“Now, a little more about the tillage.  I told you how we worked the surface of that ground and made it fine and nice.  After five or six years, perhaps, of this kind of work, I got to thinking if I had some tool that would stir that ground to the bottom of the plowed furrow and mix it very deeply and thoroughly, I might get still better results out of the tillage.  I happened to be in town one morning in the fall, when we had some wheat land (clover sod) plowed and prepared for wheat.  I had harrowed and rolled it and made it as nice as I could.—­It was what the neighbors would call all ready for sowing and more than ready.  In town I saw a man trying to sell a two-horse cultivator.  I think it was made in this State.  It was the first one I ever saw—­you can judge how long ago.  It was a big, heavy, cumbersome thing,—­a horse-killer.  I thought, if I only had that, I knew I could increase the fertility of our soil still more.  I hadn’t any money.  We hadn’t got far enough that there was a dollar to spare.  What did I do?  I gave my note for $50 and took that cultivator home with me.  I could have bought it for $35 in money, but I didn’t have it.  My wife didn’t say a word when I got home.  I have heard since that she did a lot of crying to think I would go in debt $50 more, and all for that thing.

“I got home about eleven o’clock and you can well suspect that I couldn’t eat any dinner that day.  I hitched up and went right to work, and told my wife I couldn’t stop for any dinner.  I rode that cultivator that day and tore up that field in a way land was never torn up in our section before.  There was nothing to do it with.  The soil would roll up and tumble over.  After going lengthwise I went crosswise.  A thousand hogs couldn’t have made it rougher.  The neighbors looked on and said that ’Terry would do ’most anything if you would only let him ride.’  The worst of it was, I really didn’t know but what they were right, and all he would get out of it was the riding.  It was a serious thing.  I had to wait until the harvest time before I could know.

“What was the result?  I got ten bushels of wheat more per acre than had ever grown on the land before, without any manure or fertilizer having been applied since it grew the previous crop in the rotation.  Clover had been grown.  It was a clover sod.  I didn’t know how much came from the clover and how much from the tillage.  I didn’t care, they went together to get that result.  I asked some of the old settlers how much had been grown there per acre during their recollection.  They said twenty-three bushels was the most they had known.  I got thirty-three.  The neighbors said, ’It happened so, you can’t do it again.’  You know how they talk, to make out nothing can be done with an old farm.  I was interested in doing it again.  I paid that note and had a large margin of profit left, you see, out of the extra wheat.  It all came right.