But in bright and changeful beauty shine, The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift; Their boughs where the tides and billows flow. For the winds and waves are absent there; There, with its waving blade of green, The fan coral sweeps through the clear, deep sea; And when the ship from his fury flies, Where the myriad voices of Ocean roar; When the wind god frowns in the murky skies, The purple mullet and goldfish rove, THE LAND OF COTTON "I wish I was in de land ob cotton; Old times dar am not forgotten. Look away! look away! look away! Dixie land." DINAH, in the laundry, was singing the familiar song, as she carefully ironed the dainty aprons which were to go into Margie's trunk. Margie herself, coming into the laundry for some of the freshly ironed clothes, caught up the tune, and was still humming it when she entered the sitting room where her mother was finishing a pretty shirt waist. 66 เ Where is the land of cotton,' mother," she asked, "and how did it get its name?" "The first question is easily answered," replied her mother, "for to-morrow we start on our visit to Aunt Helen, whose home is in Mississippi, one of the cotton states. But I am going to wait until we get there to see whether you can find the answer to your other question." After a night in the sleeper, a new experience for Margie, she awoke early, and began to look eagerly for the cotton fields, which her mother told her she would soon see. 66 After watching her for a while, her mother said quietly, Haven't you found your cotton fields yet? They are all around you." Margie looked again, but she could see only fields of low, green plants with white flowers. Then she looked at her own pretty shirt waist, and wondered how one grew from the other. But her mother refused to answer questions, saying, "Wait and see." When they reached Aunt Helen's, Margie found that she would have many chances to find out the secrets of cotton, for Uncle Fred was the owner of a great plantation. One of her discoveries was that the pretty white blossom of Monday was pink or purple on Tuesday. But the dainty flower had but a short life, dropping to pieces at the end of the second day, leaving only a tiny pod about the size of a bean. Margie watched this pod with great interest, until in about six weeks it had grown to be almost as large as a peach. Then, one morning, when she ran out of doors, a wonderful sight met her eyes. All over the field the pods had burst open, each showing a soft puff of cotton down, as white as snow. This light, woolly substance kept the little seeds dry and warm. Soon the cotton pickers began their work, and Margie spent most of the morning watching the negro men, women, and children pass up and down, gathering the soft, snowy fibers, and heaping high the baskets or bags which they carried. But the sun was shining now with great force, and after picking several pods for herself, Margie took them back to the cool piazza, where her mother and Aunt Helen were sitting. As she played with the soft bolls, she felt the hard seeds within them. "How do they get the seeds out, mother?" she asked. "Please tell me all about it." So her mother told her the rest of the story. "You know, Margie, that Columbus found cotton growing in the West India Islands on his first voyage, but it was many years later before it began to be cultivated in what is now the United States. It soon became a profitable industry, but the task of getting the seeds out was a very slow one. It took one man an entire day to remove the seeds from a single pound of cotton. "But in 1793 Eli Whitney, a young man from New England who had been a teacher in Georgia, invented a machine which would pull the cotton between rollers through which the seeds could not pass. By the use of this new invention, a man could clean two hundred pounds a day instead of one. "This was, of course, a great advantage to the cotton-growing section, and since then the cultivation of cotton has increased so steadily that the |