ering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars,
for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became
an acknowledged leader of his class. He had taken the right line of
development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could, choked
down their rage and followed--quick march!

The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the
scout--the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he--the inspired
farm labourer of Wisconsin--who had hurled another great impossibility out
of the way of the world's farmers.

He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts
together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness
of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did
much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was
the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the
bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it
out of a branch of a cherry tree.

Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his
pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him
first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders.
He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes
will do as much for the South as his self-binder did for the West. And it
was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the
story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.

In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one
dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the
farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy
machinery, instead of minding his work.

One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper.
"How do you like the work, Jack?" asked the farmer.

"I don't like it," said Jack, "and what's more, I believe I can invent a
machine to tie these bundles."

"Ho! ho!" laughed the farmer. "You little fool, you can't invent
anything."

Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his
invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old
man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.

"Haven't I seen you before?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," replied the old man. "I was the farmer who gave you your first
job."

"Well," said Appleby, "you s