at fall--very cheap--and picking cotton is a
back-bending business. Therefore it hung its frowsy locks from the
boll.

And nothing makes so much for frowsiness in the cotton plant, and in
woman, as to know they are not wanted.

The gin-houses were yet full, tho' the gin had been running day and
night. That which poured, like pulverized snow, from the mouth of the
flues into the pick-room--where the cotton fell before being pressed
into bales--scarcely had time to be tramped down and packed off in
baskets to the tall, mast-like screws which pressed the bales and
bound them with ties, ere the seed cotton came pouring in again from
wagon bed and basket.

The gin hummed and sawed and sang and creaked, but it could not
devour the seed cotton fast enough from the piles of the incoming
fleece.

Those grew lighter and larger all the time.

The eight Tennessee sugar-mules, big and sinewy, hitched to the lever
underneath the gin-house at The Gaffs, sweated until they sprinkled
in one continual shower the path which they trod around the
pivot-beam from morning until night.

Around--around--forever around.

For the levers turned the pivot-beam, and the pivot-beam turned the
big shaft-wheel which turned the gin-wheel, and the gin had to go or
it seemed as if the valley would be smothered in cotton.

Picked once, the fields still looked like a snowfall in November, if
such a thing were possible in a land which scarcely felt a dozen
snowfalls in as many years.

Dust! There is no dust like that which comes from a gin-house. It may
be tasted in the air. All other dust is gravel compared to the
penetrating fineness of that diabolical, burning blight which flies
out of the lint, from the thousand teeth of the gin-saws, as diamond
dust flies from the file.

It is all penetrating, consumptive-breeding, sickening, stifling,
suffocating. It is hot and has a metallic flavor; and it flies from
the hot steel teeth of the saws, as pestilence from the hot breath of
the swamps.

It is linty, furry, tickling, smothering, searing.

It makes one wonder why, in picturing hell, no priest ever thought of
filling it with cotton-gin dust instead of fire.

And it clings there from the Lint to the Loom.

Small wonder that the poor little white slaves, taking up their
serfdom at the loom where the negro left off at the lint, die like
pigs in a cotton-seed pen.

There was cotton everywhere--in the fields, unpicked; in the
gin-houses, ungi