now we can have a lot of fun!" cried Bunny, when he saw these
playmates. "Will you show me how to pick cotton?" he asked Sam.

"Sure," was the answer. "I help pick it myself, sometimes."

"And will you show me how to dig peanuts?" asked Sue of Grace.

"You don't have to do much digging," answered the little Southern girl,
laughing. "You just pull up the vines and the peanuts stick to 'em, same
as potatoes do. Course you sometimes have to dig out some that don't
come up on the vine."

While Mr. and Mrs. Brown and Mr. and Mrs. Morton were talking together,
the children were allowed to go to one of the near-by cotton fields.
Cotton, as you know, grows on low bushes, which are planted in long
rows, so the pickers may easily walk between them. In some countries the
cotton bushes, or plants, last from one year to the next, but in
Georgia most of the cotton grows from new bushes each year. The seeds
are planted in the spring, but the picking is not finished until
sometimes late in what is the winter season of the North.

Of course in some parts of Georgia there are frosts which kill the
bushes, and in these parts of the state the cotton must be picked
earlier than in the southern part, where the Browns were.

So, though there was cold weather and snow in Bellemere, there were
warm, blue skies in Georgia, and the colored men, women and children
were out in the fields picking the cotton.

As Bunny Brown and his sister Sue, with Sam and Grace, reached the field
of cotton, they could hear the darkies singing. Some one would start a
tune, and then others would join in.

"It's jolly!" laughed Bunny, as they stopped to listen to a funny song
about a mule.

"Yes, the darkies always seem to be happy," said Sam.

The children from the North watched as the colored pickers pulled off
the great, fluffy balls of white, stuffing them into bags or baskets
which were later taken from the field on two-wheeled mule carts.

"What are all those brown things in the cotton?" asked Sue, as she
looked at a fluffy clump on a near-by bush.

"Seeds," answered Grace. "The cotton clump, or boll, is full of seeds,
and these have to be taken out before the cotton is baled up for the
mill."

"Oh, I 'member about that!" cried Bunny. "We learned it in school. A man
named Eli Whitney made a machine for taking seeds out of the cotton."

"That's right," admitted Sam. "I'll take you to the gin, as it is
called, where the seeds are taken from the co