white wool is scattered over the branches and twigs, looking, not as if
it grew there, but as if it had been blown that way, and had caught and
clung at random. When I first came to the cotton country, I used to
stand with my chin on the top-rail of the fences, trying to rid my eyes
of that first impression. I saw the fields only when the cotton was
white, when there were no green leaves left, and the fleecy down did not
seem to me a vegetable at all. Starved cows passed through the
half-plucked rows untempted, and I said to myself: "Of course. Cows do
not eat cotton any more than they eat wool; but what bush is there at
the North that they would not nibble if starving?" Accustomed to the
trim, soldierly ranks of the Western corn-fields, or the billowy grace
of the wheat, I could think of nothing save a parade of sturdy beggarmen
unwillingly drawn up in line, when I gazed upon the stubborn, uneven
branches, and generally lop-sided appearance of these plants--plants,
nevertheless, of wealth, usefulness, and historic importance in the
annals of our land. But after a while I grew accustomed to their
contrary ways, and I even began to like their defiant wildness, as a
contrast, perhaps, to the languorous sky above, the true sky of the
cotton country, with its soft heat, its hazy air, and its divine
twilight that lingers so long. I always walked abroad at sunset, and it
is in the sunset-light that I always see the fields now when far away.
No doubt there was plenty of busy, prosaic reality down there in the
mornings, but I never saw it; I only saw the beauty and the fancies that
come with the soft after-glow and the shadows of the night.

Down in the cotton country the sun shines steadily all day long, and the
earth is hot under your feet. There are few birds, but at nightfall the
crows begin to fly home in a long line, going down into the red west as
though they had important messages to deliver to some imprisoned
princess on the edge of the horizon. One day I followed the crows. I
said to myself: "The princess is a _ruse_; they probably light not far
from here, and I am going to find their place. The crows at home--that
would be something worth seeing." Turning from the path, I went
westward. "What!" said a country-woman, meeting Wordsworth on the road,
"are ye stepping westward, sir?" I, too, stepped westward.

Field after field I crossed; at last the fences ceased, and only old
half-filled ditches marked the boundary-l