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 | 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 194 cents a bushel, and oats at 
143. 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 
