In every town in a wheat-growing country there is an elevator and a grain buyer. How is the wheat taken from the low wagon bed and put into the high elevator? Did you ever see a link belt? It is an iron chain made of broad links. On each link is a little square steel bucket that holds about a pint. The belt runs over a sprocket wheel at the top of the elevator. The little buckets dip into the wagon. Each one carries a tiny load of wheat up. In a few minutes the wheat is all lifted into a weighing bin at the top. When a load is weighed the wheat is dropped into the elevator tower.

The grain buyer pays the farmer for the wheat, and the farmer pays the bank the money he borrowed and has a good deal left over. The grain buyer has to borrow money now, for he must buy the wheat as fast as it is brought in. He can pay his loan when he sells the wheat in big city markets, or to millers. He makes a few cents on every bushel, and the railroad makes something for hauling it. The banks make a little interest for loaning the money. The farmer begins to buy all sorts of things—clothes and food and furniture, and more farm machines. By and by all the wheat money is flowing into all kinds of businesses.

As the country elevators fill with wheat the grain buyers call on the railroads for cars to carry it away. The cars back up on the side track below the elevator. A long canvas pipe, as squirmy as an elephant's trunk, pokes its nose into a car and the wheat flows through it in a golden stream until a car is full. More than a thousand bushels of wheat can be put into a freight car, so it can be hauled a thousand miles for a cent or two a bushel. The wheat takes a journey. It may be stored again in a big city elevator, or it may be poured into the dark hold of a ship and sent across the ocean, or it may go to a mill to be ground into flour.

Flour mills are tall, too, but not so tall as elevators. A hundred years or so ago, mills were never more than two stories high. Wheat had to be carried up to the hopper for grinding, and carried to sieves many times. Boys who were learning to be millers had to have strong backs. An American miller thought it was foolish to carry grain and flour about on people's backs. His name was Oliver Evans. He tied a bag of grain to a rope and pulled it upstairs over a pulley wheel under the roof. Then he thought of tying little buckets on a belt and pulling them up just fast enough to feed the hopper. But after that the flour had to be pulled up again and again for the grindings and siftings. At last he thought that if a mill had as many floors as there were steps in milling, the grain could be lifted to the top, fall from floor to floor, and come out finished flour at the bottom.

Wasn't that clever? Work and time and money are all saved by building mills high. You see the link-belt is used in grain elevators, too. Americans are the cleverest people in the world for making machines do their work. Wheat is moved by machinery from the seed to the loaf of bread. Milling machinery is very wonderful. The grains are crushed between steel rollers. Other machines sift out * the brown skin of the wheat seeds, and take out the little germ that would grow into a new plant. Machines mix the starch cells in the middle of the grain with the gluten cells around them. At the very last the flour is sifted through a silk gauze called bolting cloth. At the top of a mill the dusty brown grains pour into a big hopper. At the bottom soft, velvety white flour runs into new barrels and white muslin bags. It is ready to be made into bread. Every part that has been taken out is turned into something useful to feed animals. The bread you ate this morning was from wheat planted six months, or a year or more ago. And while you were eating it, farmers by thousands were in the fields putting in seed for next year's bread. Look in the morning paper and see how much it has to say about wheat. It will be on an inside page. There will be a lot of it in fine print. And there will be just as much tomorrow, and next year. The story of wheat is a continued story that is told over and over again, every year. But it is never quite the same story. People are always guessing how it is going to come out at the end of the year. If you ever go to Chicago you must visit the Board of Trade, where wheat and other grains are bought and sold every day by men who guess differently. The men who guess the nearest right, make money by buying and selling wheat.