ach 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 seed these powerful stalks,
hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre,--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 hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent at
right angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be the
strongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A
heart, the doors and walls of which are in perfect order, through which
flows freely the full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep,
clear, easily filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist
and be straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs
tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval
nature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader strides
to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which the muscles
play, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the stalks over, and
with his right hand draws the blade through them an inch or more from
the ground. When he has gathered his armful, he turns and flings it
down behind him, so that it lies spread out, covering when fallen the
same space it filled while standing. And so he crosses the broad acres,
and so each of the big black followers, stepping one by one to a place
behind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the
prostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the
smell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far
throughout the air.

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the
stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened
fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment
they have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwise
wasted--that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions of
the Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, and
for the love of which the very history of this plant is lost in the
antiquity of India and Persia, its home--land of narcotics and desires
and dreams.

Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks into
bundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the binders,