602 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



and I don't think I have ever seen quite so many clovers mixed 

 together — the Crimson Clover, and the Red Clover, and the Alsike 

 Clover, and then the Alfalfa — some fields were alfalfa entirely. 

 Here were men mowing with old-fashioned scythes with a short 

 straight blade, very unlike those used in America in former days. 

 J asked the man to let me try it, but found I could do nothing with 

 it, although I have mowed many an hour with the long curved scythe 

 that was used in this country. Then behind the mowers came the 

 women, and they raked the grass together in little bunches and 

 set them up in little shocks. Wonderful grass it was; I have never 

 seen anything like it in my life, and the green fields and the fragrant 

 clover; it covered maybe twenty or thirty acres and it was of marvel- 

 ous growth. 



The farm hands lived in little stone houses which they owned; 

 many of them had lived on this farm all their life and their fathers 

 before them. They did not own the land; that belonged to the 

 farmer, but they owmed their houses and did the work by the 

 job. This was an unusually large farm, about thirty thousand acres; 

 it had an immense barn, and I saw where the cows were pastured, 

 and I saw where the 2,000 sheep were kept. 



Up you drove through a big, wide gateway to the castle, erected 

 centuries ago, passing the big stable where they had those wonder- 

 ful cows that made the milk and cream for the Paris markets to 

 the north end of it, which was the residence part, the resideqce of 

 the man who owned the castle and the farm. He was worth prob- 

 ably 113,000,000. He asked me into the house and there I found a 

 lady that spoke English, and I spent the afternoon in going through 

 that magnificent old castle with its fine art galleries, and elegant 

 libraries, its collections of armor a thousand years old, in the grand 

 old halls with the windows down to the floor; but there was one 

 peculiarity about those windows; every window on every side of 

 the castle looked out on the same thing and what do you think that 

 was? They could see the cows go out to pasture in the morning 

 in those marvelous fields, and they could see the sheep at play in 

 the fields beyond, but from every window they could also see a 

 great pile of manure — the greatest pile I have ever seen; two piles, 

 each one as big as this room, sprinkled over with some composition 

 to deodorize it. Not a very aesthetic object, but one worth a million 

 dollars to that old Frenchman, and I am sure that every time he 

 looked at it he said, "How proud I am of this pile of manure; it 

 feeds my family; it feeds my laborers, and my cattle by feeding the 

 land; it is one of my greatest treasures." 



I finally got away from these people and went out into the fields 

 again, and pressed my foot into the soil, and it ground out rich 

 and brittle; and I said to myself, "Here is land that was old a 

 thousand years ago, and is still more fertile than anything you have 

 ever seen, while out in Ohio you think that new soil is worn out." 

 And I said to myself, "Joe Wing, learn a lesson from that old 

 Frenchman's manure pile, and go home and put it into practice on 

 your land, and some day your land will be so much more fertile 

 that there will be no comparison between the two." 



PRESIDENT NORTON: Any further discussion? 



