“The farm we moved onto was the old Sanford homestead.  Old Mr. Sanford lived there and brought up a large family.  I think five of them boys.  Every one of these boys left the farm just as soon as they could get away.  There wasn’t anything in farming for them.  After we had been at work a dozen years or more and got things going nicely, they came back (one of them lives in Connecticut) and visited the old homestead.  I remember Lorenzo said, ’It seems like a miracle.  I don’t know how you did it.  We worked from daylight to dark, from one year’s end to another, and never had anything.  We boys used to be promised a holiday on the Fourth of July if the corn was all hoed.  That was all we got.  How on earth have you done these things?’

“Friends, there were three farms we bought.  Old Mr. Sanford didn’t know anything about but one.  There was the air and the soil and there was the subsoil.  He had been working only the soil, plowing it three or four inches deep, scratching it over, taking what came, and every year less and less came.  The land had run down until the surface had quit producing.  We took the same soil, put in clover and took the fertility out of the upper farm, the air, and out of the lower one, the subsoil, and put it into the second one.  We plowed the surface soil a little deeper and deeper until we got it eight or nine inches deep instead of four.  We worked it more and more, setting more and more of the available plant food in the soil free.  That is how we did it.

“I say ‘we’ advisedly, because, friends, if I hadn’t had a wife fully able and willing to do her part, and more, I would not have this story to tell.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

AN AWAKENING DREAM

“THE chores are all done,” said Mrs. Johnston, as Percy began to take down his heavy work-coat about nine o’clock that evening.

“You ought not to have done them,” he chided as he slipped his arm around her and drew her to the sofa.

“Tell me about the Institute,” she said, stroking the hair from his forehead.

He told her of the professors who were there from the University and briefly reported the addresses he had heard.

“And I verily believe,” he added, “that if Terry were to wake up some morning and find himself located on the “Barrens” of the Highland Rim of Tennessee, he would start out with the firm conviction that all he would need to do to become a successful farmer there would be to sow clover and then ’work the land for all that’s in it.’  But, after all, it is not so strange, perhaps, that one who has himself discovered and then utilized the power of clover and tillage to restore and increase the productive power of land rich in limestone, phosphorus and all other essential mineral plant food, should jump to the fixed and final conclusion that the same system of treatment is all that is needed to make any and all land productive.  The fact that Terry’s land (if equal to the nearby New York land) contained two thousand three hundred pounds of phosphorus in the plowed soil of an acre when he began to work it out, while the soil of the Tennessee “Barrens” contains only about one hundred pounds, does not disturb him or modify his opinion so long as his personal experience is limited to his own land.