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Updated: May 27, 2025
The boom of a bridge as a train rolls over the iron girders resounds, and the brazen dome on the locomotive is visible for a moment as it passes across the valley. But no one heeds it the train goes on its way to the great city, the reapers abide by their labour. Men and women, lads and girls, some mere children, judged by their stature, are plunged as it were in the wheat.
Not till McCormick had gone on horseback among the farmers of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and secured written orders for his reapers, did he persuade a firm in Cincinnati to make them. In 1845, five hundred were manufactured; in 1850, three thousand. In 1851 McCormick placed one on exhibition at the World's Fair in London, and astonished the world with its performance.
His blue eyes which had been wide open, as they always were when full of mischief, became softer, and his long eyelashes drooped over them. But as the magic did not begin, Guido walked on slowly into the wheat, which rose nearly to his head, though it was not yet so tall as it would be before the reapers came.
The reapers were at work in the wheat, but the plain was so level that it was not possible to see them without mounting upon a flint heap. Then their heads were just visible as they stood upright, but when they stooped to use the hook they disappeared.
The scythe for hay and the cradle for grain, with strong backs and muscular arms to swing them, were the only mowers and reapers known. The hand rake had not been superseded by the horse rake, nor the hoe by the cultivator; and all through the winter, the regular thump, thump of the flails on the barn floor could be heard, or the trampling out of the grain by the horses' feet.
And even as when reapers over against each other drive their swaths through a rich man's field of wheat or barley, and thick fall the handfuls, even so the Trojans and Achaians leaped upon each other, destroying, and neither side took thought of ruinous flight; and equal heads had the battle, and they rushed on like wolves.
Peaceful as reapers singing on their homeward path now seemed the teasing voices of men and girls as, in a group, they waited for the elevator at five-thirty-five. The cheerful, "Good-night, Mrs. Schwirtz!" was a vesper benediction, altogether sweet with its earnest of rest and friendship. Tranquillity she found when she stayed late in the deserted office. Here no Schwirtz could reach her.
My skirts hampered me and I went slowly, holding my hat in both hands before my face and vaguely guided by the little patches of landscape that showed through the loose straw: a glimpse of blue sky, of swaying tree-tops, smoking chimneys and a dim horizon. I have come to the far end of the field, where the reapers are. It is the hour of the first meal.
A very low couch, behind a screen encased in wall-paper, several chairs, and opposite the door a walnut-wood secretary, formed the entire furniture of the invalid's chamber. I nearly forgot to mention two framed engravings, dated from the early years of Louis Philippe's reign the 'Reapers' and the 'Fisherman, after Leopold Robert.
The United States has preserved its ancient reputation in its agricultural machinery. We are especially strong in the class which we term "harvesters," the name including reapers, automatic binders, mowers, horse-rakes and hay-loaders. Our baling-presses also are in advance of competitors.
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