618 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE3 OfE. Doc. 



his head, and said, "Do you suppose I want to grow a crop that I 

 have to put a barrel over?" But I said to myself, "If that one plant 

 will grow, why won't a million?" 



Well, it was not many years before I was called upon to go home 

 and take charge of the place. I didn't like to go, for I had been 

 given some authority out on the ranch, and it makes a young fellow 

 feel pretty important to be made foreman. I had to get up first in 

 the morning and get the bricks with which to get the other fellows 

 out of bed, as you do when you are foreman; the only difference is 

 that you have to work a little harder, and get a little more. But 

 my father was old and could not do the work any more, and so I 

 had to go home. "Well," I said, "I will go home, and see whether 

 I can't make a success of the old farm," I could see alfalfa, but noth- 

 ing else, and when I came home from the West I brought with me 

 seven sacks of alfalfa seed. But father said we .could not afford to 

 experiment, and we must sell that seed. Finally we compromised on 

 a quarter of an acre and I had seven sacks of seed! And I had an 

 awful time selling that seed, I could not give it away; the neigh- 

 bors would not have it. I could not sell it; the seedsmen would not 

 buy it. I advertised it, but it did not want to move. Finally I did 

 manage to get rid of it by selling it in small quantities; now, some 

 of the same seedsmen sell $30,000 worth of the seed in a season. 



Well, that old potato patch was rich; the cattle had pastured 

 there; the soil had been enriched by a corn crop, and I sowed my al- 

 falfa and it grew. The next spring I sowed three acres; I picked 

 out what I thought was the best land I had for the purpose; it 

 sloped down toward the creek; a part of it was gravelly soil, and a 

 part of it hard clay. Well, down by the creek the alfalfa did not do 

 so well ; on the gravelly soil it grew. And I scratched my head and 

 said. "This old farm will grow alfalfa; I must manure the hard land 

 and drain that wet land, and then it will grow alfalfa." Father had 

 died in the meantime, and my brothers and I were running the farm, 

 and we began to lay tile underdrains, until finally on that farm we 

 had laid more than 14 miles of tile underdrains, and all the time we 

 were feeding the stock in order to make manure to enrich the soil. 

 During those years I was not trying to make money. I did not give 

 it any thought. My brother Willis gave it some little more thought 

 than I did, and perhaps it is just as well, as we might not have fared 

 so well if he had not. I only thought to grow alfalfa, and I said, "I 

 will have forty acre* of it, some day." I have a hundred now. 



I found we needed more manure, and I said, "I will buy lambs, and 

 feed 200 of them, and sell the lambs in the spring, aud make some 

 some money on them, and keep the ewes to enrich the soil." My 

 brother said, "You must be crazy; do you want to run the farm into 

 the ground?" But I got the lambs. First we had 200 lambs, then 

 300, then we fed 350. and we always had feed enough for them, and 

 the farm grew fertile; it is the most beautiful thing in the world to 

 raise lambs, and I said to myself, "Some day I will have on this old 

 farm 1,000 lambs." I did not tell my mother, or my wife, or any 

 one else, but I dreamed of my thousand lambs. Well we got seven 

 hundred — a thousand — fifteen hundred, and now we have sixteen 

 hundred sheep on that farm, and are shipping alfalfa to the Phila- 

 delphia market. How do we do it? 



