"About three dollars an acre," replied Percy; "but of course the
land has almost no value if not treated; and as a matter of fact the
three dollars is less than half the interest on the difference in
value between this land and our ordinary corn belt land. These peaty
swamp lands are to a large extent in scattered areas, and commonly,
if a farmer owns some of this kind of land, he also owns some other
good land, perhaps adjoining the swamp; but this is not always the
case, and was not with the man in the story I mentioned. This man
lived a few miles away and his farm was practically all of this
peaty swamp land type. He heard of this experiment field and came
with his family to see it.

"As he stood looking, first at the corn on the treated and untreated
land, and then at his wife and large family of children, he broke
down and cried like a child. Later he explained to the
superintendent who was showing him the experiments, that he had put
the best of his life into that kind of land. 'The land looked rich,'
said he,--'as rich as any land I ever saw. I bought it and drained
it and built my home on a sandy knoll. The first crops were fairly
good, and we hoped for better crops; but instead they grew worse and
worse. We raised what we could on a small patch of sandy land, and
kept trying to find out what we could grow on this black bogus land.
Sometimes I helped the neighbors and got a little money, but my wife
and I and my older children have wasted twenty years on this land.
Poverty, poverty, always! How was I to know that this single
substance which you call potassium was all we needed to make this
land productive and valuable? Oh, if I had only known this twenty
years ago, before my wife had worked like a slave,--before my
children had grown almost to manhood and womanhood, in poverty and