ny, and also the
stranger within the gates, and it does this year after year without
friction, like a well-oiled machine.

Not only this. Each year for the past four, it has given a substantial
surplus to be subtracted from the original investment. If I live to be
sixty-eight years of age, the farm will be my creditor for a
considerable sum. I have bought no corn or oats since January, 1898. The
seventeen thousand bushels which I then had in my granary have slowly
grown less, though there has never been a day when we could not have
measured up seven thousand or eight thousand bushels. I shall probably
buy again when the market price pleases me, for I have a horror of
running short; but I shall not sell a bushel, though prices jump to the
sky.

I have seen the time when my corn and oats would have brought four times
as much as I paid for them, but they were not for sale. They are the raw
material, to be made up in my factory, and they are worth as much to me
at twenty cents a bushel as at eighty cents. What would one think of the
manager of a silk-thread factory who sold his raw silk, just because it
had advanced in price? Silk thread would advance in proportion, and how
does the manager know that he can replace his silk when needed, even at
the advanced price?

When corn went to eighty cents a bushel, hogs sold for $8.25 a hundred,
and my twenty-cent corn made pork just as fast as eighty-cent corn would
have done, and a great deal cheaper.

Once I sold some timothy hay, but it was to "discount the season," just
as I bought grain.

On July 18, 1901, a tremendous rain and wind storm beat down about forty
acres of oats beyond recovery. The next day my mowing machines, working
against the grain, commenced cutting it for hay. Before it was half cut,
I sold to a livery-stable keeper in Exeter fifty tons of bright timothy
for $600. The storm brought me no loss, for the horses did quite as well
on the oat hay as they ever had done on timothy, and $600 more than paid
for the loss of the grain.

During the first three years of my experiment hogs were very
low,--lower, indeed, than at any other period for forty years. It was
not until 1899 that prices began to improve. During that year my sales
averaged $4.50 a hundred. In 1900 the average was $5.25, in 1901 it was
$6.10, and in 1902 it was just $7. It will be readily appreciated that
there is more profit in pork at seven cents a pound than at three and a
half cents; but h