THIS COAL-OIL JOHNNY.



COAL-OIL Johnny was, twenty years ago, a well-known character in New York and Philadelphia. He was the son of a poor widow who owned a barren tract of hill-land in Western Pennsylvania. Oil was discovered upon it, and the widow and her boy became, in the course of a month, the possessors of millions.

Johnny was an ignorant fellow, scarcely able to write his name, and had never owned a decent suit of clothes. He repaired at once to Philadelphia, and applied for a room at the Continental Hotel. The clerk, eyeing him suspiciously, refused it unless he first made a deposit. The young Croesus went out in a rage, went to a tailor-shop, and, fitting himself with a fashionable suit, hired a carriage and eight horses and a brass-band, and so paraded down the street back to the hotel.

For two years Johnny remained in the city, flinging his money about like the fabled princes of the "Arabian Nights." 

Diamond rings, houses, gold watches, were the presents, which he bestowed upon anybody who drank or smoked with him, and, as may be supposed, he never lacked a companion.

His favorite fancy was to astonish a cabdriver, whose society pleased him, by a gift of the cab and horses, which he drove; an Irish laborer who brought him home when tipsy was rewarded by a check for twenty thousand dollars.  Coal-oil Johnny now drives a cab in the city of New York, and is, unfortunately, not the owner of it. This is an extreme case of the squandering of money, but it is a typical one.

Americans who make their money easily too often forget to give their sons social standing-ground upon anything better than money. The lad who has neither education, refinement, nor moral worth to command notice, is apt to try to force it by lavish display, and is in degree as much an object of derision and pity as Coal-oil Johnny. 





Youth's Companion.