Bear with me, then, while I interpose a timid plea for our inventors and patentees of implements, whose solicitations that a trial, or at least an inspection, be accorded to their several contrivances, are too often repelled with churlish rudeness. I realize that our thriving farmers are generally absorbed in their own plans and efforts, and that the agent or salesman who insists on an examination of his new harrow, or pitchfork, or potato-digger, is often extravagant in his assumptions, and sometimes a bore. Still, when I recollect how tedious and how back-breaking were the methods of mowing Grass and reaping Grain with the Scythe and Sickle, which held unchallenged sway in my early boyhood, I entreat the farmer who is petitioned to accord ten or fifteen minutes to the setting forth, by some errant stranger, of the merits of his new horse-hoe or tedder, to give the time, if he can; and that without sour looks or a mien of stolid incredulity. The Biblical monition that, in evincing a generous hospitality, we may sometimes entertain angels unawares, seems to me in point. A new implement may be defective and worthless, and yet contain the germ or suggest the form of a thoroughly good one. Give the inventor or his representative a courteous hearing if you can, even though this should constrain you to make up the time so lost after the day's work would otherwise have ended.
I suspect that the average farmer of our completely rural districts would be surprised, if not instructed, by a day's careful scrutiny of the contents of one of our great implement warehouses. So many and such various and ingenious devices for pulverizing the earth applying fertilizers to the soil, planting or sowing rapidly, eradicating weeds, economizing labor in harvesting, etc., will probably transcend not merely his experience, but his imagination; and every one of these myriad implements is useful in its place, though no single farmer can afford to buy all or half of them. It will yet, I think, be found necessary by the farmers of a school-district, if not of a township, to meet and agree among themselves that one will buy this implement, another that, and so on, until twenty or thirty such devices as a Stump or Rock-Puller, a Clod-Crusher, Thrashing-Machine, Fanning-Mill, etc., shall be owned in the neighborhood--each by a separate farmer, willing to live and let live--with an understanding that each shall be used in turn by him who needs it; and so every one shall be nearly as well accommodated as though he owned them all.