○  russell conwell : acres of diamonds  ○

scarcely gone from that place before the man who purchased the spot went out to arrange for the watering of the cattle. he found the previous owner had gone out years before and put a plank across the brook back of the barn, edgewise into the surface of the water just a few inches. the purpose of that plank at that sharp angle across the brook was to throw over to the other bank a dreadful-looking scum through which the cattle would not put their noses. but with that plank there to throw it all over to one side, the cattle would drink below, and thus that man who had gone to canada had been himself damming back for twenty-three years a flood of coal-oil which the state geologists of pennsylvania declared to us ten years later was even then worth a hundred millions of dollars to our state, a thousand millions of dollars. the man who owned that territory on which the city to titusville now stands, and those pleasantville valleys, had studied the subject from the second day of god’s creation clear down to the present time. he studied it until he knew all about it, and yet he is said to have sold the whole of it for $833, and again i say, “no sense.”

but i need another illustration. i found it in massachusetts, and i am sorry i did because that is the state i came from. this young man in massachusetts furnishes just another phase of my thought. he went to yale college and studied mines and mining, and became such an adept as a mining engineer that he was employed by the authorities of the university to train students who were behind their classes. during his senior years he earned $15 a week for doing that work. when he graduated they raised his pay from $15 to $45 a week, and offered him a professorship, as soon as they did he went right home to his mother. if they had raised that boy’s pay from $14 to $15.60 he would have stayed and been proud of the place, but when they put it up to $45 at one leap, he said, “mother, i won’t work for $45 a week. the idea of a

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