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Fra Lorenzo was officiating at the altar as they entered the large church, before a small number of peasants, the women making a picturesque group in their light flowered bodices and their red petticoats visible from beneath their tucked-up gowns, and their gay cotton handkerchiefs knotted about their heads, since no woman's head may be uncovered in the Catholic Church.
Another class of slaves may be mentioned; we refer to the slaves of masters who bet upon their crops. In the cotton and sugar region there is a fearful amount of this desperate gambling, in which, though money is the ostensible stake and forfeit, human life is the real one.
And shall I complain at being nearly smothered by it, when I remember what an incubus slavery is to the poor creature who gathered this cotton, and what an incubus it is to our unhappy land? I was delivered at last from my load, because my tormentors were tired of their sport. Would that there were some prospect that they who load cruel burdens on the slave were increasingly tired of their work!
It has been my good fortune at one time or another to meet primitive folk in various parts of America and the Pacific, but this man was by far the dirtiest and most wretched savage that I have ever seen. He was dressed in a long, filthy tunic which came nearly to his ankles. It was made of a large square of coarsely woven cotton cloth, with a hole in the middle for his head.
Tobacco, skeins of cotton, brass buttons, cakes, crackers, cents, sticks of candy, bits of ribbon, were received by the Indians without a word or nod of acknowledgment.
"It was true," he said, "that Sherman was before Atlanta, but what matter if he took it? the world must have the Southern cotton crop, and with such an asset the Southern Republic must stand." He was not inclined now to withdraw in any particular from this position, and his people stood solidly behind him.
Rightly or wrongly, every Indian believes that the Excise duty was imposed upon India for the selfish benefit of the British cotton manufacturer and under the pressure of British party politics.
Military authority was supreme, and just when the influx of cotton was greatest, military authority arbitrarily decreed that no cotton should be shipped from Cairo to the North or East without a military permit. For a time this decree seriously embarrassed trade. The warehouses in Cairo were choked and glutted with cotton. New ones were built only to be choked in the same way.
Laura knows her business. He has a cotton claim. Used to be at Hawkeye during the war. "Selby's his name, was a Colonel. Got a wife and family. Very respectable people, the Selby's." "Well, that's all right," said Harry, "if it's business. But if a woman looked at me as I've seen her at Selby, I should understand it. And it's talked about, I can tell you."
He must give the laundress as little to wash as possible; and, in order not to wear out his clothes, he must take them off as soon as he got home, and wear only his cotton dressing-gown, which had been long and carefully saved. To tell the truth, it was a little hard for him at first to accustom himself to these deprivations.
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