At their next visit to the Refinery, the visitors were committed to a little wiry old man, called Jimmy, who first showed them a grewsome monster, own cousin to him who threw oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer. This one was called an air-pump, and, with his attendant steam-engine, inhabited a house by himself. His work will presently be explained.
The next building was the treating-house, where stand huge tanks containing the oil as drawn from the testing-room. From these it is conducted by pipes to the iron vats, called treating-tanks, and there mixed with vitriol, alkali, and other chemicals, in certain exact proportions. The monster in the next building is now set in operation, and forces a stream of compressed air through a pipe from top to bottom of the tank, whence, following its natural law, it loses no time in ascending to the surface with a noisy ebullition, just like, as Jimmy remarked, "a big pot over a sthrong fire."
This mixing operation was formerly performed by hand in a much less effectual manner, the steam air-pump being a recent improvement.
The work of the chemicals accomplished, the oil is cleansed of them by the introduction of water, and after an interval of quiet the mass separates so thoroughly that the water and chemicals can be drawn off at the bottom of the vat with very little disturbance to the oil.
From the treating-house the perfected oil is drawn to the tanks of the barrelling-shed, and filled into casks ready for exportation. A large cooper's shop upon the premises supplies a portion of the barrels, but is principally used in repairing the old ones.
The oil is next teamed to the Creek, and either pumped into decked boats, to be transported in bulk, or, still in barrels, is loaded upon the ordinary flatboats. During a large portion of the year, however, neither of these can make the passage of the shallow Creek without the aid of a "pond-fresh." This occurs when the millers near the head of the Creek open their dams, and by the sudden influx of water give a gigantic "swell" to the boats patiently awaiting it at every "farm," from Schaeffer's to Oil City.
Sometimes, however, the boatmen, like the necromancer's student who set the broomstick to bringing water, but could not remember the spell to stop it, find that it is unsafe to set great agencies at work without the power of controlling them. Last May, for instance, occurred a pond-fresh, long to be remembered on Oil Creek, when the stream rose with such furious, rapidity that the loaded boats became unmanageable, crowding and dashing together, staving in the sides of the great oil-in-bulk boats, and grinding the floating barrels to splinters. Not even the thousands of gallons of oil thus shed upon the stormy waters were sufficient to assuage either their wrath or that of the boatmen, who, as their respective craft piled one upon another, sprang to "repel boarders" with oaths, fists, boat-hooks, or whatever other weapons Nature or chance had provided them. This scene of anarchy lasted several days, and some cold-blooded photographer amused himself, "after" Nero, in taking views of it from different points. Copies of these pictures, commemorating such destruction of property, temper, and propriety as Oil Creek never witnessed before, are hung about the "office" of the Refinery, with which comfortable apartment the visitors finished their tour.
Here they were offered the compliments of the season and locality in a collation of chestnuts; and here also they were invited to inspect a stereoscope, which, with its accompanying views, is considered on Tarr Farm as admirable a wonder as was, doubtless, Columbus's watch by the aborigines of the New World. Dearer to Miselle than chestnuts or stereoscope, however, were the information and the anecdotes placed at her service by the gentlemen of the establishment, albeit involuntarily; and with her friends she shortly after departed from Barrows and Hazleton's Refinery, filled with content and gratitude.
The noticeable point in the society of Tarr Farm, or rather in the human scenery, for society there is none, is the absurd mingling of inharmonious material. As in the toy called Prince Rupert's Drop, a multitude of unassimilated particles are bound together by a master necessity. Remove the necessity, and in the flash of an eye the particles scatter never to reunite.
In her two days' tour of Tarr Farm, Miselle talked with gentlemen of birth and education, gentlemen whose manners contrasted oddly enough with their coarse clothes and knee-high boots; also with intermittent gentlemen, who felt Tarr Farm to be no fit theatre for the exercise of their acquired politeness; also with men like Tommy and Jimmy, whose claims lay not so much in aristocratic connection and gentle breeding as in a thorough appreciation of the matter in hand; also with a less pleasing variety of mankind, men who, originally ignorant and debased, have through lucky speculations acquired immense wealth without the habits of body and mind fitly accompanying it.