There is a wonderful difference in threshing operations of today and twenty years ago, says an exchange. Then the average farmer looked upon the job as taking three or four weeks at least. Twelve or fourteen horses would be hitched to the old horse power and plod wearily around the ring hour after hour through the hot and dusty day, and the old separator would shell out the grain through a little spout into a couple of half-bushel measures which one man would keep tally of by system of wooden pegs or by making straight marks on the side of the separator with a piece of chalk. Five or six men had to be on the dusty straw stack to care for the straw as it came over the elevator. All fall the work would continue, the monotony occasionally being relieved by a man getting his overalls torn off by the tumbling rod or by a horse coming to grief by too much exercise. When at last the task was completed, the farm boys wouldn't have any time to rest, but would have to jump into the corn fields, where they would prance around until Christmas.

Nowadays one of those big modern steam outfits comes into a farmer's yard at twenty miles an hour, whistles, stops, backs up a few feet, lets off a hundred pounds of steam, and then the chief mogul yells for wheat or oats. The big belt begins to turn, men drive up and throw wagon loads of bundles into the big "Quintus" self-feeder and band cutter, there is a puff of smoke, a hum of wheels, a steady stream of straw onto the stack through the blow stacker, a column of grain flies through the weigher, and before the farmer's wife (who is exceedingly wrathy because the elegant dinner she had prepared is to go untouched) has time to ring the bell, the army is off up the road and ready to tackle the big job at Jones, where the women folks were not expecting them for a half day at least, and are thrown into a panic by the prospect of feeding thirty hungry men on fifteen minutes notice. At the end of a couple of weeks the threshing is done and the boys have a month's rest, take long breaths and enjoy life. And thus it goes. Every year the big machine works faster and faster, and every year the jobs grow shorter.