GREETING BY A CHARTER MEMBER. 433 



The first article that I ever wrote for publication was sug- 

 gested and edited by Col. John H. Stevens, and I received for 

 it $22.00, and they were the biggest dollars that I ever received 

 in my life. I needed them and needed them badly. I had a wife 

 and five babies, and we hadn't any wood or coal or flour, and we 

 needed that $22.00 and we needed it mighty bad. It was Col. John 

 H. Stevens that encouraged me to write that article and then 

 edited it. 



Just ten days after that time I got a request from the "Mas- 

 sachusetts Plowman," at Boston, Massachusetts, to furnish a 

 history of the Wealthy apple, which I wrote from such informa- 

 tion as I could get and sent it down to him, and he sent me 

 a check for $25.00. That was the second money I got, and I be- 

 gan to think that was a pretty good way to make money. 



Then came the farmers' institutes. Col. Stevens was booked 

 at the opening session at Glencoe and was taken sick and couldn't 

 go, and insisted that I should go in his place. It was to be a talk 

 on diversified farming as compared to a single crop system. I 

 had stage fright but the colonel said: "Now, Smith, just shut 

 your eyes and imagine you are talking to me and tell your pig 

 stories just the same as you are telling them to me." He was 

 lying on the bed sick with acute indigestion. 



I went to Glencoe and made a talk there. Just made a talk, 

 it couldn't in any sense be called a speech ; I simply told stories 

 about the men and women I had met on the farms in Minnesota, 

 the things they were doing and the results that they got and 

 contrasted them with other people who were doing differently. 

 Well, I didn't think very much of it then, I was too badly scared 

 to understand much about it, but do you know I was surprised 

 the next morning to find that some newspaper reporters had 

 given a column to my stories and an inch to a very able lecture 

 by a professor. You know I thought I had struck yellow, yes, sir. 

 I did. 



I got another lesson that same winter. I attended a farm- 

 ers' institute and quite a number of the people from the Uni- 

 versity were there and different ones. They had a nice meeting, 

 and they gave up one whole evening to the discussion of the 

 farm boy, largely theoretical, because there were two bachelors 

 and one old maid among the speakers, and it didn't exactly suit 

 me. So I wrote an article on the subject, theoretical— I didn't re- 

 alize it then, but I do now. I was very careful about it. I sent it 

 to the editor with the idea that I would get a good check for it, 



