AN ASTOUNDING SPENDTHRIFT.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1249, 6 February 1896, Page 10

AN ASTOUNDING SPENDTHRIFT.

THREW SEVERAL FORTUNES AWAY. The discovery of petroleum on the Transatlantic Continent is invested with a good deal of romance, say 3 the Glasgow Mail, but probably nothing can exceed in grotesque extravagance the narrative of the man who was made fabulously rich by the discovery. He was Scotch, of course —at least in name —and owed hia fortune to one who was Scotch in blood as well as name. This was William McClintock, the owner of an almost worthless farm in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Accompanied by his wife, he went to the County Poorhouse to pick out a boy for adoption, as they had already adopted from the same institution a daughter. They selected a lad of twelve or fifteen years old, to whom the name of John Steele had been attached —though how he got it does not appear in the record. A little more than a year later the farmer died, leaving all his small property to hia widow, and she, impressed by his sudden demise with a new sense of the insecurity of life, almost immediately made her will. She bequeathed to her adopted daughter, who was her favourite, the sum of .£SOO, the total sum she and her husband had, by a lifetime of frugality and toil, managed to save. To the boy, John Steele, she left the farm, which was possibly worth £4O at that time. Within a few months of her execution of that instrument oil was got on the first bored well on the McClintock farm. Coal oil was not a new thing even then. The Seneca and Cornplanter tribes of Indians used to collect it, by means of blankets, from the surface of a spring, and valued it highly as a remedy for rheumatism and other ailments. Colonel Drake leased one-eighth of an acre from the widow McClintock, for which she received onehalf the yield of the well. That contract was made in advance, when nobody had an idea of what a well might yield, and neither party to it had any monopoly of amazement when hundreds of barrels of petroleum per diem were realised. Very speedily the farm was leased out in one eighth of an acre patches and dotted all over with wells. The widow was in receipt of thousands of barrels of oil every day, for which she found ready sale at from £2 10i to £3 53 per barrel, and the sums of money she handled were greater than she had ever before believed existed. As she had no I confidence in banks, she sent for a big safe, which she crammed full of money and bonds. Life was such an exciting whirl of astonishing experience to her that she forgot all about the will, and forgot that death may come as suddenly to a rich widow as to a poor farmer. Had she not done so, it is probable that the contents of more than one pigeon-hole in the big safe would have been added to the adopted daughter's share. One evening John Steele, who had been away with a team hauling oil, returned home and found the house in ashes. The charred bones of the «idow were picked out of the ruins. It was supposed that she had accidentally set herself blazing, and then the house, by rashly using petroleum to start the kitchen lire. As John Steele had been legally adopted he was the natural heir to the contents of the big safe and the river of revenue from the oil producing farm, his possession of which was further fortified by the widow's will, made before the change in her fortune. This sudden acquisition of enormous wealth turned his head, not all at once, but speedily. He wished to find in enjoyment of it an intensified consciousness of its reality, but was too ignorant

to do so in any intelligent way. He married the daughter of one of bis workmen, and she taught him to write his name in a laborious, mechanical way, and that was all he ever learned of the art and mystery of letters. She tried to keep him straight, but he knew too little to comprehend self-respect, felt himself (G 3 rich to be tramu e'led by conventionalities or to care for the opinions of others, and thirsted for a riotous excess of sensuous gratification, the highest pleasure he was capable of. Only a few months after his marriage he went away, taking with him a boon companion named Slocum, whose assigned duty was the carrying of his money and paying it out as he chose to squander it. The life of prodigality and uncontrolled dissipation into which he plunged was so wild as to be almost beyond belief. He ordered champagne not by the bottle, but. by the basket. He gave a £IOOO diamond to a negro minstrel for singing a song that pleased him. He frequently bought carriages and the teams attached when he wished to ride a few blocks, and then presented them to the drivers. On one occasion he wagered a bottle of wine that he would spend, actually paying out I "for fun," and not giving away, .£2OOO a day for pixty days, and won the bottle. At another time he received a large sum of money from the rentals on the farm when he was on the street and quite drunk. It was in bank notes, as he always required it, cheque-* being objects of suspicion with him, and when he had stuffed it into his pockets they bulged out like those of an urchin after a raid on an apple orchard. His coat could not sit well on him, padded with money as he was, and he was disgusted. Just then he caught sioht of a bank, and rushing into it with the airy formality of, "Here, take care of this stuff for me ; it's a nuisance," dumped the whole pile before a receiving teller, and went away ere that functionary could take breath or gather his wits sufficiently to give any evidence of the deposit. And when Coal Oil Johnny, as John Steele was by this time known, tried, in a brief spasm of sobriety, to remember where he had left all that money, he was quite unable to do so. And, he decided, to hunt it up would involve more trouble than it was worth. I Its loss did not worry him at all. Suddenly his wealth came to an end. He had succeeded in squandering even more than his vast income, and was in debt. Of course, he had been plundered mercilessly, right and left, but had literally thrown away several fortunes, and creditors, scenting his downfall, were pressing him. He mortgaged the farm for s large sum, and plunged afresh into even wilder extravagance and more reckless dissipation than before, but with less to go upon, and the end came quickly. His mad career was over. After a short time <>f abject destitution, in which he was deserted by all who had preyed upon him, he went to work driving a stage coach, in which guests were carried to and from the railroad depots. Soon he wearied of that", and somebody paid his , fire back to Oil Creek, where he obtained employment as a freight handler at the depot, in which capacity ho earned £5 a month. That was not enough to support himself and his family, and there was nothing more remunerative that he could find there to do. His wife raised, by the sale of her jewellery, a sum sufficient for the transportation of the family out to Nebraska, and there, in Lincoln, Coal Oil Johnny settled down. They were very poor, but managed somehow to live, for Johnny was a willing worker at any labour he could procure. Realising the evil fortune of such limitation as had been put upon his capacities by his ignorance, he took care that his son, a bright lad, should receive as good an education as was attainable under the existing circumstances. When the boy was Lid enough he obtained employment as a ticket agent at a railroad station, and there his father, Coal Oil Johnny that was, plain John Steele, as everybody about there knows, works steadily and patiently for the railroad company under the sou's direction, handling freight, taking care of the station, and so on. And he is hale, hearty, a well-preserved man, apparently about 53 years of age, seemingly well contented. But he is by no means dependent no w upon his labour for the maintenance of hia family, or upon his steady and industrious son. At a time when his situation seemed most miserable and his prospects least hopeful, while he was still seeking a day's work at any hard labour in Lincoln, fortune again smiled on him, a gleam of his old luck gilded his life once again. In some way the directors of that bank in which he had made his informal deposit 80 years before learned of the unhappy condition of the Steele family. Having assured themselves of the identification of their erratic depositor, they made up his account and forwarded to him the sum left in their charge, with interest from the date of its deposit. How much it was is known only to those concerned, but it is believed to have been somewhere about £IO,OOO, probably mor« rather than less. With that money 700 acres

of choice farming land were purchased, and a good house erected, with barns,

outhouse's, excellent fences, and so forth. There Mrs Steele is in control, and if the bad idea should occur to Johnny of an experimental return to the tumultuous delights of earlier days, it is not probable that he would be able to prejudice the family interest in that farm. Bub there are no fears of his doing so. He has proved himself a man, not merely a warning.