ce Agreements and Deeds.

"Next time you buy a ranch, Mr. Hannington, take my advice and hire a
lawyer to see the deal through for you."

"No more bally rawnches for me, Phil. And it is possibly just as well
I lost this one, because I have learned that one has to grub and mess
among caterpillars and all those dirty little insects and worms they
call bugs, which keep getting on the fruit trees, eating up the bally
stuff you are trying to grow. I simply cawn't stand the slimy, squashy
little reptiles, you know!"

"I am afraid you are destined to meet them in other places besides
ranches," remarked Phil.

"I have found them on my dinner table before now!"

"How disgusting!" exclaimed the horrified Englishman.

"What are you going to tackle next? Don't you think you had better get
a job for a while, working for wages, until you get acclimatised; and
so conserve your money until you have had the necessary experience?"

"Not so long as my old dad is willing to foot the bills! The least he
can do is to keep me going here. It is cheaper for him than letting me
gad about between London, Paris and the Riviera. Besides, my mother
would die of shame if she fawncied her boy Percy was working for
wages like a common labouring bounder."

This was a species of maternal niceness Phil had never run up against,
consequently he did not feel sympathetic toward it.

"They tell me oil-wells are a jolly good thing to get into. That
fellow Rockefeller made a lot out of them, didn't he? You don't know
of any likely places around here, Phil?"

"No! I don't think this is much of an oil country, Mr. Hannington.
What we hear about oil here is more or less bunk. Better leave it
alone!"

"You know,--I did meet a fellow on the train coming across. He had a
jolly good thing. He was a water-diviner;--could tell you where the
water was for a well just by walking over the land with a twig in his
hand and doing a kind of prayer. Seemed to listen for the water, the
same way as a robin does on the lawn when after worms."

Phil laughed. "Yes!--I have met a few of that water-divining species,
and some of them were pretty good at it, too. They seemed to strike it
right fairly often."

"Aw, yes, Phil!" continued DeRue Hannington, wiping his mouth with his
napkin and leaning back in his chair, "but this fellow did have a good
scheme. He said, you know, if a man could divine water, there was
nothing to prevent him from divining oil too. So he was go