AGRICULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 77 



Did you ever plow a new clearing ? Well, if you 

 ever did without using any strong language I 

 would like to take you by the hand and make you 

 a farmer emeritus. The meanest work of all, per- 

 haps, was piling and burning the brush. When 

 things went badly we had a saying which ran in 

 this wise : " It will all come right when the clear- 

 ing is burned." The effect of these laborious 

 struggles upon a lot of boys too long in the back 

 for such hardships, showed later as I will pres- 

 ently relate. 



Those sturdy pioneers with ax and fire-brand 

 let the sun in on many fair acres and land prices 

 began to go up by leaps and bounds from 

 twenty to thirty and even to forty dollars per acre. 

 The earliest settlers gratified that irresistible de- 

 sire for land which they had inherited from a long 

 line of Anglo-Saxon ancestors ; but my father, see- 

 ing no chance of acquiring more land at a low price 

 in New York to give each of his sons a farm, 

 went to Michigan and purchased nearly 500 acres 

 at $2.50 per acre. After a time we traded forty 

 acres of it for a chaff-piler threshing machine with 

 which we occasionally threshed for the neighbors ; 

 but we soon came to the conclusion that it was 

 dirty business. Taxes were paid on this Michigan 



