orge lost his temper and "went up in the air!"

Under any conditions treading or flailing out wheat was a slow and
unsatisfactory process and, as Washington grew great quantities of this
grain, he was alert for a better method. We know that he made inquiries
of Arthur Young concerning a threshing machine invented by a certain
Winlaw and pictured and described in volume six of the _Annals_, and in
1790 he watched the operation of Baron Poelnitz's mill on the Winlaw
model near New York City. This mill was operated by two men and was
capable of threshing about two bushels of wheat per hour--pretty slow
work as compared with that of a modern thresher. And the grain had to be
winnowed, or passed through a fan afterward to separate it from
the chaff.

Finally in 1797 he erected a machine on plans evolved by William Booker,
who came to Mount Vernon and oversaw the construction. Next April he
wrote to Booker that the machine "has by no means answered your
expectations or mine," At first it threshed not quite fifty bushels per
day, then fell to less than twenty-five, and ultimately got out of
order before five hundred bushels had been threshed, though it had used
up two bands costing between eight and ten pounds. Booker replied that
he had now greatly improved his invention and would come to Mount Vernon
and make these additions, but whether or not he ever did so I have
failed to discover.

By 1793 the burden of the estate had become so heavy that Washington
decided to rent all of it except the Mansion House Farm and accordingly
he wrote to Arthur Young telling his desire in the hope that Englishmen
might be found to take it over. One man, Parkinson, of whom more
hereafter, came to America and looked at one of the farms, but decided
not to rent it. Washington's elaborate description of his land in his
letter to Young, with an accompanying map, forms one of our best sources
of information regarding Mount Vernon, so that we may be grateful that
he had the intention even though nothing came of it. The whole of Mount
Vernon continued to be cultivated as before until the last year of his
life when he rented Dogue Run Farm to his nephew, Lawrence Lewis.

As a public man he was anxious to improve the general state of American
agriculture and in his last annual message to Congress recommended the
establishment of a board of agriculture to collect and diffuse
information and "by premiums and small pecuniary aids to encourage and
assi