DISCOUNTING THE MARKET 165 



others do honor to her tastes and to the evidence 

 of thought which the home lot shows. She dis- 

 claims great credit, for she says, " One has only 

 to live with a place to find out what it needs." 



As I look back to the beginning of my experi- 

 ment, I see only one bit of good luck that at- 

 tended it. Building material was cheap during 

 the months in which I had to build so much. 

 Nothing else specially favored me, while in one 

 respect my experiment was poorly timed. The 

 price of pork was unusually low. For three 

 years, from 1896, the price of hogs never reached 

 $5 per hundred pounds in our market, a thing 

 unprecedented for thirty years. I never sold 

 below three and a half cents, but the showing 

 would have been wonderfully bettered could I 

 have added another cent or two per pound for 

 all the pork I fattened. The average price for 

 the past twenty-five years is well above five cents 

 a pound for choice lots. Corn and all other foods 

 were also cheap ; but this made little difference 

 with me, because I was not a seller of grain. 



In 1896 I was, however, a buyer of both corn 

 and oats. In September of that year corn sold 

 on 'Change at 191 cents a bushel, and oats at 

 14J. These prices were so much below the food 

 value of these grains that I was tempted to buy. 

 I sent a cash order to a commission house for 

 five thousand bushels of each. I stored this 

 grain in my granary, against the time of need, 

 at a total expense of $1850, 21 cents a bushel 



