If I had more land, would I increase my stock?  No, unless I had enough land to warrant another plant.  My feeding-grounds are filled to their capacity from a sanitary point of view, and it would be foolish to take risks for moderate returns.  If I had as much more land, I would establish another factory; but this would double my business cares without adding one item to my happiness.  As it is, the farm gives me enough to keep me keenly interested, and not enough to tire or annoy me.  So far as profits go, it is entirely satisfactory.  It feeds and shelters my family and twenty others in the colony, and also the stranger within the gates, and it does this year after year without friction, like a well-oiled machine.

Not only this.  Each year for the past four, it has given a substantial surplus to be subtracted from the original investment.  If I live to be sixty-eight years of age, the farm will be my creditor for a considerable sum.  I have bought no corn or oats since January, 1898.  The seventeen thousand bushels which I then had in my granary have slowly grown less, though there has never been a day when we could not have measured up seven thousand or eight thousand bushels.  I shall probably buy again when the market price pleases me, for I have a horror of running short; but I shall not sell a bushel, though prices jump to the sky.

I have seen the time when my corn and oats would have brought four times as much as I paid for them, but they were not for sale.  They are the raw material, to be made up in my factory, and they are worth as much to me at twenty cents a bushel as at eighty cents.  What would one think of the manager of a silk-thread factory who sold his raw silk, just because it had advanced in price?  Silk thread would advance in proportion, and how does the manager know that he can replace his silk when needed, even at the advanced price?

When corn went to eighty cents a bushel, hogs sold for $8.25 a hundred, and my twenty-cent corn made pork just as fast as eighty-cent corn would have done, and a great deal cheaper.

Once I sold some timothy hay, but it was to “discount the season,” just as I bought grain.

On July 18, 1901, a tremendous rain and wind storm beat down about forty acres of oats beyond recovery.  The next day my mowing machines, working against the grain, commenced cutting it for hay.  Before it was half cut, I sold to a livery-stable keeper in Exeter fifty tons of bright timothy for $600.  The storm brought me no loss, for the horses did quite as well on the oat hay as they ever had done on timothy, and $600 more than paid for the loss of the grain.