than yours when thus you tell us: Pluck?

PART SECOND--THE BOLL

CHAPTER I

COTTON

The frost had touched the gums and maples in the Tennessee Valley,
and the wood, which lined every hill and mountain side, looked like
huge flaming bouquets--large ones, where the thicker wood clustered
high on the side of Sand Mountain and stood out in crimson, gold and
yellow against the sky,--small ones, where they clustered around the
foot hills.

Nature is nothing if not sentimental. She will make bouquets if none
be made for her; or, mayhap, she wishes her children to be, and so
makes them bouquets herself.

There was that crispness in the air which puts one to wondering if,
after all, autumn is not the finest time of the year.

It had been a prosperous year in the Tennessee Valley--that year of
1874. And it had brought a double prosperity, in that, under the
leadership of George S. Houston, the white men of the state, after a
desperate struggle, had thrown off the political yoke of the negro
and the carpetbagger, and once more the Saxon ruled in the land of
his birth.

Then was taken a full, long, wholesome, air-filling Anglo-Saxon
breath, from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf. There was a quickening
of pulses that had faltered, and heart-beats that had fluttered,
dumb and discouraged, now rattled like kettle-drums, to the fight of
life.

It meant change--redemption--prosperity. And more: that the white
blood which had made Alabama, need not now leave her for a home
elsewhere.

It was a year glorious, and to be remembered. One which marks an
epoch. One wherein there is an end of the old and a beginning of the
new.

The cotton--the second picking--still whitened thousands of acres.
There were not hands enough to pick it. The negroes, demoralized for
a half score of years by the brief splendor of elevation, and backed,
at first, by Federal bayonets and afterwards by sheer force of their
own number in elections, had been correspondingly demoralized and
shiftless. True to their instinct then, as now, they worked only so
long as they needed money. If one day's cotton picking fed a negro
for five, he rested the five.

The negro race does not live to lay up for a rainy day.

And so the cotton being neglected, its lengthened and frowseled locks
hung from wide open bolls like the locks of a tawdry woman in early
morning.

No one wanted it--that is, wanted it bad enough to pick it. For
cotton was cheap th