May 27 Friday – In Findlay, Ohio, his old stomping grounds, William Dean Howells wrote Sam all about the recent discovery there of natural gas.

They are going to have a Natural Gas Jubilee in this wonderful place on the 8 th or 9 th of June, and they are going to ask you, of course. I think if you will come you will enjoy a No.11 astonishment, and it will fit you comfortably. The wildest dreams of Col. Sellers are here for the commonplaces of everyday experience. I wish I could blow off a gas-well in this note, for then you would have some notion of what a gas well is. But I can’t, and so you had better come, and see what thirteen of them all going at once, are [MTHL 2: 593-4].