remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county,"
said Governor Cummins, who is still far from being a man of years.

"I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a
dozen and butter for four cents a pound," said John Cownie--a well-known
figure at the Des Moines Capitol.

One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high
civilisation--a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation
of a thousand years.

And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story--from
ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The
various States are only patches of one vast grassy plain where

"painted harvesters, fleet after fleet,
Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat."

"My first experience with the 'New Farmer,' as you call him, was in
Texas," said a Kansas City business man. "I had taken an agency for
harvesters in a section of Texas that was bigger than several dozen
Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first
morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came
a big, roughly dressed man. 'Come here, Bill,' said the banker. 'Maybe
you want some farm machinery.'

"'Maybe I do,' said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on
talking with the banker.

"Ten minutes later the big fellow looked up from the catalogue and
asked--'How much do you want for ten of these binders?' I nearly had a
spell of heart failure, but I gasped the price. He said--'all right; send
'em along.'

"'Don't you worry about Bill's credit,' said the banker, seeing I looked
dazed. 'He has more than $100,000 in this bank right now.'

"This was my cue to get busy with the big farmer, and before he left the
bank he had bought a thresher, four traction engines and half a dozen
ploughs."

Harvesting by machinery has actually become cheaper than the ancient
method of harvesting by slaves. This surprising fact was first brought to
the notice of Europeans during the Chicago World's Fair, when forty-seven
foreign Commissioners were taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in North
Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-field very nearly a hundred square miles in
extent, with three hundred self-binders clicking out the music of the
harvest. There were no serfs--no drudges--no barefooted women. And yet
they were told that the labour-cost of reaping the wheat was LESS THAN A
CENT A BUSHEL.

It