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ties of farmers. His produce is sent to the nearest 

 shipping station by means of electric railways on 

 the highways, which run alike winter and summer, 

 and which, when once put down, require no filling 

 up of chuck-holes and no plowing up of the sides 

 of the roadway and throwing of the dirt into the 

 centre. Scattered over his farm are numerous poles 

 carrying insulated wires. Let us go out to his wheat- 

 field and see what he is doing. It is the time of 

 harvest. We see an odd-looking reaper and binder ; 

 from it, as it moves rapidly along, there pays out 

 some insulated wire which connects the reaper with 

 the wire coming to the field from the highway, 

 through which wire it receives the energy which 

 runs it. Thus the farmer with great rapidity cuts, 

 binds, and shocks his wheat; he does the work 

 alone and complains not of weariness, but only of 

 a sense of loneliness. As he stops his machine for 

 a few moments to shift the wire, he tells us that this 

 method is getting too slow for him, on account of 

 the reeling and unreeling of the wire, and that he 

 is thinking of buying the latest patent which carries 

 its own electric supply in storage-batteries, only he 

 fears that the recent experiments looking toward 

 making electricity directly from coal are so near to 

 success that this new machine, in turn, will soon 

 become old-fashioned. 



" After he is done a wagon comes out, moved by 

 the same mysterious force, and gathering the 

 sheaves, takes them to the barn. In course of time 

 an electric thresher, which cannot set the barn on 

 fire from red-hot cinders, separates and cleans the 

 wheat; and soon the electric railway transports it 

 to the market. 



" His electric plow is quite an improvement on 

 the one which not long ago turned up the first fur- 

 row in American soil at the Kansas sorghum experi- 

 ment station, and his electric harrow pulverizes the 

 ground to an evenness that is marvellous. . ... 



