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IT is usually the labor of years to get a few

representatives for a piano, because piano dealers cannot be talked into changing their lines. They have connections running back in many cases almost a lifetime. So when the New Scale Lyon & Healy Piano was placed on the market it was said that if it were taken on by forty or fifty dealers in two years it would be doing very well. But 238 dealers, which

is to say

238 Judges of Pianos

secured the agency in less than two years. Nothing approaching this record has ever been made in the history of the piano trade. Two hundred and thirty-eight dealers, in two hundred and thirtyeight cities and towns, when one-fifth that number would have been considered a success!

Here's the Reason

The Lyon & Healy Piano is pure in tone; it bears a world-known name; and it is sold from $350 up. There is nothing like it. Be sure to see it and hear it before decid.ng. Beautiful analytical catalog free. Write today.

Lavon & Healy

PIANO MAKERS

27-61 E. Adams Street, Chicago

Agencies in Germany and Russia

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OR naught stirs the blood like the crackle of the blaze

When the smoke of your fire hangs low,

And the moon hides her head in the mid-summer haze
And the yellow flames climb and grow;

For a charm is in the touch of the camp-fire's rays

That sets congenial hearts aglow.

THE TECHNICAL WORLD MAGAZINE

VOL. X V

JULY, 1911

NO. 5

AGRICULTURAL HIGHWAYMEN

A

By

HARRY F. KOHR

N Iowa farm of something more than eighty acres passed into the hands of a city man on a mortgage. He rented it and, for the first two or three years, the returns were satisfactory. Then he found the dwellings and outbuildings needed repairs which took back some of the profit. He held the land nine years and in that time had six tenants, the last of which harvested a crop of corn that barely was enough to feed his team and pay his own family expenses for the

year.

The land was in a community where values ranged around $125 an acre but it cost the owner only about $6,000 under the mortgage. As near as he could estimate his income from the land for the nine years was about $4,000, from which was deducted repairs, taxes, new fencing and other incidentals aggregating about $1,200. This left him a net income of about $2,800. Then he tried to sell the land. Many buyers looked but none bought. They wanted no "corned out" land, they said. Finally along came a young farmer who took it off his hands for $4,000. That left the first man a net income of $800 on his $6,000 investment for nine years.

A northeast Kansas farm was homesteaded forty-six years ago and worked

by the original owner for thirty-four years, until he died. His son rented the land to two brothers. They planted wheat for seven years until the yield became too small to be profitable. In the next year another tenant planted corn and he "corned" the land for five years. No record was kept of the wheat yields, but the corn-yields averaged only twentyeight bushels an acre, the first crop being thirty-five bushels and the last crop twenty-three, an average value on the farm of eleven dollars an acre. His ninety acres of corn netted him $445. The owner got the same and his profit was approximately seven per cent. The first year of his tenancy the tenant's return was about $525, while the landlord made about eight per cent. The latter rate has been about the average profit, not deducting for deterioration of farm plant and soil. Increasing land values, however, have compensated for that.

In an eastern Missouri county, the Canadian fever and the Texas fever struck the farmers in one section about the same time. As a result pretty nearly three whole townships were depopulated. The land largely passed into the hands of city investors and then into the hands of tenants. Among the farms in that section was one of 220 acres operated

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