Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/184

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THE MEXICAN PROBLEM

YOUTH AND ENTHUSIASM STILL WITH HIM

Doheny is an enthusiast. When he goes into a thing, he is in all over, hands and feet. He will travel longest with the swiftest and the strongest, swim or ride with the youngest, and sleep more or less in any part of the twenty-four hours. He will absorb more and his interest and his sympathies will be of the broadest because his studies and his sympathies reach from the stars of heaven to the lowest mineral deposits and his interest is all the while in humanity and its onward progress.

In the forenoon, over on the side of Sulphur Mountain, he dipped his fingers in the thirty-four gravity oil oozing from well Number 36 and exclaimed enthusiastically: "Isn't that fine? Is n't it better than soup or something to eat? Just smell it! It is a soft, lubricating oil with no asphaltum." And he dipped up a pan of it and we all had to note it, smell it, and admire it. Then he took a wisp of oil waste from the automobile and wiped his hands as clean as those of a woman and was off in the motor to dip into another oil well and note its color, its thickness, and its gravity.

As I write this in the East, comes the report