a feeble existence in a community of Scotch farmers in North Carolina.”  This statement has no foundation in fact.  The order is not the out-growth directly, or even indirectly, of any pre-existing organization.  It is the result, so far as it is possible to trace impulses to their source, of the suggestion of a lady, communicated some years ago to Mr. O.H.  Kelley, the present secretary of the National Grange, and the person who has done more than any other to establish the order as it exists to-day.  The suggestion was in substance this:  Why cannot the farmers protect themselves by a national organization, as do other trades and professions?  Mr. Kelley seized the idea with enthusiasm, worked out the plan of a secret society, and traveled over the country seeking to arouse the farmers to organize for their mutual advantage.  He met with constant disappointment at first, and his family and friends implored him to abandon a project which threatened to absorb every cent he possessed, as it did all his time and energy.  But he persevered against every discouragement, and to-day he may well be proud of the results of his devotion.

The first grange was organized in St. Paul, Minnesota, and called the “North Star Grange,” and it is one of the most efficient subordinate granges in the country to this day.  Another was organized in Washington, one in Fredonia, New York, one in Ohio, another in Illinois, and a few others during the same year in different places.  This was very nearly six years ago.  Since that time they have been constantly increasing—­at first slowly, then with a rapidity unheard of in the history of secret or any other organizations in this country or the world.  We can hardly count three years since the order fairly began to grow, and now the granges are numbered by the thousand.  Ten States on the twenty-fifth of June last had over a hundred granges, and seven of these between two and five hundred.  Iowa to-day has seventeen hundred and ten, and others in process of organization.  Thirty-one of the States and Territories had subordinate or both subordinate and State granges, according to the June returns.  There were eight at that date in Canada, twenty-three in Vermont, five in New York State, three in New Jersey, two in Pennsylvania, and one in Massachusetts.  Up to this time there has been little effort made to extend the organization into the Eastern and Middle States, but at present deputies from the National Grange are being sent to these “benighted regions,” and the leaven is working finely.  To show how rapidly the order is extending it will be only necessary to add that seven hundred and one charters for new granges were issued during the single month of May.