y industry. Most of the children get
their schooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few there are
that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Child-labor is to
be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and
stunting physical development. With the grown men of the county there
is little variety in work: thirteen hundred are farmers, and two
hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans,
ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers. This
narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen
hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants
and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six
seamstresses.

Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in
the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world
earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or
resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are
toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into
a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of
the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The
dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm
toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools
to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in
the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is
scarce.

The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine
or ten months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden
vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in
August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas.
And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that
leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?

Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by
great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres it used to
run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human
beings here obeyed the call of one,--were his in body, and largely in
soul. One of them lives there yet,--a short, stocky man, his
dull-brown face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair
gray-white. The crops? Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable.
Getting on? No--he w