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At intervals I caught glimpses of negro cabins, with their clearings, and their little crops of cotton glistening in the sun. The island tow-heads and sand-bars were numerous, and in places the Mississippi broadened into lake-like areas, while the yellow current, now heavily charged with mud, arose in height every hour. The climate was growing delightful.
On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called "tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses.
Beautiful islands lend variety to the scene, some of them mere willowed "tow-heads" largely submerged in times of flood, while others are of a permanent character, often occupied by farms. It is clear that the islands are not so numerous as sixty years ago.
She never forgets whose wife she is, there is no "sweet confidante" without whom she "can not live" she never writes endless letters about nothing. She is, in short, a faithful, honest wife: and, "in due time," the husband must make more "three-legged stools" for the "tow-heads" have now covered them all!
The older children climbed the ladder nailed to the wall to get to the loft floored with loose clapboards that rattled when trodden upon. The straw beds were so near the roof that the patter of the rain made music to the ear, and the spray of the falling water would often baptize the "tow-heads" left uncovered. Our diet was simple, and the mush pot was a great factor in our home life.
So for hours it drifted, now bow on, then broadside to, and as often stern first; here caught and spun round by an eddy, then tossed aside and allowed to proceed on its unguided course. The cotton-woods on the tow-heads beckoned to it with their trembling fingers; but it paid no heed.
When he went to bed his problem was still with him, and involved itself with his dreams; but always the young girl smiled upon him with sympathetic eyes and told him to go on or so it seemed to him. He was silent at breakfast. He went to school with a feeling that a return to teaching little tow-heads to count and spell was now impossible.
"What's the matter?" she asked, startled, clutching the baby tighter to her, and conning over with quick alarm the tow-heads that bobbed and surged about her waist. "The children are all right aren't they?" Milo looked up apprehensively. He was an old-faced, anxious-looking, little fellow, already beginning to have a stoop to his thin shoulders the bend of the burden bearer.
Every old watercourse and even "tow-heads" of dying bushes that they came to did but each give them another disappointment. The animals were holding out well, with frequent rests, for they had been taken care of even at the expense of the human beings.
The farmhouse was only two miles off, and the evening calm; no time was lost: what woman will not instantly drop all work and all interests, to come to the help of another in the trial time of motherhood? Within an hour the neighbour's wife was holding hands with the mother of the banished tow-heads.
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