made in Germany?" he asked.

"No, your Excellency," came the reply. "They can be made only in
America."

The old man gave a sigh. "Those Yankees are ingenious fellows,"
he said. "This is a wonderful machine."

In this story of American success, four names stand out
preeminently. The men who made the greatest contributions were
Cyrus H. McCormick, C. W. Marsh, Charles B. Withington, and John
F. Appleby. The name that stands foremost, of course, is that of
McCormick, but each of the others made additions to his invention
that have produced the present finished machine. It seems like
the stroke of an ironical fate which decreed that since it was
the invention of a Northerner, Eli Whitney, that made inevitable
the Civil War, so it was the invention of a Southerner, Cyrus
McCormick, that made inevitable the ending of that war in favor
of the North. McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia,
on a farm about eighteen miles from Staunton. He was a child of
that pioneering Scotch-Irish race which contributed so greatly to
the settlement of this region and which afterward made such
inestimable additions to American citizenship. The country in
which he grew up was rough and, so far as the conventionalities
go, uncivilized; the family homestead was little more than a log
cabin; and existence meant a continual struggle with a not
particularly fruitful soil. The most remarkable figure in the
McCormick home circle, and the one whose every-day life exerted
the greatest influence on the boy, was his father. The older
McCormick had one obsessing idea that made him the favorite butt