ech than walk
a rope. On only one previous occasion had he faced an audience, and that
was at the age of twelve, when he had recited a scrap from the "Lay of the
Last Minstrel" at a school entertainment. As he rose to his feet, this
poetic fragment came into his mind; and so, half in fun and half in
desperation, Marsh assumed the pose of a Demosthenes and addressed the
banqueters as follows:

"O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! What mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!"

"That was the first and only speech of my life," said Mr. Marsh, when I
saw him in his home as DeKalb, where he has retired from business. "But it
certainly established my reputation as an orator in that region of
Hungary."

At one famous competition near Paris, in 1879, three reapers were set to
work in fields of equal size. The French reaper led off and finished in
seventy-two minutes. The English reaper followed and lumbered through in
sixty-six minutes. Then came the American machine, and when it swept down
its stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the judges were inclined to
doubt either their watches or their eyesight.

Another of these tournaments, which also did much to advertise the United
States as the only genuine and original reaper country, took place on an
English estate in 1880. There was only one American reaper in the race,
and in appearance it was the clown of the circus. The ship that carried it
had been wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it arrived the machine
was rusted and dingy.

Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge. He was then a youth of
twenty-one, and equally ready for an adventure or a sale. There was no
time to repaint and polish the machine, so he resolved to convert its
forlorn appearance into an asset.

"Oil her up so she'll run like a watch," he said to his experts. "But
don't improve her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it off. And go and
hire the smallest, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find."

The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering
with newness and drawn by a stately team of big Norman horses. The shabby
American reaper arrived last, and met a shout of ridicule as it rolled
into its place. But in the race, "Old Rusty," as the spectators called it,
swept ahead of the others as t