this lecture in a city that stands on that farm, and they
told me that a one-third owner for years and years had been getting one
hundred and twenty dollars in gold every fifteen minutes, sleeping or
waking, without taxation. You and I would enjoy an income like that--if
we didn't have to pay an income tax.

But a better illustration really than that occurred here in our
own Pennsylvania. If there is anything I enjoy above another on the
platform, it is to get one of these German audiences in Pennsylvania
before me, and fire that at them, and I enjoy it to-night. There was
a man living in Pennsylvania, not unlike some Pennsylvanians you have
seen, who owned a farm, and he did with that farm just what I should do
with a farm if I owned one in Pennsylvania--he sold it. But before he
sold it he decided to secure employment collecting coal-oil for his
cousin, who was in the business in Canada, where they first discovered
oil on this continent. They dipped it from the running streams at that
early time. So this Pennsylvania farmer wrote to his cousin asking for
employment. You see, friends, this farmer was not altogether a foolish
man. No, he was not. He did not leave his farm until he had something
else to do. _*Of all the simpletons the stars shine on I don't know of a
worse one than the man who leaves one job before he has gotten another_.
That has especial reference to my profession, and has no reference
whatever to a man seeking a divorce. When he wrote to his cousin for
employment, his cousin replied, "I cannot engage you because you know
nothing about the oil business."

Well, then the old farmer said, "I will know," and with most commendable
z