1 86 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



of the State the farm was under the shadow of dis- 

 honesty and mismanagement, and I was a stranger 

 in the land of my birth. Vice-President Russell 

 once remarked to me that there was nothing he 

 dreaded so much as to have a farmer drop in and 

 ask to be shown over the " Model Farm." Many 

 a time I looked back longingly to my Iowa farm 

 and while load after load of stone was being taken 

 from the fields at Cornell, I remembered the black 

 soil of the prairies; but having set my hand to this 

 task, I would not draw back. 



One of the first things I did was to have the 

 immense accumulation of farmyard manure hauled 

 out and spread thickly on the corn ground that 

 was to be. The manure was strawey, the spring 

 wet and late, the ground undrained and clayey ; and 

 after waiting for it to dry it was plowed at last a 

 little too moist and quite as deep as I was used to 

 plowing the friable, warm soil of the prairies. It 

 will be seen that I made three serious mistakes at 

 once in one cornfield on that farm that was to be 

 a "model; " but apparently no one observed them 

 but myself and the corn. Afterwards when I had 

 drained this field and otherwise improved its pro- 

 ductive power, we were able to raise in one propi- 

 tious year, over eighty bushels of shelled corn per 



