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Updated: June 16, 2025
The top of the cotton stalk glimmered with a purple bloom, but down between the rows, among the dying leaves, the first bolls were opening. The air was still hot, for at noontime the glare in the sandy road was fierce, but the evening was cool, and from out in the gleaming dew came a sweetly, lonesome chirrup, an alarm in the grass, the picket of the insect army, crying the approach of frost.
But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the cotton-field were certain small "Phantoms of delight," with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us.
Yo' see a cotton plant doesn' grow mo'n about fo' feet high an' thar's always a lot of it that's shorter. The bolls hang low, sometimes, an' yo've got to go pickin', pickin', stoopin' halfway oveh an' the hot sun beatin' down on yo' neck an' back. Since the war the planters have tried all sorts o' labor, but thar's no white man that c'n pick cotton, they get blindin' headaches an' fall sick.
Of all the wild birds that still haunt our remaining solitudes, the ruffed grouse the pa'tridge of our younger days is perhaps the wildest, the most alert, the most suggestive of the primeval wilderness that we have lost. You enter the woods from the hillside pasture, lounging a moment on the old gray fence to note the play of light and shadow on the birch bolls.
The difficulty in finding really qualified ministers must be met by fervent prayer, and by compulsion on the part of the Estates of Parliament. Stationary ministers are to receive less sustenance than the migratory Superintendents; the sons of the preachers must be educated, the daughters "honestly dowered." The payment is mainly in "bolls" of meal and malt.
When I first visited Grandmother's garden, she had a few pitiful little cotton plants from whose stunted bolls she extracted every fiber and made a most excellent thread. In fact, when she made some bead aprons for me, she rejected my spool of cotton and chose her own, twisted between thumb and finger.
He dared not think what a long heavy rain might do to the wonderful island of cotton which now stood fully five feet high, with flowers and squares and budding bolls. It might not rain, but the safest thing would be to work at those dykes, so he started for spade and hoe. He heard Miss Smith calling, however. "Bles hitch up!" He was vexed. "Are you in a hurry, Miss Smith?" he asked.
About Shanghai they do not use the heavier two and three horse plows I found about Peking; consequently the land is poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or variety breeding has ever been attempted. No wonder that the stalks are small, the bolls small and few in number, and the staple also very short.
I had always a ready fancy and some of the natural vanity of youth, so I could see myself landing off the lugger at the quay of Inneraora town, three inches more of a man than when I left with a firkin of herring and a few bolls of meal for my winter's provand; thicker too at the chest, and with a jacket of London green cloth with brass buttons.
When these tyrant tools were thus discomfited, Sir John Cochrane came on shore, and tried in vain to prevail on the inhabitants to join in defence of religion and liberty. So he sent for the baron-bailie, who was the ruling power of the town in the absence of their great Sir John, and ordered him to provide forthwith two hundred bolls of meal for the ships.
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