long essay might be written on prickly pear. It weaves in and out
of many chronicles of the Southwest. A. J. Sowell, one of the best
chroniclers of Texas pioneer life, tells in his life of Bigfoot Wallace
how that picturesque ranger captain once took one of his wounded men
away from an army surgeon because the surgeon would not apply prickly
pear poultices to the wound. In _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_, Sowell
narrates how rattlesnakes were so large and numerous in a great prickly
pear flat out from the Nueces River that rangers pursuing bandits had
to turn back. Nobody has written a better description of a prickly pear
flat than O. Henry in his story of "The Caballero's Way."

People may look at prickly pear, and it will be just prickly pear and
nothing more. Or they may look at it and find it full of significances;
the mere sight of a prickly pear may call up a chain of incidents,
facts, associations. A mind that can thus look out on the common
phenomena of life is rich, and all of the years of the person whose mind
is thus stored will be more interesting and full.

Cabeza de Vaca's _Narrative_, the chronicles of A. J. Sowell, and O.
Henry's story are just three samples of southwestern literature that
bring in prickly pear. No active-minded person who reads any one of
these three samples will ever again look at prickly pear in the same
light that he looked at it before he read. Yet prickly pear is just one
of hundreds of manifestations of life in the Southwest that writers have
commented on, told stories about, dignified with significance.

Cotton no longer has the economic importance to Texas that it once had.
Still, it is mighty important. In the minds of millions of farm people
of the South, cotton and the boll weevil are associated. The boll weevil
was once a curse; then it came to be somewhat regarded as a disguised
blessing--in limiting production.

De first time I seen de boll weevil,
He was a-settin' on de square.
Next time I seen him, he had all his family dere--
Jest a-lookin' foh a home, jest a-lookin' foh a home.

A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that living threatened
by the boll weevil will not be much interested in ballads, but for the
generality of people this boll weevil ballad--the entirety of which is
a kind of life history of the insect--is, while delightful in itself,
a veritable story-book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's
effect