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For the first few years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself.
It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far ridge, and left the world in darkness. On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it.
Every mechanical art is an educator; every loom, every reaper, every mower, every steamboat, every locomotive, every engine, every press, every telegraph is a missionary of science and an apostle of progress; every mill, every furnace with its wheels and levers, in which something is made for the convenience, for the use and the comfort and the well-being of man, is my kind of church, and every schoolhouse is a temple.
She loved to look over its acres of velvet carpet. In June her man and three stalwart boys, now twenty, eighteen and fourteen years of age, would swing the reaper into that field and harvest the waving gold without the aid of a hired laborer. She and her little girls would help and sing while they toiled. There was no debt on their books.
To my imagination every shot meant awful slaughter, and between me and the terrible thing stretched a beautiful country, as calm in the sunshine as if horrors were not. In the field below me the wheat was being cut. I remembered vividly afterward that a white horse was drawing the reaper, and women and children were stacking and gleaning.
"I should not be surprised if there were." Whiskerandos remained for a minute in silence, then said, "I want to compare English beer with Russian kwas." "You are not going into the field!" I cried in alarm. "I am going, why, there is nothing to fear; there is not a reaper near, and if there were, he would need to be a sharp fellow who could catch a rat in an open field!"
"Sam Nuggan was in to-day with a chipped cog off his reaper, and he says, 'Cullen, he says, 'I've got it. 'No! says I. 'Yes! says he. 'It's all along of that yaller head and young Dickson of Barellan."
So great was his ability in this direction, indeed, that there has been a tendency to discredit his achievements as a creative genius and to attribute his success to his talents as an organizer and driver of industry. "I may make a million dollars from this reaper," said McCormick, in the full tide of enthusiasm over his invention; and these words indicate an indispensable part of his program.
McCormick at first attempted to build his product on his Virginia farm and for many years it was known as the Virginia Reaper. Nearly ten years passed, however, before he sold his first machine. The farmer first refused to take it seriously. "It's a great invention," he would say, "but I'm running a farm, not a circus."
"Hush," she said, catching his hand in hers, as she read, while all around them the sounds of summer the distant clack of a reaper, the crack of a whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the squeak of a chipmunk were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her voice: "'Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining!
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