hough it were an enchanted chariot, winning
the gold medal and an enviable prestige among British farmers.

In Germany, as in England, the reaper was introduced into general use
through royalty. This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper King named Byron
E. Huntley gave the German emperor and empress their first view of
harvesting on the American plan. The exhibition took place in a
grain-field that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam. At first, the
empress watched the machine from a window; but soon she became so keenly
interested that she went into the field to study it at closer range.

"I admire you Americans," she said to the delighted Huntley. "You are so
deft--so ingenious, to make a machine like this."

The present Emperor of Germany is not merely interested in American
harvesters; he is an enthusiast. On several occasions he has held
harvester matinees for the benefit of his cabinet ministers, so that they
could see with their own eyes the superiority of machinery to hand-labour.
The first of these matinees was given on one of the Kaiser's farms, near
the ancient city of Bonn, in 1896; and I was told the story by Sam Dennis,
the Illinois Irishman who was in charge of the harvester.

Dennis arranged a contest between his one machine and forty Polish women
who cut the grain with old-fashioned sickles. As soon as the emperor and
his retinue had arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given and the
strange race began. On one side of the field were the forty women, bent
and browned by many a day's toil under the hot sun. On the other side was
Sam Dennis, sitting on his showy harvester.

"Get ap!" said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a
wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator
into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a
fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string.

[Illustration: AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES,
IN FRANCE]

The emperor was radiant with delight. Being somewhat of an expert
himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the
differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been
blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that
time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor
pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain
and cutting it without the waste of a handful wh