“The ancient Israelites once worshiped a golden calf, but the modern Americans would worship a golden polecat if they couldn’t get the gold in any other form to worship.”
“The young man who starts out in life with character and brains and energy as his outfit will distance the one whose sole capital is the money his father left him.”
E. H. SIBLEY.
S. H. GRAY.
F. H. JOHNSTON.
Samuel H. Gray carries under his hat plenty of the gray-matter that makes bright writers and bright wooers of the Muses. He has been court stenographer of Venango county and holds a confidential position with the firm of Miller & Sibley, applying his spare moments to newspaper-writing. His pictures of petroleum-traits and incidents are finished word-paintings, with “light and shade and color properly disposed.” Like Silas Wegg, he “drops into poetry” in a friendly way. Such papers as the New-York Truth strive for his emanations, which savor of Bret Harte and “hold the mirror up to nature” in oleaginous circles. Judge of this “By the Order of the Lord,” founded on an actual occurrence in Scrubgrass township:
“It was back, if I remember, in the year of sixty-five,
When we formed a part and parcel of that rushin’, busy hive
That extended from Oil City up the crooked crick until
It reached its other endin’ in the town of Titusville;
When every rock an’ hillside was included in a lease,