l that he can call his own within the limits of his land,
nothing pleases him better than those still, brown fields where the
shapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months have passed,
the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundles
scattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to lie till it
shall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chill
rains, locking frosts and loosening snows--all the action of the
elements--until the gums holding together the filaments of the fibre
rot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woody
portion of the stalk, and the stalk itself be decayed and easily broken.

Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through at
each step, you stoop and taking several stalks, snap them readily in
your fingers. The ends stick out clean apart; and lo! hanging between
them, there it is at last--a festoon of wet, coarse, dark gray riband,
wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian centuries before Horace
ever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress of the Saxon and Celt, dress
of the Kentucky pioneer.

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp into
armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at the
bottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slanting
sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strong
winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies--each
shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; and
then the white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine--the
snow-white tents of the camping hemp.

Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm or
the hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned and
baled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or the
hemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and wages of the day.

Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, some
night--dear sport for the lads!--takes place the burning of the
"hempherds," thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle a
handful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses of
tinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms of red
bees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the night; to
run from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line of signal
fires, until the whole earth seems a conflagration and the heavens a