s is done, the yearly balance
will be increased by the addition of $5000, and we may be able to make
the farm pay for weddings, as Polly suggested.

CHAPTER LXVII

LOOKING FORWARD

I am not so opinionated as to think that mine is the only method of
farming. On the contrary, I know that it is only one of several good
methods; but that it is a good one, I insist. For a well-to-do,
middle-aged man who was obliged to give up his profession, it offered
change, recreation, employment, and profit. My ability to earn money by
my profession ceased in 1895, and I must needs live at ease on my
income, or adopt some congenial and remunerative employment, if such
could be found. The vision of a factory farm had flitted through my
brain so often that I was glad of the opportunity to test my theories by
putting them into practice. Fortunately I had money, and to spare; for I
had but a vague idea of what money would be needed to carry my
experiment to the point of self-support. I set aside $60,000 as ample,
but I spent nearly twice that amount without blinking. It is quite
likely that I could have secured as good and as prompt returns with
two-thirds of this expenditure. I plead guilty to thirty-three per cent
lack of economy; the extenuating circumstances were, a wish to let the
members of my family do much as they pleased and have good things and
good people around them, and a somewhat luxurious temperament of my own.

Polly and I were too wise (not to say too old) to adopt farming as a
means of grace through privations. We wanted the good there was in it,
and nothing else; but as a secondary consideration I wished to prove
that it can be made to pay well, even though one-third of the money
expended goes for comforts and kickshaws.

It is not necessary to spend so much on a five-hundred-acre farm, and a
factory farm need not contain so many acres. Any number of acres from
forty to five hundred, and any number of dollars from $5000 to $100,000,
will do, so long as one holds fast to the rules: good clean fences for
security against trespass by beasts, or weeds; high tilth, and heavy
cropping; no waste or fallow land; conscientious return to the land of
refuse, and a cover crop turned under every second year; the best stock
that money can buy; feed for product, not simply to keep the animals
alive; force product in every way not detrimental to the product itself;
maintain a strict quarantine around your animals, and then de