44 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



before him, I went to work in earnest and studied up a speech 

 and learned it thoroughly. I knew it from beginning to end. 

 I thought under no conditions w^ould I make a failure of it. 

 I thought it would win the applause of anyone. When I got 

 there and started my speech very bravely, my knees commenced 

 to trembel and got warm under my collar, and the firstthing I 

 knew the whole thing had left me. I could not remember 

 one single word of that speech I had learned so thoroughly. 

 I don't know what I haddone. He helped me through, through 

 the back door. 



You people will wonder why I am here today. I wonder 

 at it myself. I wondered why I was asked to go on this stage. 

 It took me a long while to study it out. I know it is not proper 

 to get up before an audience and make excuses. But under 

 the conditions, I think it is my privilege to explain to you why 

 I am here. There is scarcely a familiar face before me. In order 

 to thoroughly make you understand, I will have to tell you a 

 little story. It will carry you older people back seventy years 

 maybe. 



Can you remember when this thickly populated country was 

 nothing but a wilderness, where the nearest neighbors were two 

 or three miles apart. How well you remember settling on a piece 

 of land; how you broke up a few acres, probably with oxen, 

 had a pig in the pen, one cow and a few chickens. You put 

 in a big field of corn, half an acre, two or three acres of wheat 

 How you had no way of getting the wheat except with the old 

 fashioned cradle. I am not very old yet, but I remember carry- 

 ing the bundles. The only way of threshing the wheat was t)y 

 the old fashioned flail, and after getting it threshed out, the only 

 way you have of cleaning it, way by naturre's fanning mill, the 

 wind. And after all that, the only way you had of taking that 

 to mill, perhaps,was putting a bag of it across your horse in 

 front of you, and starting off down through the field, and then 

 following the cow path right straight on down to the little old 

 creek, and then going on down to the old grist mill. There 

 one of these old mills that was owned and run by an old fellow. 



