“I builded better then than I knew.  I had no idea what the result was going to be.  When it was all ready, I sowed Hungarian grass seed.  I wish you could have seen the crop.  It grew four and a half or five feet high, as thick as it could stand on the land.  I believe if I had thrown my straw hat, it would have staid on the top.  It was enormous for that land.  I had four big loads to the acre.  You know what you can put on a load of Hungarian.  When I went by the owner’s house with those loads and took them to our barn, he was out there and he looked awfully sour.  That man, to my knowledge, had never grown half as much to the acre since I had known of his being on the land, probably never more than one-third as much.  Old run-out timothy sod; no manure, no fertilizer, nothing but the work,—­this spring fallowing.  I enjoyed the matter more, because he had told some of the neighbors he had got the start of that town fellow; I would never see five dollars an acre back, out of the land.  That was his opinion of what I could raise.

“Hay was hay that fall, after a dry season.  We live in a dairy section.  The cows were there and had to be fed.  I got $18 a ton for that hay in our barn, something like $70 per acre.  I think the laugh was on the other side.  That was my first awakening, along this line of tillage.  Didn’t know how it came about, didn’t know anything about the fertility locked up in the soil, just the plain facts.  I did so and so, and got such and such results.  The next year Charlie Harlow, still living there, said, ’I wish you would put in some Hungarian for me this spring.’  I said, ’What part of the crop?—­I should want two-thirds.’  He said he had an offer for half.  I said, ‘Then let him have it.’  He replied, ’One-third of what you will raise is more than half of what he will raise.’  He saw what I did on his brother-in-law’s farm.

“The following year I had a piece of land ready to grow corn, I had cleared out the stumps and done the best I could to get it in shape.  I plowed it just as soon as the ground was dry enough, about the first of April, that is.  I worked it every little while just as nearly as I could as the Hungarian land had been worked, I harrowed and rolled, let it rest a while, then harrowed and rolled.  I kept it up until my next door neighbor, Mr. Croy, had planted his corn, and it was four inches high and growing pretty well.  Ours wasn’t planted.  A neighbor came and said, ’I am sorry for you, Terry, you don’t know what you are about.  You are fooling away your time.  Your corn ought to have been in before this.’  I was harrowing and rolling.  I was determined to see whether I could do it over again.  Some of the neighbors said it couldn’t be done again.

“The fourth or fifth of June—­too late, ordinarily, to plant corn with us—­I put in the crop.  I wish you could have seen it grow!  It came up and grew from the word ‘Go.’  In four weeks it was ahead of any corn about.  It went ahead of my neighbor’s corn that was three or four inches high when ours was planted.  We had a crop that, the farm in the condition that it was, was considered as something remarkable.  They couldn’t account for it, neither could I. All I knew was I had been working the ground so and so and getting such and such results.