ear-corn
for the pigs. He can lift his voice and call the cattle from a mile
away--and does at times. He bought a section of Red River railroad land
from himself and put it in his wife's name. The land was swampy, covered
with swale, and the settlers had all passed it up as worthless. Mr. Hill
cut the swale, tiled the land, and grew a crop that put the farmers to
shame. He then started a tile-factory in the vicinity, and sold it to
the managers--two young fellows from the East--as soon as they proved
that they had the mental phosphorus and the commercial jamake.

The agricultural schools have always interested Mr. Hill. That which
brings a practical return and makes men self-supporting and self-reliant
is his eternal hobby. Four years in college is to him too much. "You can
get what you want in a year, or not at all," he says. He has sent
hundreds of farmers' boys to the agricultural colleges for short terms.
Imagine what this means to boys who have been born on a farm and have
never been off it--to get the stimulus of travel, lectures, books, and
new sights and scenes! In this work, often the boys did not know who
their benefactor was. The money was supplied by some man in the near-by
town--that was all. These boys, inoculated at Mr. Hill's expense with
the education microbe, have often been a civilizing leaven in new
communities in the Dakotas, Montana and Washington. In Eighteen Hundred
Eighty-eight the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba became a part of
the Great Northern.

Hill had reached out beyond the wheat country into the arid zone, which
was found to be not nearly so arid as we thought. The Black Angus and
the White-Faced Herefords followed, and where once were only scattering
droves of skinny pintos, now were to be seen shaggy-legged Shire horses,
and dappled Percherons.

The bicycle had come and also the trolley-car, and Calamity Jake
prophesied that horses would soon be valuable only for feeding
Frenchmen. But Jacob was wrong. Good horses steadily increased in value.
And today, in spite of automobiles and aeroplanes, the prices of horses
have aviated. Jim Hill's railroads last year hauled over three hundred
thousand horses out of Montana to the Eastern States.

* * * * *

The clothes that a man wears, the house that he builds for his family,
and the furnishings that he places therein, are all an index of his
character. Mr. Hill's mansion on Summit Avenue, Saint Paul,