94 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan. 



seemed as if we should freeze solid and blow away ; and I 

 believe we should, if we had not been completely snowed 

 under ; as it was, we froze our ears lying in bed. 



" The third year was good enough, but, with the cost of 

 building a pole barn, we did not get ahead any, but rather 

 fell behind. 



" The fourth year promised splendidly. Corn, wheat and 

 grass o-rew as we never saw them in York State. But one 

 day, just as wheat was beginning to turn, we noticed a sort 

 of cloud coming up from the south-east and coming directly 

 towards us, growing darker as it came ; and then it began to 

 roar like Niagara at a distance, or near by, for that matter ; 

 the sunlight went out, and almost before we knew what the 

 matter was the locusts came down upon us. They flew into 

 our faces and caught in our hair, and filled the house before 

 we could shut the door and window ; they completely cov- 

 ered the ground and all the plants there were on it ; and the 

 gnawino;, oratino;, whirrino; roar was awful. It did not take 

 them long to eat every particle of a plant there was on the 

 farm and all the surrounding country, and to scratch up 

 their roots, and the last that came starved for want of fodder, 

 makino; a smell about as bad as a slaughter house. There 

 was nothing left for us, and we ' lit out' and went down to 

 Kansas, where I got a job on the railroad. I made up my 

 mind that locusts were too much for us, and the first man 

 who wanted that farm and try his hand with them would have 

 it, and he did ; and we took a year to look around and find a 

 place where a man could live and have a decent show. 



" The next spring we went oft' south-west a hundred miles 

 in the State, and bought out a fellow and went to work. 

 Times were lively there, so far as settling up the country 

 was concerned ; Init the emigrants were a mongrel crowd 

 from every part of the world. They were late in coming in, 

 and it rained all the time until the middle of June, and the 

 land could not be worked. Half of them could not get 

 cover, and when hot weather came on they took the shakes, 

 and kept it up all summer. What crops they got in didn't 

 do any too well, and were not grown when a stinging frost 

 came in September and killed everything. That was a tough 

 winter : it seemed as if those foreigners would starve, and 



