12 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
These valleys were fertile, they would yield food for 
man and beast, and alfalfa was the magic sesame 
that made open the door to the riches of the valley. 
All this time the writer was becoming more and 
more enthusiastic over the wonderful value of the 
alfalfa plant. Back in Ohio was the old home farm 
where he had spent his boyhood. It was a little 
farm of less than 200 acres, charmingly diversified 
by little hills, rich flat meadow lands, wet and half 
wild, in which grew wild lilies and pink fragrant 
spireas. There was woodland and pasture, a run- 
ning stream, the Darby creek, with swimming holes 
in it, a big pond where he had sailed his tiny ships 
not so very many years before, a corn field, usually 
of about 15 acres, meadows in irregular patches, 
and an old apple orchard that ‘bore famously of big 
red apples. On that farm too was an old man once 
tall but now bent and gray, weatherbeaten, seamed 
and furrowed from exposure, with a kindly serious 
face and a twinkling blue eye. That was the father. 
And a mother, small and agile and energetic, rather 
frail yet sunny and happy, ever singing at her work. 
That was mother. And two younger brothers did 
the work about the barns and went to school. These 
younger brothers, men now, are yet on Woodland 
Farm and are the writer’s partners. 
The writer had been a very close friend of his 
father, and together they had planned the work on 
Woodland Farm before he had gone west, and now 
the old man remembered his boy and knew of his 
interest in the old place, so he used to write now 
