in fifty-four and a half hours, and to arrive at St. Louis in ninety-four hours! Ten miles an hour was an ordinary rate of speed."

Some of the mail coaches carried passengers, at four cents a mile, thus obtaining an additional profit. They were handsomely finished and upholstered vehicles, with three seats inside, accommodating nine persons, and an extra seat beside the driver, highly desirable in pleasant weather. Horses were changed at the relay stations almost without stopping. Undoubtedly a few of these old coaches are still in existence, and are in use today by circuses and Wild West shows-most interesting relics of a bygone epoch.

An enthusiastic writer has said: "The chariots of the Appian Way, drawn by the fastest horses of ancient Rome, were but a dismal cortège in comparison with the sprightly procession of stage coaches. on this American highway."

We learn that along the line of the

old Cumberland Road, in those days, might be seen as many as twenty coaches traveling in a single line. There were hotels where seventy transient guests ate breakfast in a single morning. Life along the Pike at that period was made cheerful and noisy by the echoing horns of hurrying stages, the creak and crunch of the wheels of the wagons, and the loud complaints of great herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs.

The passenger and mail coaches were operated much like the railways of today, rival companies fighting each other at times with great bitterness. In one instance a struggle between two stage coach lines brought down the charge for carrying passengers from Richmond to Cincinnati from five dollars to fifty cents. There was much rivalry in regard to speed. and a stage driver was more likely to be dismissed for slow time than for intoxication. Way bills handed to drivers often bore the words: "Make this time, or we'll find somebody who will."

The traffic over the National Road was not always unaccompanied by danger. In one case a stage coach fell over a precipice while crossing the mountains, and several of the passengers were killed. It was not an uncommon thing to be attacked by robbers-especially at night, in the passes of the wilder parts of the Alleghenies.

Says Hulbert: "At almost every mile of the road's long length, 'wagonhouses' offered hospitality to those engaged in freight traffic. Here a large room could be found, with its fireplace, before which to lay blankets on a winter's night. The most successful wagonhouses were situated on the outskirts of the larger towns, where, at more reasonable prices and in more congenial surroundings than in a crowded city inn, the rough, sturdy men, upon whom the whole West depended for over a generation for its merchandise, found hospitable entertainment for themselves and their horses. These houses were usually unpretentious frame buildings rounded by commodious yards, with generous watering troughs and barns.'

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With all its prosperity, the road was frightfully expensive to keep up. ConCongress at length grew tired of appropriating money to pay for repairs, and a bill was passed establishing a toll systemthe idea being that the government should collect the tolls, and use them for the maintenance of the highway. President Monroe, however, vetoed the bill, holding it to be unconstitutional, and it was thereupon decided to hand the road over to the states through which it ran, allowing them to take care of it. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia accepted their portions during the period from 1831 to 1834, and soon toll-houses and gates were set up at intervals of fifteen or twenty miles all along the Pike.

Each animal or vehicle that passed over the road was taxed in proportion to the amount of damage it was supposed

to do to the roadbed. Cattle paid twice as much as hogs, and the latter twice as much as sheep. The tariff on coaches and wagons varied inversely with the width of the tires. Vehicles with tires above six inches in width passed free, inasmuch as they served as rollers. Children and clergymen paid no toll; and in Pennsylvania persons hauling coal for home consumption were likewise "deadheads."

But the road was never self-supporting. The cost of repairing the Ohio division alone was $100,000 per annum, and the receipts from tolls did not approach this mark. Meanwhile the years. passed on, and, when the middle of the century arrived, a strange sound was heard in the wilderness. It was the voice of the locomotive, and it gave notice of the doom of the good old Pike. By 1852 the steam roads had taken away the bulk of travel and freight traffic from the ancient highway, and of course the mails between East and West were lost likewise.

At the present time the old Cumberland Road is in pretty fair shape, in parts. A good deal of it is in rather bad disrepair. Quite a number of the old mile-posts are still standing. There are a few toll-houses left; likewise two or three of the old taverns, and some of the buildings formerly occupied as wagon-houses. The states, having acquired their portions of the highway from the government, handed them over to the counties and townships, so that, under different local administrations, the road has met with varying fortunes. Yet, on the whole, it is today in so decent a condition of preservation that the expenditure of a moderate amount of money would restore at least some measure of its ancient glory; and, while preserving a great historical monument, it would have the additional advantage-in itself surely worth while-of furnishing a delightful route of pleasure travel for the people.

IFTY years ago the average farm consisted of about fifty acres and it took two men to tend it. The crops they raised would sell for about five hundred and fifty dollars. Last year in North Dakota eight men cropped two thousand acres and broke ready for crop one thousand more, doing it with the aid of traction engines. Their crop sold for forty-eight thousand dollars. Machinery made this thing possible.

The uncountable millions of wealth produced on our farms in 1909 would not have been possible under the ancient methods of fifty years ago. There were not enough farm laborers in the whole world to produce the millions of bushels of grains, the millions of tons of forage, sugar and other produce grown north of the Isthmus of Panama in 1909 if the old fashioned methods had been used.

When our fathers were youngsters they plowed with two-ox and two-horse plows, turning over an acre every ten hours. They planted their corn by hand and tended it with hoes. They sowed

their grain by hand from bags hung over their shoulders. They cut it with the reaping hook and the cradle and raked and bound it by hand. They threshed it on the barn floor with a flail and winnowed it in the wind with baskets. The corn was either cut and shocked to be later shucked at shucking bees or snapped into baskets and stored in bins to be husked in the winter, the husks being carefully saved and fed to the cow.

To us young fellows who are just taking charge of the farms from which our fathers are retiring, these things they used to do when they began are but as faint unreal traditions, things to be thought of and wondered at much as we do the tales of roving bands of Indians and herds of buffalo and elk here in Iowa. Those of us who can say we have done any of these things must admit they were done as a novelty rather than as the regular routine of normal farm work. For the sake of being able

to tell it, I once helped cradle, rake and bind ten acres of wheat in a stump field. I also threshed a small patch of field peas with a flail so as to learn how to swing that treacherous tool without breaking open the back of my head.

Think of two oxen yoked to a crude plow with a cast iron lay and a cast iron or wooden moldboard. They plod along slowly and awkwardly, around the field. Every time they cross the field a strip of ground ten inches wide is turned over. They plow an acre, possibly an acre and a quarter in a day. The crude plow they draw does a fairly decent job, if the ground is in good condition for plowing. In comparison with this look at an engine plowing outfit. One man drives the engine, one man watches the plows, the engine moving along sedately and unconcernedly, around and around the field. Every time it crosses the field a strip twenty-one feet wide is turned over. Such an outfit on my farm in 1908 plowed a thirty-five acre field in five hours and a half. This is better than sixty-three acres in a day. Better than sixty men and one hundred and twenty oxen would do in the old days. My father plowed with the oxen, I plow with the engine-a span of forty or fifty years. When harvest time came the neighbors would gather into one field. A line would form with the best man in front as a pacemaker. Each would swing a cumbersome "cradle" cutting a narrow strip of grain laying it in a narrow ribbon-like line with the heads out. Behind the

reapers would come the binders. With an old wooden-toothed hand rake a man would rake together enough of a strip of the cradled grain to make a bundle, lay down his rake, make a band from the grain and bind the bundle, tossing it aside and picking up his rake to gather grain for another bundle. One man could cradle about three acres and one bind about two in a day of ten hours. Behind the binders would come the shockers and among them all would move the children, carrying water to the men and gleaning the scattered heads of grain. After all the grain in the neighborhood had been cut they would stack the bundles. In the late fall and winter the grain would be threshed out on the barn floor with flails, one man threshing and cleaning eight bushels in a day. Did you ever get down on your knees and swing a flail all day long? It certainly is no fun.

In the great grain fields of this country and Canada things are done differently now. One may see a moderate sized engine hauling five or six large self-binders, each one cutting a strip eight feet wide, binding the grain into neat, uniform bundles and dropping them in bunches of five or six, handy for the shockers. Or in some sections one may see a large engine hauling a combined harvester and thresher. This machine, with five or six men to operate it, will walk right down through a field of grain and cut it, thresh it, throw the straw onto the ground and sack the grain ready for hauling to market. In this way one