“Let us go back once more.  The first year that I moved onto that farm, the first fall, we had nine cows, and I wanted to save all of the manure.  Now, there wasn’t an experimental station in the land.  I didn’t know anything about the potassium or nitrogen in the liquid manure, but I had seen where it dropped on the land and how the grass grew.  I thought it was plant food, and our land was hungry.  I said, I must try and save this manure, and not have it wasted.  I hadn’t a dollar.  What did I do?  There was an old stable there that would hold ten cows.  It was in terrible shape.  It had a plank floor that was all broken.  I tore it out.  I hauled some blue clay.  I filled the stable four or five inches deep with the blue clay, wet it, pounded it down, shaped it off and got it level, fixed it up around the sides, saucer shape, so it would hold water.  Then I laid down some old boards (I couldn’t buy new ones), and put in a lot of straw there and put my cows in.  I saved all that manure the first year, all that liquid.  I had twice as much, probably more, from the same number of cows as had been saved on that farm before, and it was much more valuable.  That was the beginning the first winter, when I hadn’t anything.

“For the horse stable I went to town and found some old billboards.  It was new lumber, but had been used for billboards.  After the circus the owner offered to sell the boards cheap, and to trust me.  He was a carpenter, and he jointed them.  We put them crosswise on the old plank floor, and when they got wet they swelled and became practically water tight.  I even crawled under and saw that there was no liquid manure dropping down there.  I drew sawdust and used for bedding.  I saved the liquid of the horse stable.  I didn’t know it was worth three times as much, pound for pound, as the solid.  I didn’t know it was worth two times as much in the cow stable, pound for pound, as the solid.  I found it out by experience.

“Now, when I was in town, before going on this farm, I worked for S. Straight & Son, the then great cheese and butter kings of the Western Reserve.  I was getting over a thousand dollars a year in their office.  They didn’t want me to leave at all, but my wife and I took a notion to be independent, to work for ourselves, and we bought this old farm.  We had a chance to work for ourselves, all right.  The first year we worked from early in the morning until nine or ten o’clock at night, and then we tumbled into bed, too tired to think, to get up and do it over again.  I worked in the field, taking out stumps and doing something, as long as I could see, and then helped my wife to milk.  We would get our supper along about nine or ten o’clock.  At the end of the year we had not one single dollar, after paying our interest and taxes,—­not one dollar to show for our work.  Do you wonder we were pretty discouraged?