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Show There was the wheat as high a9,,thc H backs of his oxen. One man went M alongside three yoke of oxen, one man M driving and an American binder doing M the work. A little beyond this was another field and I don't think I have H ever seen quite so many clovers mixed together, the crimson clover M and the red clover and the alsikc clov- fl cr and then the alfalfa, some fields were alfalfa entirely. Here were men mowing with old fashioned scythes with a short' H straight blade, very unlike those used H in America in former days. I asked fl the man to let me try it, but found 1 H could do nothing with it, although 1 H have- mowed many an hour with the H long curved scythe that was used in H this country. Then behind the mow- H ers came the women and they raked H the grass together in little bunches H and tied the bunches and set them up H in little shocks. Wonderful grass it H was; I have never seen anything like H it in my life and the green fields and H the fragrant clover; it covered, may- H be, 20 or 30 acres, and it was of mar- H vclous growth. fl "The farm hands lived in little H stone houses which they owned; many M of them had lived on this farm all H their lives and their fathers before H them. They did not own the land; H that belonged to the farmer, but they H owned their houses and did the work M by the job. This was an unusually H large farm, about 30,000 acres; it had H an immense barn and I saw the cows M were pastured and I saw where the H 2000 sheep were kept. fl "Up you drove through a big, wide H gateway to the castle, erected cen- '- H turics ago, passing the big stable, H where they had those wonderful cows that made the milk and cream for the M Paris markets, to the north end of it, H which was the residence part, the rcsl- H deuce of the man who owned the cas- tic and the farm. He was worth prob- M bly $13,000,000. He asked" me into H the house and there I found a lady M that spoke English ' I spent the H afternoon in going through that ma- H nificcnt old castle with its fine art gal- H lcrics and elegant libraries, its collec- M tions of armor a thousand years old, M in the grand old halls, with the win- M dows down to the floor; but there M was one peculiarity about those win.- M dows; every window on every side H of the castle looked out on the same M thing and what do y6u think that was? ifl (Continued on page 15,) " p M , o SOIL FERTILITY. (Continued from page 7.) They could sec the cows go out to pasture in the morning in those marvellous mar-vellous fields and tfiey could see the sheep at play in the fields beyond, but from every window they could see a pile of manure the greatest pile I have ever seen; two piles, each one as big as this room, sprinkled over with some composition to deodorize it. Not a very aesthetic object, but one worth a million dollars to that old Frenchman and I am sure that every time he looked at it he said: 'How proud I am of this pile of manure; it feeds my family; it feeds my laborers and my cattle by feeding the land; it is one of my greatest treasurers.' "I finally got away from these people peo-ple and went out into the fields again and pressed my foot into the soil and it ground out rich and brittle and I said to myself: 'Here is land that was old a thousand years ago and is still more fertile than anything you have ever seen, while out in Ohio you think that new soil is worn out.' And I said to myself, 'Joe Wing, loarn a lesson from that old Frenchman's manure ma-nure pile and go home and put it into practice on your land and some day i 1 in 1 your land will be so much more fertile fer-tile that there will be no comparison between the two." The dairyman has a lot of this mulch and it means a great source . of wealth to him when properly taken care of and distributed on his fields. Instead of his farm becoming impoverished im-poverished in a few years it will increase in-crease in productiveness. |