For the latest phase of civilization come to Corry. Here oildom converges and crystallizes, and according to all reliable accounts, is ahead of Ophir. I have not the figures at hand, but do not doubt that the oil product of our country is worth more than gold. Taking the present yield of Venango County at 10,000 barrels per day, and the value $10 per barrel, would make $36,500,000 per annum. Put all the other oil regions at $13,500,000, and the total is fifty million per annum. When did California beat that?

But come to Corry. It is Sunday and is observed as a day of rest quite as well as in Pittsburgh. A tour of the churches showed me that the Pioneer denominations were well represented. “Rev. Cream Cheese,” however, has not yet arrived. There are too many trees and stumps about to render the place even tolerable to that “idol of the church and pet of Mrs. Grundy.” There is also too much of “muscular and mental Christianity” for him. Idleness is essential to complete sentimentality, and there are no idlers here.

At the last one in my round, I found the Sunday school just closing — the room full of scholars — adjourning to the church. It was also immediately filled, as I doubt not every other church in the city was. The music, as might be expected, corresponded with the vitality of the people. It was not scientifically executed, as the music in your fashionable Pittsburgh churches and the criminals in your jails are, but it was sung — the congregation joining. If all Pittsburgh has so sweet a tenor as the leader of that choir, I have not yet heard him. Confessing to a weakness for non-emasculated music — music whose sound is full of sense — and listening to the joyous tones of those singers, it scarcely needed the beautiful words “Zion, City of Our God.”

To take me up to the Pearly Gates and the Golden Streets of the New Jerusalem, but when at the close they sang, as I had never heard it sung before, “Jerusalem, my heavenly home.” [It] brought before me a long line of old friends and relatives — father and mother, brothers and sisters — long since gone. Pardon me if I wept like a mere child. If they sing thus in all the churches here, the world would do well to come to Corry for music as well as for light.

Another remarkable fact is the religious tendency of most of the successful oil men. One of them began here about two years ago in debt ten thousand dollars. Not a dollar in his pocket. A generous Pittsburgher, to whom he owed over eight thousand dollars, but who had faith in him, let him have four thousand dollars’ worth of oil and five thousand dollars in cash to start him here. He has paid back every dollar — has one of the most beautiful residences and one of the largest business establishments here, and evidently coining money. He has just built one of the most beautiful churches here, also, and equipped it with a parsonage, etc. Another similar case occurred in Titusville.

But there is one act of gratitude which the rich oil men have yet to perform before their glory is complete, that of tendering a substantial testimonial of gratitude to Mr. Drake, the persevering pioneer of the oil business proper — said to be poor. Who will name a committee to accomplish the object?