"I WANT TO MAKE OIL"
At this writing there is an old man named Samuel Van Syckel, over
eighty years of age, partly paralyzed, but still vigorous, living in
an obscure back street of Buffalo, very poor, though his fertile brain
has helped to make millionaires of many others. Van Syckel's life has
been one of ups and downs, possible only in the case of an adventurous
mind seeking the golden-fleece in a new industry and in a new country.
Of all the brave and ingenious men who have experimented, invented,
and pioneered to realize for mankind all the surpassing possibilities
of the coming oil age, he is one of the most notable. He had already
made and lost one or two fortunes when we find him, about 1860, with a
little still in Jersey City, making roof-tar.
He was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, the son of a farmer, and
worked on the farm until he was of age, when he went into business.
The panic of 1857 caught him with sails wing-a-wing, conducting all
at once, and prosperously, grist-mills, linseed-oil mills, grain
distilleries--these he had to take for a debt--several stores,
cooper-shops, and two or three farms.
He failed because he had gone security for others, but he paid 100
cents on the dollar, and went to New York City. There he became a
member of the Corn Exchange, and opened a commission-house for the sale
of produce. His country friends had such confidence in his honesty and
judgment that within six months he had done a business of $400,000.
But he discovered that of the 1500 members of the Exchange all but
one had failed, and many of them several times. He saw that he was
in a position where, through the inability of some other dealer to
fulfil his contract, he might be swamped any day, and lose all he had
himself and all the thousands intrusted to him by his friends. He had
old-fashioned notions about losing friends' money, to himself or to any
one else. He left the produce business. He went to making roof-tar in
Jersey City, and in 1860 built one of the first refineries for making
kerosene out of petroleum. When "Colonel" Drake, in 1859, found out
that oil could be got by drilling, Van Syckel was one of those the new
source of supply found waiting for it. He began refining in a small
way, and, with an ardor which he has carried into everything he has
done, he plunged into the study of new ways of refining the oil which
then started to flow with embarrassing riches out of thousands of
wells. The study of oil-refining became his passion, as, fortunately
for us less gifted folk, the study of the effects of heat on clay,
of sulphur on the gum of the caoutchouc-tree, of steam on the lid of
the teakettle, were in their time passions with Palissy, Goodyear,
and Watts. In the work of his life, forcing its secrets out of this
difficult liquid, he has been very successful. Earthly reward the
old inventor has none, but, sitting in his story-and-a-half cottage,
what he mourns most is that he has been and is denied the opportunity
of work. Tortured by restless and inventive energy, which age and
disappointment and betrayal have not sufficed to snuff out, his
continuous word is: "I want to make oil."
When petroleum from the new wells began to come to New York, dozens
of little stills were built all over the Jersey flats, many of them
by Jews and Greeks. "Stills kept burning up all around," he says to
his visitor. "Almost every day there was an explosion somewhere from
the gases. I told my wife to give me my oldest clothes and send me
my meals. I was going to find out all about this business. There was
a pile of roofing-gravel under a shed by my stills. I went there and
slept and ate, day and night, and watched the stills and the pipes,
the gases, the oils, and all. All the sleep and rest I had for months
was there. It was while watching these work that my greatest idea
came to me, of making oil by a continuous process, so that I could
feed in petroleum at one end and have kerosene running out at the
other in an unceasing stream, day after day, without stopping the
whole establishment, as the oil-refineries still do, every day or two,
to cool off and clean up. By the old process, still in use, when the
charge in the still of perhaps 1000 barrels had been refined, we had to
draw the fires and wait perhaps ten hours--the best part of a day--for
the still to cool off, so that the men could go in with iron chisels to
chop it all loose and clean it out. This would take four or five men
from four to six hours. The still would be idle for a day and a half,
and then the same process would have to be gone through with again with
every charge. All over the flats the Jews and Greeks kept burning up.
The Common Council of Jersey City said we must stop refining. The rest
joined a great combination to fight the Common Council, but I made up
my mind to go where the oil was produced. I went to Titusville in 1865.
I had all the money I could want. Some rich men told me to draw on them
up to $100,000 for anything there was 'snacks in' for them."
This was about the time the founders of the oil combination began in
Cleveland, with "no money."
"What makes I found in Titusville!" continued Van Syckel. "I went all
up and down the creek. They were glad to get 65 gallons of kerosene
out of 100 gallons of petroleum, while I could get 80. I think the
head of the oil combination had a little still cocked up in the woods
there--a one-horse, pig-pen kind of a place at the bend of the creek,
a cobbled-up sort of a mud-hole, with a water-trough to bring the
oil to the still. He was not there himself; he stayed in Cleveland.
I didn't ever think anything about him then. I was 'way above him. I
first saw him some years after, about 1872, in a refiner's office. He
was talking up some scheme he had for a combination of refineries.
He said he didn't want to have the market overstocked. He was just a
common-looking kind of a man among the rest of us there. I saw, when I
reached Titusville, that the most money was to be made in shipping oil.
I made a dollar a barrel, and in six months I was $100,000 in pocket.
The land speculation I wouldn't touch. It was wild. It scared me to see
men sitting around on logs, and trading off little pieces of land for
hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was the first man to lay a pipe
line to carry oil up and down the hills of Pennsylvania."
"The first successful pipe line," says the United States Census
Report of 1885, "was put down by Samuel Van Syckel, of Titusville, in
1865, and extended from Pithole to Miller's Farm, a distance of four
miles."[342]
"When I first came to the oil country all the oil had to be teamed from
the wells to the railways, over roads with no bottom in wet weather.
Sometimes a line of teams a mile long would be stuck in the mud. Often
the teamsters would dump their load, worth $5 a barrel, and abandon
it. Mules would get so discouraged that they would lie down and die
in the roadway before they could be helped. The teamsters knew their
power. They charged accordingly. They charged for looking at the oil
to see how many barrels their teams could draw. They charged extra for
every mud-hole they struck, and if the wagon-wheels went to the hubs
they doubled their bills. I paid $2 to $4 a barrel for teaming, and
was shipping 4000 barrels a week. The teamsters were making more money
than the well-owners, and didn't care whether they hauled oil or not.
All this set me to thinking. I hit on the pipe line idea, and announced
that I would carry the oil by pipe from the wells to the railroad. That
was too much for the people of the oil regions. Everybody laughed me
down. Even my particular friends, with whom I used to take my meals
at the hotel, jeered and gibed me so that I took to coming and going
through the back door and through the kitchen, and ate by myself. 'Do
you expect to put a girdle around the earth?' was the favorite sarcasm.
I knew it would cost a great deal--$100,000 perhaps; but I had the
money. I built it--two two-inch lines, side by side--between June and
November in 1865, and turned the oil in. The pipe was a perfect success
from the first barrel of oil that was pumped in. It flowed, just as I
expected, up hill and down dale. The line was four miles long--from the
Miller Farm to Pithole--with two or three branches.
"Then the teamsters threatened to kill any one who worked on the pipe
line or who used it. They would drive astraddle of it, dig down to it,
put logging chains around it and pull it out of the ground, and leave
the oil, worth $4 to $5 a barrel, running to waste out of the holes. I
sent to New York for some carbines, hired 25 men to patrol the line,
and put a stop to that. I put up the line as security for some debts
owed by my partner, under an agreement that when its profits had paid
the debt it was to be returned to me. The debt was wiped out in a few
months, but I never got the line back.... I had no money left to sue
for it. This was the end of my pipe line. It has grown into a system
thousands of miles long, second in importance only to the railroad,
and out of it many, many millions of profit have been made, but not
a cent has it yielded me. Then I went to refining oil, and, with a
partner, built one of the first big refineries in the oil regions.
There has been no oil refined in this country since 1870 without the
help of my improvements. Some I patented, some I did not. The refiners
at Titusville were hard put to it for pure water. I drove pipes through
the river into the second gravel under the river, and got the finest
cold water there could be. This anticipated the 'driven wells' several
years. I put steam into the stills" (this had been done before both
by European and American refiners). "I found out how to burn the
uncondensable gases. I showed one of my neighbors how to do this, and
he saved $20 a day after that in his coal bills, but I got nothing for
it. Each new thing I proposed, up would go everybody's hands and eyes,
and oh, what a rumbling there would be! I never made money so fast as
in this refinery. We did not use the continuous process. I had not
patented it, and I had partners whom it would not have been right for
me to experiment with. Our profits were over a dollar on every barrel.
We sold our product as fast as we could make it. We made $125,000 in
fifteen months, although we paid as high as $8 a barrel for crude. I
worked like a slave to make good the loss of $100,000 in my pipe line.
I worked and watched day and night, and knew I was beating them all
making oil. My partners were church elders, who could never find words
enough to express their indignation about the way my pipe line had been
taken away from me, and so virtuous that they never smoked a cigar nor
drank a drop. I got into no end of lawsuits with them, and I lost my
property again. I sold a part interest in my patent to some one who was
afterwards taken into this oil combination, and it now claims that they
own all my patents. They have frightened off or bought off every one
who has tried to use any of my inventions."
The rest of the old man's story was told by him under oath in a suit
he brought against members of the combination.[343] "The idea of
continuous distillation, as it was suggested to me at Jersey City, was
always in my brain ever since. I made an attempt to construct such
works in 1876 under Mr. Cary. I run out of money. I had been robbed out
of my pipe line that cost me $100,000, and my oil-refinery in which I
had more than $100,000. Mr. Cary said he was going to build a little
refinery. He said he had $10,000 that we might use in making oil in a
continuous way. We got our lease and broke ground in 1876. We had not
got very far--we got the pipe on the ground and some brick and one
old-fashioned still--when" the representative of the oil combination,
one of its principal members, "came on to the ground ... the 15th
of December, 1876. He asked me if I would not take a salary and not
build these works in opposition to them. I told him 'No.' Then he
wanted I should take a life salary, one that would support me for life
comfortably. I told him I did not want his salary; I wanted to build
this refinery and make oil in a new continuous way. He then wanted me
to let him build it. He said, 'We will build it for you.' I objected
to this. He then said that I could make no money if I did refine oil.
He also said if I did I could not ship it. He said he would say to me
confidentially that they had made such arrangements with the railroads
in reference to freight--in reference to getting cars--he knew I could
make no money if I did make oil."
Almost on the same day--May 14, 1888--on which Van Syckel was giving
the jury this undisputed account, sustained by the judge and jury, of
how the combination used "arrangements with the railroads" against
its rivals, another pioneer, even more distinguished, was relating
his almost identical experience before the committee of Congress
investigating trusts, May 3, 1888. This was Joshua Merrill, "to whom,"
said S. Dana Hayes, State Chemist of Massachusetts, "more than to any
one else, belongs the honor of bringing this manufacture to its present
advanced state."[344] Merrill's inventions and successful labors are
described in the United States Census Report on Petroleum, 1885. He was
at work guessing the riddles of petroleum as long ago as 1854.[345]
From 1866 to 1888 he and his partners ran a refinery at Boston.
"What has become of it?"
"We have recently dismantled it."[346]
For several years their business had been unprofitable. There were two
causes, he explained. One was that they made a better quality of oil
than the average, at a cost which they could not recoup from the prices
established in the market by poorer oils. The other cause was the
extraordinary charges made against his firm by the railways in Boston
which brought their crude.
His firm had their own tank-cars, in which their crude oil came from
Pennsylvania. From Olean to Boston his freight cost him the last few
years 50 cents a barrel. From the depot in Boston, to get it over two
miles of track to his refinery, cost him $10 a car, or about $1.25 a
barrel. This was at the rate of about 42-1/2 cents a ton a mile. The
average freight rate for the United States is about half a cent a ton
a mile. His rate was an advance of 8400 per cent. on the average. He
appealed to the Railroad Commission of Massachusetts.
"We wrote to the commissioners that we thought the charge was very
high, and they ought to interfere to have it reduced. But it was not
done.
"We made repeated efforts, personal solicitations, to the railroad
officers, and to the railroad commissioners also, but it was the
established rate."[347]
Two roads participated in this charge of $10 for hauling a car two
miles. One of these was the New York and New England road, whose haul
was a mile and a half, and its charge $6.
"Who was president of the New York and New England road?"
The dismantled witness's experience had made him timid.
"I do not know."
"Do you not know," he was asked, "that one of the oil trustees is
president?"
"Yes, sir."[348]
The same railroad is the principal New England link in the lines of
circumvallation which the combination in coal, hard and soft, American
and Nova Scotian, is drawing about the homes and industries of the
country. His company sold their tank-cars to the oil combination, as
"we no longer had any use for them."[349]
"I was thirty-two years in the oil business," the veteran said,
mournfully, as he left the stand. "It was the business of my life."[350]
To return to Van Syckel. After his warning to the inventor that he
could get no cars and make no money, even if his new idea proved a
success, the representative of the combination invited Van Syckel to
put himself in its hands.
"He said they would furnish the money to test the invention and pay me
all it was worth. I felt a little startled at the rebates, and I knew
it before, but I did not know it was so bad as he had figured it out.
I then asked him who of his company would agree to furnish me money to
test the patent and to pay all it was worth. He asked me who I wanted
to agree with. I then asked him if a man" (naming him) "that I had had
more or less dealings with" (one of the trustees) "would agree to what
he had said. He said he had no doubt he would. He said, 'We will go and
see him, and go at his expense.' He said he would take the works off my
hands at cost, and would satisfy my partner to stop building them if I
would go to New York, and I think it was the next day when we went to
New York."
They went to the office of the member of the combination whom Van
Syckel had said he would confide in. "He seemed to be very glad to
see me, and very sorry to learn I had been so unfortunate in the oil
regions. He then asked me what these patent works would cost in a small
way to prove that oil could be successfully made under continuous
distillation. I told him it could be done for about $10,000. He said
they would give it, ... and if it proved a success they would give me
$100,000. He said it was worth more. He would give me $125 a month to
support my family during the time I was building and testing it. I
said, 'Let us put what we have agreed upon in writing.' He begged off
for a time. He said it could be done at Titusville just as well. He saw
I was not quite satisfied being cut off in that way, so he took my hand
and said he would give me his word and honor what they had agreed upon
there should be put in writing at Titusville Monday morning. I did not
want to press him any harder. I told him I would take the $125 a month
until the thing was tested. If it proved a failure the whole thing
should come back where it started from, and if it proved a success he
was to pay me $100,000" (for the patents and the business). "He said
we all understood it, then. I went home." Van Syckel called upon the
Titusville member of the trust. "He begged off from me the same as the
other did in New York; said they were pressed with business. He said
they would fix it this afternoon, or words to that effect." Instead
of building for him, as it had agreed, the combination, the moment he
placed himself in its hands, destroyed the building he had already
begun.
"What did they do with the works when they bought them?"
"They took the brick that was on the cars and hauled them to other
places, I suppose, and I don't know where they threw the still. They
kept that leased property during the five years for a junk-yard. I went
the next day to see him, and pressed him about it the best I could.
I could not accomplish anything; he appeared to be busy, or kept out
of the way. I kept chasing to his office. I tried to catch him and
talk over what I should depend on, where we were going to build; but
he kept out of the way. He said he had not seen their folks. In July,
1879, more than three years after our contract in New York, he said
they had had a meeting of all their wise-heads, and they had called in
chemists, and they all unanimously agreed that oil could not be made
by a continuous process, and gave that as a reason for not furnishing
the money to build these works. I said, in reply, 'I am not responsible
for the knowledge that the "oil combination" has for refining oil;
neither would I exchange mine for all they have got combined. You said
you would furnish me the money and build these works, and do as you had
agreed to do.' I walked out. That was about the last I had to say to
him on that subject."
"Did you after that build, or undertake to build, an oil refinery to
test your continuous process?"
"Yes, sir; in connection with a German. He was going to build a small
refinery. He said he would build it my way, if I would let him use
it in the new way. He constructed it on that principle; but he was
slow--he was a very slow man to deal with. We ran ... twenty days
without stopping" (to clean out the stills).
"And it actually ran that length of time?"
"Yes, sir."
"What became of these works?"
"Hauled off to the junk-yard"--by one of the companies in the
combination. It "bought them out after we just got them under way, and
then tore them down and hauled them off."
"You then brought them up to Buffalo, and tried to put them into the
Solar Works?"
"Yes, sir."
"What became of those?"
"They eventually went the same way."
In court the combination claimed that Van Syckel's was an inferior
process, but it had not left it to die the natural death of the
inferior process.
"And how about the expense of the two ways?" he was asked.
"The same help that would make 1000 barrels the old way, to take three
or four days, I would make in the new process in one day; the old way
takes about a ton of coal more and gets less oil, and the oil is not
near so good."
No contradiction was offered by the defendants of any of these
statements. Uncontradicted evidence showed that the new process was
cheaper and produced better oil than the old processes. Stillmen from
the Herman and Solar refineries, in which Van Syckel tried his new
process after the combination refused to build for him, testified to
the practical success of his method. "We must have run these continuous
works for two months while I was there" (at the Solar).[351]
"We kept Van Syckel's process running right along continuously for
sixteen days" (at the Herman refinery).[352]
"We did not have to clean out the patent stills, while by the old
process they would have to be cleaned out about every day or thirty-six
hours."[353]
A number of residents of Titusville, dealers in oil and consumers,
testified to the superiority of the illuminant Van Syckel produced.
It burned much better than that made by the monopoly, several said.
"The burning qualities was extraordinarily good." "It gave better
satisfaction to my customers." "It did not gum the lamp-wicks, and did
not smell."[354]
This was done in spite of rusty and choked-up pipes, defective stills
and apparatus.
One of the owners of the Solar, who was a practical refiner and
the overseer of the works, testified that he had seen Van Syckel's
continuous process run successfully both in Titusville and Buffalo:
"The result was much beyond my expectation."
"How long did you run the works?"
"I think about two weeks."
"What was the cause of it stopping?"
"The president of the company, also the treasurer, had been to New
York two or three times; after the second or third visit he came back
seemingly disgusted with the business; afraid of losing his money if he
continued any longer, and quit."
"Was there a mortgage upon your property?"
"Yes, sir." It had been foreclosed, he said, in conclusion, by one of
the leading members of the oil combination.[355]
The only thing Van Syckel can do to carry out his part of the contract
he does. He develops his invention. He is successful in his application
to the United States patent-office. He made his contract with the
combination in 1876, and got four patents thereafter in 1877, 1878, and
1879.
"Well," it was said in court, "they are a large concern; they would
make money out of this; I should think they would want it if it is
such a good thing." "Why, my dear man, they have got a monopoly of the
business, anyway," Van Syckel replied. "They don't care what kind of
oil they sell; but they have got a plant that has cost them millions
of dollars that they have got to change, and all that sort of thing, if
they take my patent. That is the situation."
He lived on the $125 a month while he was testing and proving the
invention. In July, 1880, when four years of his life had been thus
wasted, the allowance was changed, without notice or his consent, to
$75 a month. The next month he was refused even that sum "unless I
signed a receipt in full of all demands, and I walked out without it."
His pipe line has become a part of the net-work of pipe lines of which
the oil combination boasts. His refinery of 1869, one of the largest
built in western Pennsylvania up to that time, passed into its hands.
Three times in succession, after it refuses to build for him as it
agreed, he arranges to put his idea of continuous distillation into
use, and in each case the refinery in which he sets up his pipes and
stills is bought up by it and destroyed. He is kept dangling for years
by its policy of delay. Then his independent efforts are broken up;
capitalists are made afraid of him. He can get no means for building
new works. "Ever since I went into their hands," he said in court, "I
have been just as I am now. I could not make oil; could not build a
refinery; could not get anybody help me to do it; and here I have stood
these last twelve years, and I want to be out. That is just where they
want to keep me, so I cannot make any oil. It is the whole profit of
the whole of it. They hold me to my contract, and they break theirs."
When twelve years had gone by, and he found that they would neither
build for him as agreed nor let any one else build for him, Van Syckel
turned to the law and sued them for damages. On the trial all the facts
as we have stated were admitted--the abandonment of the enterprise in
consequence of the threats that he would not be allowed to ship and
market his oil; the interviews in New York; the contract; the sale; Van
Syckel's later efforts to make oil in other refineries; his success
in producing better and cheaper oil; its popularity; the purchase and
destruction of the works using the new method. Not a word of evidence
was adduced in disproof. The judge and the jury found all these
questions in Van Syckel's favor.
The defence was twofold. It was admitted that the two representatives
Van Syckel had dealt with had made the contract as he described it. The
members of the combination did not deny that. But, they argued, it was
not legally binding. "We simply concede," said these great men to the
Court, "that they made a contract, but leaving it to the corporation
itself to decide upon it.... There cannot be the slightest claim that
the company was bound by a contract of that character." On this point
they were defeated in the trial. Their second defence was that there
were no damages. "The trouble is," they said, "that there are no
damages sustained, no damages whatever sustained." They took the ground
that his possessing a creative mind was the cause of Van Syckel's ruin,
not their betrayal of him. "Mr. Van Syckel," they argued to the Court,
sympathetically, "is an instance of what it means to get out a patent,
and deal in patents--in nine cases out of ten. He was an inventive man.
He has got out a good many patents. No question they were meritorious
patents. And what is the result? Poverty, a broken heart, an enfeebled
intellect, and a struggle now for the means of subsistence by this
lawsuit. So that, if your honor please, there is nothing here from
which we can determine what the original value of this patent was." The
jury and the judge decided against them, and held there was a contract,
legal and binding. That brought them face to face with the question of
damages, and here the ruling of the judge saved them, as the decision
of another judge saved other members of the combination in the criminal
case in the same city, about the same time.[356] The judge ordered the
jury to find the damages at six cents, and the jury--in the evolution
of freedom juries appear to have become merely clerks of the Court--did
so. "This direction of a verdict," said the Court to Van Syckel,
"decides every other question of the case in your favor."
Six cents damages for breach of such a contract, and in Buffalo $250
fine for conspiracy to blow up a rival refinery! Here are figures with
which to begin a judicial price-list of the cost of immunity for crimes
and wrongs.
Lawyer Moot, Van Syckel's counsel, deferentially asked the Court to
suggest where was the defect in the proof of damages. It would be "the
wildest speculation and guesswork," the Court said, for the jury to
attempt to compute the damages.
"Then the Court is unable to suggest any particular defect in the
proof?"
The Court evaded the point of the counsel, and repeated in general
terms that there was no testimony upon which a jury could assess
damages.
Those whom he was suing did not disprove that, by threats of making it
impossible for him to get transportation, they had driven Van Syckel
to abandon his own business, and make a contract with them by which
they were to pay him $100,000 for his new process, if successful. The
Court held the contract binding. They had not furnished the money and
works to test the inventions as they had agreed to do; but he had
nevertheless gone on and completed the invention, so that patents
were granted for it by the government. He had tested the invention in
other works, they failing him, and had proved it a success; they had
thereupon purchased and destroyed these works; he was beggared, and
nobody else under these circumstances could be induced to venture money
on his invention. Upon these facts, judicially ascertained, the judge
refused to let the jury compute the damages, and ordered them to find
the damages "nominal," as another judge sentenced their associates in
Buffalo to "nominal" punishment.
"There are many things known to the law," said Parnell to the president
of the Special Commission trying the Irish members of Parliament,
"which are strange to a non-legal mind."
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."
It is better to be one of the king's horses than one of the king's
men. But no words of envy pass his lips. He does not seem to repress
them. He simply appears never to feel them. It chanced that as I
left him, standing on the uppermost of the three wooden steps of his
cottage, bleakness all about, "plain living" within, plain enough to
satisfy the hardest climber for "high thinking," it chanced that his
last words to me were--"I want to make oil," with an appeal to seek
for him the opportunity so long denied. These words, plain and homely
as they must seem to those who feed their appetite for the sublime
and heroic with the highly varnished sayings of the battle-field and
illustrious death-beds, will never cease to ring in my ears with a tone
of greatness.[357]