world, rolling out in every workday
minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine.

Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten
back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his
conversation.

"A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter," he said;
"and perhaps he was right. I wasn't an inventor, that's true. All I did
was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I
suppose I was just a promoter."

The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty.
Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his
trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said:

"Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?"

"Yes," replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.

"Well," said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, "I want to say that
you're a mighty smart man."

Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone,
he leaned over to Webster and said:

"Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for
making them. I never felt so foolish in my life."

He is now eighty-one--older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he
has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times
in wealth.

He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world.
More--they said, "Presto, change!" and the drudges of the harvest-fields
stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold
myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and
plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.

Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can
stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads.
And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie
or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.

The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester
business once--and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the
famous "Binder-Twine Trust" set out with the black flag flying. It was a
skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was
the first and only "easy money" that was ever made in the harvester world.
Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust
in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the
fin