advertisements of these germ cultures put out by commercial
interests are usually very misleading. The safest and best and least
expensive method of inoculating a field for alfalfa is to use
infested soil taken from some old alfalfa field or from a patch of
ground where the common sweet clover, or mellilotus, has been
growing for several years. I saw the sweet clover growing along the
railroad near Montplain, and there is one patch on the roadside
right where--when you enter the valley on the way to the station."

"Right where Adelaide smashed that nigger's eye with her heel and
helped Mr. Johnston capture them both," broke in the grandmother.
"That's the only good thing I can say for her peg heeled shoes."

Adelaide colored and Percy now understood what had been a puzzle to
him.

"The same bacteria," he went on quickly, "live upon both the sweet
clover and the alfalfa, or at least they are interchangeable. These
bacteria are not a fertilizer in any ordinary sense, but they are
more in the nature of a disease, a kind of tuberculosis, as it were;
except that they do much more good than harm. They attack the very
tender young roots of the alfalfa and feed upon the nutritious sap,
taking from it the phosphorus and other minerals and also the sugar
or other carbohydrates needed for their own nourishment, since they
have no power to secure carbon and oxygen from the air, as is done
by all plants with green leaves. On the other hand, these bacteria
have power to take the free nitrogen of the air, which enters the
pores of the soil to some extent, and cause it to combine with food
materials which are secured from the alfalfa sap, and thus the
bacteria secure for themselves both nitrogen and the other essential