"Thirty-six years ago last fall," he said, "my wife and I bought and moved onto the farm where we now reside. We went on there in debt $3,700, on which we had to pay seven per cent. interest. I had one horse, an old one, and it had the heaves, a one-horse harness, and a one-horse wagon, three tillage implements, and nine cows that were paid for; and a wife and two babies, but no money. Now that was the condition in which we started on this farm, thirty-six years ago, in debt heavily, and no money; but that is not the worst of it. If it had been as good soil as you have in some parts of this State, we should have been all right. How about the soil? For sixty years farmers had been running it down until it could scarcely produce anything. We had a tenant on the place one year, before we could arrange to move on, after we got it. They got eight bushels of wheat per acre, and he said to me, 'That is a pretty good yield, don't you think, for this old farm?' Oh, friends, I didn't think so;--never ought to have bought this farm;--didn't know any better,--born and brought up in town, my father a minister, and I thought a farm was a farm. But I learned some things after awhile. That tenant mowed over probably forty acres of land. (We originally bought one hundred and twenty-five.) He put the hay in the barn. It measured twelve tons. Half of that was weeds. Most of the hay he cut down in a swale. There wasn't anything worth considering on the upland. That was the condition of the land. "How about the buildings? The house had been used about sixty years, an old story-and-a-half house. Dilapidated, oh, my! Every time the rain came, we had to take every pan upstairs and set it to catch the water. We did not have any money to put on more shingles. It was out of the question, we couldn't do it. How about the dooryard? It was a cow yard. They used it for a milking yard, for years and years. You can imagine how it looked. The barn was in such condition that cattle were just as well off outdoors as in. The roof leaked terribly. The tenants had burned up the doors and any boards they could take off easily. They were too lazy to take off any that came off hard. They burned all the fences in reach.