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Through the month of July, the crop is wrought over for the last time; the plant, heretofore of slow growth, now makes rapid advances toward perfection. The plow and hoe are still in requisition. The "water furrows" between the cotton-rows are deepened, leaving the cotton growing as it were upon
I strolled about the grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds, cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
In it were the voices of their fathers long gone, come back from the rice-fields and the cane-brakes and the cotton-rows, voices so sweet and plaintive that they were haunted. "I we-ent out een de wilderness, En I fell upon mah knees, En I called upon mah Savior, Whut sh-all I do for save? He replied: Halleluian! Sinnuh, sing! Halleluian! Ma-ry, Mar-tha, halle Hallelu Halleluian!"
Dixie had reached the farthest end of one of her longest cotton-rows, and was turning to work homeward on another, when the branches of the bushes of a near-by coppice parted and Bradley, with a fowling-piece on his arm, appeared. "Good gracious, you are a queer girl!" he laughed, as he advanced to the low fence and climbed to a seat upon it.
But Edny Ann went on calling: "O Als'on! O Als'on! come yere!" Little Lizay pleaded in a frantic way for silence as she saw Alston coming with long strides up between the cotton-rows toward them. "I wants yer ter ten' ter Lizay," said Edny Ann. "Her's been stealin' yer cotton: see'd 'er do it see'd 'er take a heap er cotton outen yer baskit an' ram it into hern. Did so!"
I've seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by " and we passed on. Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees, was of quite different fibre. Happy? Well, yes; he laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children?
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