ile the women were
trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in
the stubbled field.

Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work
than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided
before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women's
side when Sam Dennis said "Whoa!" to his horses, and condescended to enter
into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers.

For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally,
although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was
about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of the
harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what
some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a
steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any
rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago,
earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish.

Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion
a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was
told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day
the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company.

"Bismarck sat in his carriage," said Haney, "but he ordered his driver to
follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and
feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he
made a sign to me to stop."

"Let me see the thing that ties the knot," he said.

"I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of
string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave him a bound sheaf,
so that he could see a knot that had been tied by the machine. The old man
studied it for some time. Then he asked me--'Can these machines be made in
Germany?'

"'No, your Excellency,' I said. 'They can be made only in America.'

"'Well,' said Bismarck, speaking very good English, 'you Yankees are
ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.'"

When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were
walking together over the President's estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper
which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field.

"Do you see that machine?" he remarked. "I bought it from an American
company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest sin