Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders. He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes will do as much for the South as his self-binder did for the West. And it was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life. In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy machinery, instead of minding his work. One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper. "How do you like the work, Jack?" asked the farmer. "I don't like it," said Jack, "and what's more, I believe I can invent a machine to tie these bundles." "Ho! ho!" laughed the farmer. "You little fool, you can't invent anything." Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard. "Haven't I seen you before?" he asked. "Yes, sir," replied the old man. "I was the farmer who gave you your first job." "Well," said Appleby, "you see 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.