Like some other things, including people, this unappeasable substance conceals its terrors beneath a placid exterior, and lies in its great tanks, or in shallow pits dug for it in the earth, looking neither volcanic nor even combustible, but more like thin green paint than anything else, except when it has become adulterated with water, when it assumes a bilious, yellow appearance, exceedingly uninviting to the spectator. In this case it is allowed to remain undisturbed in the tank until the oil and water have separated, when the latter is drawn off at the bottom.
Wandering one day among groves of derricks and villages of tanks, Miselle and her guide came upon a building containing a pair of truculent monsters in a high state of activity. These were introduced to her as a steam force-pump and its attendant engine; and she was told that they were at that moment sucking up whole tanks of oil from the neighboring wells, and pumping it up the precipitous bluff, through the lonely forest, over marsh and moor, hill and dale, to the great Humboldt Refinery, more than three miles distant, in the town of Plummer, as it is called,--although, in point of fact, Plummer, Tarr Farm, and several other settlements belong to the township of Cornplanter.
There was something about this brace of monsters very fascinating to Miselle. They seemed like subjected genii closed in these dull black cases and this narrow shed, and yet embracing miles of territory in their invisible arms. Even the genius of Aladdin's lamp was not so powerful, for he was obliged to betake himself to the scene of the wonders he was to enact,--and if imprisoned as closely as these, could not have transferred enough oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer to fill his own lamp.
Afterward, in rambling through the woods, Miselle often came upon the mound raised above the buried pipe, and always regarded it with the same admiring awe with which the fisherman of Bagdad probably looked at the copper vessel wherein Solomon had so cunningly "canned" the rebellious Afrit.
Leaving the shed of the monsters, Miselle followed her guide out of the throng of derricks and tanks, and a short distance up the hill, to the picturesque site of Messrs. Barrows and Hazleton's Refinery, the only one now in operation on Tarr Farm.