o your banjo, you idiot!" the Major shouted. "I'll swear this
beats any family on the face of the earth." He got up, knocking over his
chair. "Go on. Don't stand there trying to splutter an explanation of
your lack of sense! No wonder you have always failed to pass an
examination. Not a word, Margaret. I know what you are going to say:
Beats any family on the face of the earth."

CHAPTER VIII.

On the morrow there was a song and a chant in the cotton fields. Aged
fingers and youthful hands were eager with grabbing the cool,
dew-dampened fleece of the fields. The women wore bandana handkerchiefs,
and picturesquely down the rows their red heads were bobbing. Whence
came their tunes, so quaintly weird, so boisterous and yet so full of
melancholy? The composer has sought to catch them, has touched them with
his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to
transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made
a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle
them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a
cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be
caught. Here seems to lie a sentiment that no other labor invites, and
though old with a thousand endearments, it is ever an opera rehearsed
for the first time. But this is the view that may be taken only by the
sentimentalist, the poet loitering along the lane. To him it is a
picture painted to delight the eye, to soothe the nerves, to inspire a
pastoral ode. There is, however, another side. At the edge of the field
where the cotton is weighed, stands the planter watching the scales. His
commercial instincts might have been put to dreamy sleep by the
appearance of the purple bloom, but it is keenly aroused by the opening
boll. He is influenced by no song, by no color fantastically bobbing
between the rows. He is alert, determined not to be cheated. Too much
music might cover a rascally trick, might put a clod in the cotton to be
weighed. Sentiment is well enough, and he can get it by turning to
Walter Scott.

None of the planters was shrewder than the Major. In his community he
was the business as well as the social model. He was known to be brave
and was therefore expected to be generous. His good humor was regarded
as an echo of his prosperity, and a lucky negro, winning at dice, would
strive to imitate his manner. At planting, at plowing and at gathering,
no detail was too s