an unexpected sea of
troubles. There was not a flaw in the binders. They were cutting and tying
the grain with the skill of 60,000 men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand
farmers swore that it was too high.

Twine was an item that they had never in their lives bought in large
quantities. To pay fifty dollars--the price of a horse--for mere string
that was used once and then flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like
buying daily papers by the thousand, or shoe-laces by the ton. And so it
came about that though Deering had reduced the cost of wheat ten per
cent., he got little thanks for his superb machines--nothing but a loud
and angry roar for better and cheaper twine.

Deering moved against this new array of difficulties with quiet and
inexorable persistence. There were only three binder-twine makers in the
United States, and all warned him that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.
But Deering pushed on until he met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of
Philadelphia. From the unassuming way in which Deering stated his needs,
Fitler concluded that the order would be a small one.

"What you want," he said, "is a single strand twine, which cannot be made
without a new line of machinery. I regret to say that I cannot afford to
do this for one customer."

"Well," said Deering, "I think I may need a good deal in the long run,
though I wish to begin with not more than ten car-loads."

Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was dazed, but only for a moment. It
was his chance and he knew it. Years afterward, he was fond of telling how
he "made a million-dollar deal with William Deering in two minutes."

Thus, whatever Deering touched, he improved. He became the servant of the
harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as sporting millionaires spent
fortunes on their horses. It was his one extravagance. In his later
endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass twine,
$35,000 on paper, $43,000 on straw, and failed. Then he spent $165,000 on
flax and succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort of paymaster to a small
mob of inventors who had new ideas or who thought they had. There was one
very able inventor--John Stone--who actually drew his salary and expenses
every week for twenty years, until he had perfected a corn-picking
machine. From first to last, Deering spent "perhaps more than two millions
of dollars" on improvements, according to one of his closest friends.

The fact is that the Appleby binder had tra