"Get ap!" said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string. [Illustration: AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES, IN FRANCE] The emperor was radiant with delight. Being somewhat of an expert himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain and cutting it without the waste of a handful while the women were trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in the stubbled field. Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women's side when Sam Dennis said "Whoa!" to his horses, and condescended to enter into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers. For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally, although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of the harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago, earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish. Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company. "Bismarck sat in his carriage," said Haney, "but he ordered his driver to follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he made a sign to me to stop." "Let me see the thing that ties the knot," he said. "I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave him a bound sheaf, so that he could see a knot that had been tied by the machine. The old man studied it for some time. Then he asked me--'Can these machines be made in Germany?' "'No, your Excellency,' I said. 'They can be made only in America.' "'Well,' said Bismarck, speaking very good English, 'you Yankees are ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.'"