When, at his invitation, I climbed up beside him, I was delighted with the first impression of the man. In the prime of life and of very compact figure, his small dark eyes, that were the brighter for contrast with a swarthy complexion, moved with an alertness that denoted energy and force. Individuality was stamped upon him and showed itself in the trick of the eye, and in every tone of his voice. He asked me where I was going, and said that he could take me five miles over the road toward Jefferson, “unless,” he added, “you’ll stop at my farm and work for me.” I thanked him, but said that I would keep to the road for the present, and then I changed the subject to the reaper. It was of the make of the factory in which, for eight weeks, during the previous winter, I worked as a hand-truckman, and very full of association it was as I looked upon it in changed surroundings. Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then stacked them under the eaves over the platform; scores of such binders we had transferred from the dark warehouses to the waiting freight-cars below. Equally familiar looked the “wider,” and the receptacle for twine, and the “binder,” and the “bar.” I told the farmer that I had been a hand in the factory where his machine was made, and he appeared interested in the account of the vast industry where two thousand men work together in so perfect a system of the division of labor, that a complete reaper, like his own, is turned out in periods of a few minutes in every working day. He, too, was autobiographical in his turn. His history was one of the innumerable examples at the West of substantial success under the comparatively simple advantages of good health and an unbounded capacity for work. From an early home in Pennsylvania, he drifted, as a mere boy, into Indiana, and “living out” there to a farmer, he remained with him for five years. Shrewd enough to see his opportunity, and to seize it, he made himself master of farming, and became so indispensable to his employer that he was soon making more than twenty dollars a month and his keep the year around. At the end of five years he had saved a little more than eight hundred dollars, which he invested in a mortgage on good land. Then came his _Wanderjahre_. He went to Colorado, worked for two years on a sheep ranch, and looked for chances of fortune. They were not wholly wanting, but the prospects were distant, and, rather than endure longer the lonely life of the frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and bought his present farm at the rate of ten dollars an acre. For twelve years he had lived and worked upon it. Under improvement, and the growth of population about it, its value had risen threefold, for he had recently added to it a neighboring farm, for which he had to pay at the rate of thirty dollars an acre.