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This was the end of harvest drudgery. Sickles, cradles, rakers, binders, each in turn was set free. From this time on, all that was needed was a man or a good-sized boy to drive the team and to manage the machine. The 5 machine cut the grain, bound it into sheaves, collected these on a carrier, and dropped them to the ground ready to be placed in shocks—all without the aid of the human hand.

There was one defect in the wire binder, which proved 10 to be its undoing. The wire mixed with the straw got into the mouths of the cattle and at times killed them. Pieces of wire mixed in the grain cut the hands of those handling it. So, while the farmers were delighted with the selfbinder, they disliked the wire.

15 At the very time the wire binder seemed to be most. secure in its position in the harvester world, John Appleby, of Wisconsin, took to William Deering, the chief maker of the Marsh harvester, an invention which he claimed could tie a knot more quickly and more securely than was ever 20 done by a sailor.

Deering knew the dislike of the farmers for wire.

"Here," he said to himself, "is the device to make the perfect binder, a binder that will use twine." And he forthwith accepted the new device without the slightest 25 hesitation.

During the winter of 1880, word went about among the makers of binders that "Deering is crazy over a twine binder. Why, he is making three thousand of them." Before the harvest of 1880 was over, the shoe was on the 30 other foot; for Deering not only made three thousand twine binders, but he sold them at a profit of one hundred thousand dollars.

With one of these machines, having almost human skill, a sixteen-year-old boy can harvest as much grain as a dozen strong men could harvest with the cradle or even forty with the sickle.

The final step in the improvement of the reaper was the 5 invention of the complete harvester, which is really a harvester and thrasher in one machine. The complete harvesters are used, in our own country, chiefly on the Pacific Coast. They are great machines drawn by thirty to forty horses or by an engine. They cut a swath from 10 twenty to twenty-five feet wide, and a single machine will cut, thrash, clean, and sack from seventy-five to a hundred acres of grain in a day, all at a cost of not more than forty cents an acre.

Chiefly because of the reaper, the amount of wheat 15 produced in the world has increased by leaps and bounds, until it now amounts to about four billions of bushels a year.

Great Inventors and Their Inventions.

1. Outline this article under topics like those of the preceding story of cotton. (See page 123.)

2. Name in order the various machines used to harvest wheat. 3. Bring to class any pictures you can find of any of the kinds of machines described.

4. If you have seen wheat harvested, tell how it is done.

5. What are the wheat-producing states of our country? 6. What foods do you eat that are made from wheat?

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Where in mist the rock is hiding,
And the sharp reef lurks below,
And the white squall smites in summer,
And the autumn tempests blow;
Where, through gray and rolling vapor,
From evening unto morn,

A thousand boats are hailing,
Horn answering unto horn.

There we'll drop our lines and gather

Old Ocean's treasures in,
Where'er the mottled mackerel
Turns up a steel-dark fin.
The sea's our field of harvest,
Its scaly tribes our grain;
We'll reap the teeming waters

As at home they reap the plain !

In the darkness as in daylight,
On the water as on land,

God's eye is looking on us,

And beneath us is His hand!
Death will find us soon or later,
On the deck or in the cot;
And we cannot meet him better

Than in working out our lot.

1. Where are these fishermen bound for? What kind of ships have they? What are some of the perils they may meet?

2. Where are some famous fishing grounds near the United States? What kinds of fish are caught?

3. Select from the poem a list of words that have to do with the sea.

MAPLE SUGAR

BY J. G. DORRANCE

S the first hunters, the first woodsmen, and the first builders in the American wilderness were Indians, so also were the first sugar makers. The Indian went about his sugar making in ways quite different from those 5 we see and know to-day. With the coming of the first thaws in March, when the nights were still frosty and cold but the days were warm and the snow beginning to melt slowly away from beneath the trees, the red man began to make ready for gathering the sap.

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Then, as now, there were several kinds of maples in the forests the hard, or sugar, maple; the red and silver maples; and one or two others of less importance. All of these have sweet sap, but only that of the hard maple contains enough sugar to be of any practical value. So the trees which the Indian selected for his use were large, full-crowned sugar maples, trees that had been growing for many years and were full of sap.

On the sunny side of each tree he made a deep, slanting cut with his hatchet or tomahawk, and into the lower end 20 of this he drove a curved piece of bark or a hollow reed. This carried the slowly running sap to a small dish of clay or birch bark placed on a stone at the foot of the tree. As the dishes became full, the sap was emptied into large troughs of elm bark, troughs which were sometimes large enough to hold fifty or a hundred gallons of this sweet stuff.

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