, as in France, by sacrificial economies. The
Iowan is noted as a high liver and a good spender. Here, for instance, is
the menu of a chance supper I enjoyed at the home of an Iowa farmer, nine
miles from Des Moines: Mashed potatoes, poached eggs, hot biscuits, white
bread, fresh butter, honey, jelly, peaches and cream, gooseberry pie, and
good coffee--all served on china, with fine linen tablecloth and napkins.
The man of the house was the son of a rack-rented Irish immigrant, who
had been reared "on potatoes and salt, mostly."

I found one young county, born since the Civil War, in which five thousand
farmers now own property worth seventy-five millions. They have fourteen
thousand horses, seventeen thousand sheep, sixty thousand cattle, and
ninety thousand hogs. In the furnishing of the homes in this county, so
its Auditor informs me, more than twenty-five thousand dollars have been
spent on the one item of pianos.

In a small, out-of-the-way town, called Ames, I came upon a farmers'
college--a veritable Harvard of the soil. Here, on a thousand acres which
fed the wild deer and buffalo in the days of Andrew Jackson, is a college
that equals Princeton and Vassar combined, in the number of its pupils.
Its farm machinery building is the largest of its kind. Five professors
are in charge, and it is a curious fact, showing how new the New Farmer
is, that these professors are obliged to teach without a text-book. As
yet, there is no such thing in the world as a text-book on farm
machinery.

The Iowans pay half a million dollars a year to sustain this college. They
pay it cheerfully. They pay it with a hurrah. Why? Because it is the
biggest money-maker in the State. One little professor, named Holden--the
smallest of the whole hundred and forty, is revered by the Iowans as a
King Midas of the cornfield. He has shown them how to grow ten bushels
more per acre, by using a better quality of seed. This one _idea_, in a
State where every fourth dollar is a corn dollar, meant an extra twenty
millions last year.

First in corn, first in farm machinery, and first in the number of her
banks! That is Iowa. There are a few of her villages that have no banks,
but they are conscious of their disgrace. They feel naked and ashamed. In
all, there are as many banks as post-offices, very nearly; and they are
crammed with enough wealth to build three Panama Canals.

"Money is a trifle tight just now," said an Iowa banker. This was last
S