money was borrowed of a friend in Detroit, secured on a life insurance policy.  We did not let anybody know how hard up we really were.  My wife rode to town (to church when she went), in the same wagon we hauled out manure in, for a time.  Time and again she had been to town when she said she could not do without something any longer and came back without it.  Credit was good.  We could have bought it.  We didn’t dare to.

“Now, friends, a dozen years from the time we started on that farm, under these circumstances, we were getting from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty bushels of merchantable potatoes per acre right along—­not a single year, but on the average—­varying, of course, somewhat with the season.  We were getting from four to five tons of clover hay in a season, from two cuttings, of course, per acre.  We were getting from thirty-three to thirty-eight bushels of wheat per acre, not one year, but for five years we averaged thirty-five bushels per acre, and right on that same farm.  No fertility had been brought on to it, practically, from the outside.  A man without any money, in debt for the land $3,700, was able to do this.  Now, how did he do it?  That is the question I have been asked to talk upon.  I have told you briefly something like what we have accomplished.  I might say, further, the old house I told you that we lived in for fourteen years while we were building up the fertility of this soil, we sold for $10, after we got through with it.  It is now a horse barn on the farm of our next neighbor and has been covered over.

“Eleven years from the time we started we paid the last $500 of our debt, all dug out of that farm, not $25 from any other source.  Thirteen years from the time we started, we carried off the first prize of $50 offered by the State Board of Agriculture of Ohio, for the best detailed report of the best and most profitably managed small farm in the state,—­only thirteen years from the time we started on that rundown land, and no fertility brought from the outside; without any money; and meanwhile we had to live.

“Now I had arranged with the tenant the first year, before we went on there, to seed down a certain field.  It had been under the plow for some time.  I wanted it seeded so I could have some land to mow and he seeded half of it.  It was only a little lot, about five acres.  He seeded half with timothy and left the other half.  That was his way of doing things, anyway.  When we moved onto the farm later I naturally wanted to finish that seeding and get that field in some sort of shape for mowing.  I went to my next neighbor, who lives there yet, and asked him what I had better use.  I didn’t know anything, practitically, about farming, and he advised me to try some clover seed.  He said:  ’So far as I know, none was ever sown on that farm.  They have sowed timothy everlastingly, everybody, because it is cheap.  I knew timothy wouldn’t grow there to amount to anything If I were in your place I would try some clover.’