It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley, Lewis Miller, Morgan, Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard stood a farmer's son--John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the loyalty of Steward that he became Deering's Grand Vizier. He was inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen patents to his credit. So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling out in every workday minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine. Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his conversation. "A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter," he said; "and perhaps he was right. I wasn't an inventor, that's true. All I did was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I suppose I was just a promoter." The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty. Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said: "Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?" "Yes," replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers. "Well," said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, "I want to say that you're a mighty smart man." Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone, he leaned over to Webster and said: "Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for making them. I never felt so foolish in my life." He is now eighty-one--older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times in wealth. He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world. More--they said, "Presto, change!" and the drudges of the harvest-fields stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known. Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads. And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.