ee I wasn't a little fool after all."

Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was
a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age--in
1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man
who put money back of the boy's invention. He stood behind it to the
extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless
speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a
little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited
into a thousand.

When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back,
Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in
Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one
occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth
even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash
of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and
thought only of guns.

Yet while he lay in the trenches at Vicksburg, he whittled out a new
device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him
$500 for it, and then, before Appleby's eyes, sold a half interest in it
for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him
an inventor for life.

Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867
he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie,
Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for
several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the
spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the
machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed
these, and one man--Dr. E. D. Bishop--pulled a roll of money from his
pocket and handed it to the inventor.

"Take this," he said, "and make me a partner. Your invention will be a
world's wonder some day."

All told, Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on Appleby's genius, for which, twelve
years later, he drew out $80,000. This was the first of the many
incidental fortunes scattered right and left in the path of the
self-binder, which began in 1880, to sweep forward as gloriously as the
triumphal car of a Roman emperor.

As for William Deering--the modest manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879
joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had he sold the 3,000 self-binders
than he found himself floundering neck deep in