motion from a horse-power and laboriously grinding the straw as if the work were a painful operation, is but a distant relation to the modern separator and its accompaniments as used to-day on the prairies. The separator itself is equipped with a cleaning apparatus that leaves the grain free from chaff or dirt; the straw is taken away through a tube-like stacker that places it wherever wanted. The tractionengine has wide wheels, and the driver's seat is covered with striped awning when desirable. It is the prairie automobile, and when a move is made from one farm to another it takes the whole outfit of separator, cook-wagon, water-wagon, and errand-wagon behind it and proceeds at leisurely pace over the prairie roads. Its progress through the towns in the dead of night frightens children, sets the dogs to barking, and makes the old folks dream that a freight-train has left the track and is steaming up the street.

The cook-wagon is a house on wheels, with gasoline stove, an extension table, and a generous cupboard. Arrived at the farm, it is taken to the lee of a hedge or under the trees along the creek, if such there be, and becomes the home of the crew. The cook may be a man with skill in that direction, or the wife and daughter of the owner of the machine may assist him in this department. The first meal is served at daybreak, the second at noon, and the third when darkness is coming on, for the whistle of the engine does not sound its welcome summons to stop work until sunset. There is plenty of whole some food-meats, pies, and bread-and there is no trifling with appetite. With the prairie breeze sweeping through the screened door of the eating-house, and the hungry men gathered around the wellheaped table, the picture is a pleasant one.

The business of running a threshing outfit is one that requires considerable capital and some ability as a manager. The first cost of the separator and engine is about $2,500. The demand for this machinery was such that ten outfits were sold in each of a dozen Kansas counties during the present season. Along with the machine there must be taken six pitchers, who get $1.50 a day; two feeders, who, when needed, are paid $2; an engineer, who receives the highest wages, $2.50 to $3 a day; and a water-hauler,

who takes the tank on wheels to a convenient windmill or stream to be filled for the use of the engine. The feeders stand at the hungry mouth of the machine and send the grain down among the whirling cogs and teeth, evenly and steadily. If the grain is in bundles, there stands on either side of the feeder a band-cutter, who, with a sharp knife, severs the twine holding the straw together. A boy of fifteen to nineteen can easily do this.

The owner of the farm takes care of the straw as it leaves the machine, and must have two or three men for this. Many a farmer's boy has served a perspiring apprenticeship in the drudgery of life at the upper end of a straw-carrier, fighting to keep back the dust-laden stream that came pouring with what seemed to be malicious persistence out of the whirlpool below.

The wheat-the reddish-yellow treasure for which all the toil has been performed-at last is in sight. Out of a tiny spout well to the rear of the machine it pours its welcome rivulet, falling into the farmer's wagon until the box is full to the brim. Then with the precious burden the wagon is driven to the granary or to the elevator in town, and the farmer breathes a long sigh of relief that he has come to the end of the devious journey from seed-time to harvest.

The thresher has two scales of payment for his work-six cents a bushel if he and his men are boarded by the farmer, and seven cents if he has his own cook-wagon, the latter being the usual arrangement. A good machine can turn out 800 to 1,000 bushels of wheat a day under favorable conditions. Rain, high winds, breakdowns, and other things cause delays. It is a great source of joy to all concerned when the machine hums along from morning to night without trouble. If the threshing is done in the field immediately after harvesting, the bundles are brought from the shocks to the machine as the threshing goes on, and then more men and teams are needed, making it all a busy scene. Some of the newer machines have attachments for cutting the bands of the bound wheat, and other improvements are added each season.

The long wait for a machine, sometimes necessary, has caused a demand in the West for machines that are less expensive,

and so-called "baby separators" are being tried. A farmer can afford to own one for his personal use. Then, some neighborhoods have formed farmers' associations and have purchased threshing outfits, each member of the company taking his turn at using it. This is not common, the old method being generally in use. A machine can in the run of a season thresh from 60,000 to 70,000 bushels of grain, much depending, however, on the yield per acre, the abundance and weight of

usually to assist in a light part of the labor, such as driving a header-wagon. There is help enough without them. Likewise the tales of harvest revelries are

generally imaginative. After working twelve hours in the heat of a prairie summer day, there is only one thing that appeals to a harvest hand-a place to sleep undisturbed.

"How did it go?" and "What'd ye get?" are the two questions that pass when farmers meet after the harvest.

the straw, the condition of the stacks, and the weather.

The danger of fire is always with the threshers. It may be from an imperfection in the engine, or it may be from some carelessly scattered coals; the tinderlike stubble or the vast pile of straw welcomes the blaze, and in a moment there is surging flame with clouds of smoke as the only evidence of the wealth that once covered the soil. Frequently the machine also is burned, though the engineer endeavors to couple to it his obedient but clumsy motive power and take it out of danger.

The stories of women working in the harvest-fields of the prairies are mostly fiction. If occasionally one does so, it is

They are at the bottom of the greater question, "Does wheat-raising pay?" Not always nor everywhere. This year in most parts of the West it paid handsomely. The average cost of planting and harvesting an acre of wheat, exclusive of the use of the land, is about seven dollars. If, as was the case on hundreds of farms this season, there is a production of twenty-five bushels to the acre, and it sells for sixty cents, the usual price during the summer at the local markets of the West, there is a profit of $800 on each hundred acres. When it is not one hundred but a thousand acres that is harvested, the reward in a good wheat year is considerable. There are quarter-sections of central and

western Kansas and of Oklahoma that this year raised enough wheat to pay for themselves. Fields that went thirty bushels to the acre, and some that did even better, were numerous, and then the farmer was certain that wheat was a good crop for him to raise. He forgot that there ever was a wheat failure, and was convinced that he could make a success every time.

But there is another side.

A farmer came into my office one day during July and was led to talk of his efforts. "We are getting along all right this year," he remarked, "but I don't like to think of what we went through.'

By small crops, do you mean?" "Not small crops no crops. One year I got sixty bushels of wheat from fifty acres, and saved it for seed. The next year I sowed it and didn't get even one bushel. That was hard luck!

"How did we live? Chickens and cows and kaffir corn-it wasn't very good living, but one can do a good deal when he has to. But it's better now. I'm going to take home a surrey for the folks this afternoon."

He was a type of the Western farmer who has fought the good fight through the hard times and the years of bad crops to better things, and, with his family, deserves all the comforts that generous Nature can give him.

Out in western Kansas are colonies of Russian Mennonites who have year after year stirred the ground and sowed it to wheat. They have given no heed to politics and little attention to the luxuries of life. When they made money they bought more land and sowed it to wheat. At threshing-time it is one of the curious sights of the West to see them taking the cash for their crop in silver and going home with half-pecks of the white metal jingling in their capacious pockets. Their economy of living and their dogged persistence have allowed them to win where thousands of Americans have grown discouraged, and, loading their worldly goods in canvas-topped prairie-schooners, have sought better locations.

On the great wheat-farms of the Dakotas the business is conducted by capitalists, and though it is doubtful if there is any

economy in the management on a large scale, it is the method that seems best adapted to that section. It would not be practicable in the more thickly settled communities of the States farther south.

The time when the Western farmer was compelled to sell his wheat in the field or haul it from the thresher to the market is past. Most of the farm-owners are able to hold their crop from one year to the next if it seems best for securing better prices. As a result, there is less rush than formerly in getting the grain East, though the large crop this year has broken all records for the number of cars sent into the Western cities on their way to the mills or to the seaboard. All through the autumn and early winter will the grain movement continue, and the returns therefrom will make trade good in hundreds of prairie towns where the farmers will spend their profits. Hundreds of farmers and their wives will, during the autumn, take a trip "back East "to the little village where they were born and passed their boyhood and girlhood days. It will be a restful vacation for them, but they will go home better contented with the West than ever, for they will find their old-time friends changed and many of them gone.

Following the threshers, and scarcely waiting for them to get out of the fields, come the plowers, making ready for the next year's wheat crop. On the easy-running sulky-plows they will make their rounds, changing the bright yellow stubble to brown, as the chocolate-colored ribbons of earth are turned behind the steadymoving team. Plowing is begun in July, and the harrow quickly follows, so that by the last of August the fields are waiting for the early September sowing. Later, the smoke of the threshing-engine may yet drift from one side of the field while the drill is placing the seed for next year's crop. It is the beginning and end of the wheat harvest-the planting and the fruit

age.

If, year after year, the prairies could produce as bountiful a yield as in the present season, there would be no limit. to the good times in the West. The skies would always be bright and the happiness of the people would never be diminished.

TH

Schneider, Schneider, Meck, Meck, Meck.

HE quiet village street echoed with this taunting cry. The shouters were half-grown boys, running in pursuit of a taller one, who fled before them, casting strangely terrified looks behind. At the corner of the street leading into the Jews' quarter, he ran full against a short, fat boy, bounding back as though he had collided with a rubber cushion. Thus stopped short, his pursuers were upon him in a moment.

"Come on, let's fight 'em, Peretz !" cried the shorter boy. The other glared for a moment at his tormentors, breathed hard, clenched his fists, then suddenly grasped his companion by the arm and, dragging him along, ran down the Jews' quarter into the open doorway of the synagogue yard. He quickly slammed the gate and bolted it. The two boys stood panting and glaring at each other. "They are right," burst forth the shorter, "they are right that they call us Jews cowards! Why didn't you fight 'em?"

For answer Peretz lunged forward, grasped his companion by the shirt and the belt of his trousers, tossed him up above his head, shook him as a dog would a cat, and then gently laid him on the ground at his feet. The boy-his name was Jacob, euphoniously called Yaikew in the Ghetto-lay for a moment as if stunned.

"What kind of craziness is this?" demanded he, hotly, scrambling to his feet. "Thou needst not show me what a strong man thou art."

"Dost still think I was afraid?" cried the other, passionately. Then he turned. suddenly away and hid his face against the wall. Yaikew looked in amazement and saw that he was trembling.

"What ails thee, Peretz?" he asked, more gently. "Has anybody done thee a harm ?"

"It is always so; the people all think I'm a coward," was the tremulous reply. Yaikew shrugged his shoulders and returned with a sage air: "What should they think?"

Peretz cast a cautious glance around and drew from his bosom an old, torn book.

"See," said he, holding it fondly, "this is why I don't fight."

"What is that? What dost thou mean?" questioned Yaikew.

"If I fight might they not tear my shirt and find it?"

"What," cried Yaikew, "for an old, torn book thou lettest them torment thee!"

He took it in his hands, turned its yellow pages wonderingly, and finally added: "What is this, anyhow? It isn't Hebrew."

"It's Greek," whispered Peretz.

66

Greek," echoed Yaikew. "Where didst thou get it?"

"Sh-sh," warned the other, in fright. "The schoolmaster who lived at the mill last summer gave it to me, for blacking his boots and carrying water. In the evenings I taught him to read out of the Pentateuch and he taught me out of this— the Iliad."

"Ili-ahd," mimicked Yaikew, smiling. "There must be fine things written in this book that thou wearest it in thy bosom."

"God forgive me the sin," cried Peretz, "but there is naught so beautiful in all our holy tongue as is written in this little book. I could not live without it. Wai! my master would burn it in a minute, and my mother, Yaikew-she is very pious. It would grieve her that I read profane books," and he laid the volume carefully within his open shirt and pressed his hands lovingly upon it.

Peretz was fifteen years old, and for the last two years apprenticed to the village tailor. His widowed mother, the poorest woman in the "Gass (Jews' street), picked up a scanty living at any odd work that she could find. She had sent him to the Ghetto school until he was barmitzvah (at the age of thirteen).

"'Tis time that he begin to earn something, and he has no head for learning," decided the old teacher, for Peretz dreamed