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"Theodore has customers who spend two thousand a year with her." "Very laudable extravagance, if they are wives of millionaires, and have their silver-mines, or cotton-mills, or oil-wells to maintain them. But that the widow of a Hampshire squire, a lady who six years hence will have to exist upon a pittance, should run up such a bill as this is to my mind an act of folly that is almost criminal.
That is, if you had never heard of the mysterious submarine oil-wells, the volcanic fountains, unexplored, that well up with the eternal pulsing of the Gulf-Stream ... But the pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a "great blow" somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled; and a splendid surf made the evening bath delightful.
We elders linger long by the last camp-fire, to talk in fond reminiscence of the six weeks afloat; while the Boy no doubt dreams peacefully of houseboats and fishermen, of gigantic bridges and flashing steel-plants, of coal-mines and oil-wells, of pioneers and Indians, and all that of six weeks of kaleidoscopic sensations, at an age when the mind is keenly active, and the heart open to impressions which can never be dimmed so long as his little life shall last.
"All yielding tribute to me, even as the mines and mills and factories I cannot see yield tribute! Even as the oil-wells, the pipe-lines, the railroads and the subways yield even as the whole world yields it. All this labor, all this busy strife, I have a hand in. The millions eat and drink and buy and sell; and I take toll of it yet it is not enough.
After spouting to a height of fully two hundred feet, for nearly ten minutes, the volume of oil, or, rather, of the gas that was forcing it to the surface, appeared to be exhausted, and lower and lower sank the torrent, spreading out in a fan-shape as it lessened, until finally it ceased entirely. "What is the matter?" asked Ralph, who fancied that oil-wells flowed incessantly.
Carnegie himself has always had his eggs in a dozen or so baskets, but he never has had any more baskets than he could watch. His baskets were usually coupled together like the "grasshopper," which pumps several oil-wells with one engine. Wealth is good for those who can use it; power the same; but when you cease to manage a thing and the thing begins to manage you, it may eat you up.
The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns.
The next forenoon I entered a region of salt wells, with a number of flourishing little towns scattered here and there upon the borders of the stream. One of these, called Hartford City, had a well eleven hundred and seventy feet in depth. From another well in the vicinity both oil and salt-water were raised by means of a steam-pump. These oil-wells were half a mile back of the river.
He did not like to hear competition called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
He bought them for a few thousand dollars, and soon after discovered on his purchase the most productive oil-wells in all America. He was just about to be another Peabody when a fearful accident suddenly ended his life; he was burnt in an enormous fire that destroyed one of his establishments.
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