NOTES AND QUESTIONS 1. This selection is taken from In Starry Realms. Have you ever seen a falling star? What is needed in order to observe satisfactorily such an exhibition? The author says our knowledge of the natural history of shooting stars has been acquired in recent years; what do you learn from him on this point? 2. The author imagines what a shooting star would say if it were to tell its life history; why does the author not tell you the facts himself instead? Give a brief summary of the facts narrated in the imaginary story. Which interested you most? 3. How do falling stars contribute to the growth of our globe? What law guides meteors in their courses? How does the end come? Library Reading. In Starland, Ball; The Friendly Stars, Martin; "Giant Stars," Hale (in Scribner's Magazine, February, 1921); "Meteorites," Merrill (in Smithsonian Report, 1917); "Hymn to the Stars," Whittier (in The Literary Digest, January 15, 1921). COTTON AND THE OLD SOUTH* JAMES A. B. SCHERER In the autumn of 1792 a young college graduate sailed from New York for Savannah, on his way to South Carolina to teach school. He had never seen a boll of cotton in his life. A year later he made the first cotton gin, which caused his great and generous rival in inventive genius, Robert Fulton, to class him among the three 10 men who accomplished more for mankind than any other men of their times. The eagerness of Southern planters to grow upland cotton, after it could be ginned, almost passes belief. Five months after he had obtained his patent Whitney wrote: "We shall not be able to get machines made as fast as we shall want them. We have now 20 eight hundred thousand weight of cotton on hand and the next crop will begin to come in very soon. It will *Reprinted by permission from Cotton as a World Power by James A. B. Scherer. Copyright 1916 by Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1. young college graduate, Eli Whitney, whose importance is made clear in the text. require machines enough to clean five or six thousand weight of clean cotton per day to satisfy the demand for next year. And I expect the crop will be double another year." Ten years after the gin was invented he wrote: "The cotton cleaned annually with that machine sells for at least five million of 30 dollars." This astonishing leap in cotton production of course arose from the fact that Whitney's gin made it possible, exactly at the moment when the great series of English inventions, rounding to completion in the power-loom of Cartwright, had created an insatiable demand. As Baines said, "The spinning machinery in England gave birth 40 to the cotton cultivation in America; and the increase of the latter is now in turn extending the application of the former. In the vast machine of commerce, the spindles of Manchester are as necessarily tied to the plow and hoe of the Mississippi as to their own bobbins. Thus do mechanical improvements in England and agricultural improvements in America act 50 and react upon each other; thus do distant nations become mutually dependent and contribute to each other's wealth." Robert Fulton, a friend of both Whitney and Cartwright, by applying the steam-engine of Watt to override the immense ocean barrier dividing the gin from the home of the powerloom, manifolded a thousand times 60 over the carrying power of the ships; while Samuel Slater, the British spinner, by setting up from memory at Pawtucket a successful factory just three years before Whitney invented his gin, initiated in New England a demand for Southern cotton second only to that of the old England from which he had fled. It is little wonder 39. Baines, Sir Edward Baines (1800-1890), author of A History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain. that the South devoted itself thenceforward with undivided attention to the production of that precious commodity for which two continents clamored, and which the South alone could supply. Certainly the life of the South from this time forward revolved around the cotton plant. Early in the spring the 10 negroes with their multitudinous mules began the plowing of straight, long, deep furrows in the fragrant mellow soil-the deeper the better, since cotton has a tap-root which, if properly invited, will sink four feet in searching for fresh food and moisture. Fertilizer, consisting of manure and malodorous guano, or, in later times, expensive phosphates, is laid in the center of the 20 "beds" thrown up by the furrows; and the time of actual planting awaited. When the first song of the "turtle dove" is heard, and the starry blooms of the dogwood light up the edge of the forest, and the frosts are thought to be over, came, in the old days, flocks of black women with hoes, scooping out the beds at rough intervals, followed by other women, 30 dropping careless handfuls of seed. The tender green plants, thrusting their way upward shortly, were thinned out, one stalk to a foot. When two or three weeks above the surface, more plowing was needful, to break the new crust of the soil and kill weeds. Then, every three weeks thereafter, until the steaming "dog days" of August, the patient plow would break 40 the crust again and again, so that on the larger plantations the plows never ceased, but returned continually from the last furrows of far-stretching acres to break the first furrows of another three weeks' task. Hoeing, meanwhile, kept the women busy with the grass and weeds. In early August the crop was "laid by," and required no more work till picking time. Meanwhile, under proper conditions 50 this incessant labor would transform the fields into flower gardens. By June the beautiful blossoms are blushing; bell-shaped and softly brilliant, here and there, with the magic trick of changing their colors, as a maid her clothes. Shimmering in the morning in a creamy white or pale straw dress, and closing its silky petals in the evening, the flower on the second day of 60 its fragile life shifts to a wild-rose color, deepening by evening to magenta or carnation; all this, for three brief but brilliant days, on graceful stems knee-high, rich in glossy dark-green foliage; so that the aspect of a spacious level field, with fresh blossoms budding into cream or cloth of gold, while elder sisters smile in pink and red amidst the trembling verdure, is of 70 a splendid variegated beauty that lends to the Southern landscape half its charm. It is in this summer season the Southern children sing: First day white, next day red, From mid-August until winter, however, and especially in that "season 80 of mellow fruitfulness," October, the cotton shrub becomes a thing of wonder; adding to its garniture of bloom the bursting pods of snowy fleece that dominate the coloring of the fields into the semblance of a vegetative snowstorm. Then, on the old plantation, swarmed forth the turbaned mammies and the wenches, shining pickaninnies and black babes in arms, with bags 90 and huge baskets and mirth, nimble fingers, as it were, predestined to the cotton pod, to live in the sunshine amid the fleecy snow, and pile up white fluffy mounds at the furrows' ends, chanting melodies, minor chords of song as old as Africa, the women trooping home again at nightfall with poised overflowing baskets on their heads, to feasts of corn-pone and cracklin' and molasses in the blaze of a light'ood fire, within sound of the thrumming of the banjo. Cotton was and is the Southern "money crop." From autumn the banker and merchant "carry" the South on their ledgers, and scant is 10 the interchange of coin; but when the "first bale of cotton" rolls into town behind a jangling team of trotting mules, their grinning driver cracking out resounding triumph with his whip, money makes its anniversary appearance, accounts are settled, and the whole shining South "feels flush." The gin-houses drive a roaring business, the air is heavy in them 20 and the light is thick with downy lint, and their atmosphere pungent with the oily odor of crushed woolly seeds. Steam or hydraulic presses, with irresistible power then pack towering heaps of seedless fleece into coarse casings of flimsy jute wrapping, metal-bound. These bales, weighing roughly to the tale of five hundred pounds, pass the appraisement of the 30 broker, swarm the platforms of the railway warehouses, and overflow to the hospitable ground; then are laden laboriously into freight cars, and, after being squeezed to the irreducible minimum of size by some giant compress, are hauled to the corners of the earth. Of the distinctive civilization of the old Southern cotton life no words 40 could be more pertinent than Grady's. "That was a peculiar society," he said. "Almost feudal in its splendor, it was almost patriarchal in its simplicity. Leisure and wealth gave it exquisite culture. Its wives and mothers, exempt from drudgery and almost 2. cracklin', crackling, the brown, crisp remainder of pork fat, after the lard has been removed. 40. Grady, Henry W. Grady (1851-1889), editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a famous Southern newspaper. from care, gave to their sons, through patient and constant training, something of their own grace and gentleness, and to their homes beauty and 50 light. Its people, homogeneous by necessity, held straight and simple faith, and were religious to a marked degree along the old lines of Christian belief. The same homogeneity bred a hospitality that was as kinsmen to kinsmen, and that wasted at the threshold of every home what the more frugal people of the North conserved and invested in public chari- 60 ties. Money counted least in making the social status, and constantly ambitious and brilliant youngsters from no estate married into the families of planter princes. Meanwhile, the one character utterly condemned and ostracized was the man who was mean to his slaves. Even the coward was pitied and might have been liked. For the cruel master there was no 70 toleration. "In its engaging grace in the chivalry that tempered even quixotism with dignity-in the piety that saved master and slave alike-in the charity that boasted not-in the honor held above estate in the hospitality that neither condescended nor cringedin frankness and heartiness and wholesome comradeship-in the reverence so paid to womanhood and the inviolable respect in which woman's name was held-the civilization of the old slave régime in the South has not been surpassed, and perhaps will not be equaled, among men.' NOTES AND QUESTIONS 1. What effect on catton production had the invention of the cotton gin? Account for this far-reaching influence. How did Cartwright influence the production of cotton? Fulton? What led to the demand for cotton in New England? 2. What picture of life in the South, centering about the cotton plant, does the author give you? How does Henry W. Grady describe "the civilization of the old Southern cotton life"? Theme Topic. Cotton as a world power. Library Reading. My Beloved South, O'Connor; "Cotton Growing in the West," Chambliss (in The World's Work, March, 1920). THE HEMP FIELDS JAMES LANE ALLEN Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth, trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroad under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes 10 a sign in the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth far away at wet, pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of the hemp, goes forth into the fields. Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen birthplace. Upturned by the plow, crossed and recrossed by the harrow, clodless, leveled, deep, fine, fertile-some ex20 tinct river-bottom, some valley thread ed by streams, some tableland of mild rays, moist airs, alluvial or limestone soils such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature. Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcast the sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small, oval-shaped fruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with 30 living marrow. Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they lie, those mighty, those inert, seeds. Down into the darkness about them the sun's rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes of light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, 40 closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of maternal earth more closely. Suddenly -as an insect that has been feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action-in each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its ashen, woody shell; it takes 50 two opposite courses: the white, fibriltapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearing its lancelike leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm. Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his barn-lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees or does he not see?-the surface of it less 60 dark. What is that uncertain flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green? A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying it out of sight, is the shallow, tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling. Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the 70 bluish green of young oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye; with orderly dots of dull dark green in vast array-the hills of Indian maize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far and near, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turns to the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in Nature 80 seem dead and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant, strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight. Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward; scarce darker as to the stemless stalks which are hidden now, but darker in the tops. Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants paler, smaller, maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker, taller, living longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads. A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come 10 forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic, swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting; a hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, so that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steaming air floats an odor, balsamic, startling, the odor of those plumes and stalks 20 and blossoms from which. is exuding freely the narcotic resin of the great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell out deeply to draw it in-fragrance once known in childhood, ever in the memory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesick thoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over into which is blown the 30 smell of the hemp-fields. Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by? A land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed, rustling, have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or stored in the lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavyheaded, rustling wheat has turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble 40 or sent through the whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are garnered and gone, the landscape has many bare and open spaces. But, separating these everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in blade and tassel; and-more valuable than all else that has been sown and harvested or remains to be everywhere the impenetrable thickets of the hemp. Impenetrable! For close together 50 stand the stalks, making common cause for soil and light, each but one of many, the fiber being better when so grown-as is also the fiber of men. Impenetrable and therefore weedless, for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird. Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossal solitudes. The fieldsparrow will flutter away from pollen- 60 bearing to pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden near the edge. The crow and the blackbird will seem to love it, having a keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy. The quail does love it, not for itself, but for its protection, leading her brood into its labyrinths out of the dusty road when danger draws near. Best of all winged creatures it 70 is loved by the iris-eyed, burnishbreasted, murmuring doves, already beginning to gather in the deadened tree-tops with crops eager for the seed; well remembered also by the long-flight passenger pigeon, coming into the land for the mast. Best of all wild things whose safety lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved by the hare for its young, for refuge. 80 Those lithe, velvety, summer-thin bodies! Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp. Are they slightly shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is threading its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shaken violently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path of the dog following the hot scent-ever baffled. A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seeds these powerful stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fiber that strength of cables when the big ships are tugged at by the joined fury of wind and ocean. And now some morning at the corner of the field stand the black men with 90 |