hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent at right angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be the strongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A heart, the doors and walls of which are in perfect order, through which flows freely the full stream of a 10 healthy man's red blood; lungs deep, clear, easily filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist and be straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval Nature-all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader strides to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which 20 the muscles play, he grasps as much

as it will embrace, bends the stalks over, and with his right hand draws the blade through them an inch or more from the ground. When he has gathered his armful, he turns and flings it down behind him, so that it lies spread out, covering when fallen the same space it filled while standing. And so he crosses the broad acres, and 30 so each of the big black followers, stepping one by one to a place behind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the prostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the smell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the air.

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the stalks, 40 till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or unripened fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment they have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwise wasted-that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions of the Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, and for the love of which the very history of

this plant is lost in the antiquity of 50 India and Persia, its home-land of narcotics and desires and dreams.

Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks into bundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the binders move the wagon-beds, or slides, gathering the bundles and carrying them to where, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to rise. At last these 60 are well built; the gates of the field are closed or the bars put up; wagons and laborers are gone; the brown fields stand deserted.

One day something is gone from earth and sky. Autumn has come, season of scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment for its fruits, says, "I have done what I could-now let me rest!"

70

Fall! and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool, silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves; the fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep grass; the fall of the so hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook below; the fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those roofs of leaves; the fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the rooty earth; 90 the fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets; the fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time when they shall arise again as the living generations;

the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land.

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the corn-knife and 10 the rustling of the blades, as the work

man gathers within his arm the topheavy stalks and presses them into the bulging shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling heaps near the cider mills. 20 In the vineyards the fall of sugaring grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in the cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet pomace.

But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer's help, of all that he can call his own within the limits of his land, nothing pleases him better than those still, brown 30 fields where the shapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months have passed, the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundles scattered, the hemp spread out as once before, there to lie till it shall be dew-retted, or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chill rains, locking frosts, and loosening snowsall the action of the elements-until 40 the gums holding together the filaments of the fiber rot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woody portion of the stalk, and the stalk itself be decayed and easily broken.

Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through at each step, you stoop and, taking several stalks, snap them readily

in your fingers. The ends stick out 50 clean apart; and lo! hanging between them, there it is at last-a festoon of wet, coarse, dark gray ribbon, wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian, centuries before Horace ever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress of the Saxon and Celt, dress of the Kentucky pioneer.

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp into 60 armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at the bottom, well-pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slanting sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strong winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies each shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; and then the 70 white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine-the snow-white tents of the camping hemp.

Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm or the hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned and baled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or the hemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and so wages of the day.

Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, some nightdear sport for the lads!-takes place the burning of the "hempherds," thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle a handful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses of tinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms 90 of red bees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the night; to run from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line of signal fires, until the whole earth seems a con

54. wild Scythian. The Scythians were an ancient Asiatic people famed for their savagery. 55. Horace, Latin poet (B. c. 65-8). 85. hempherds, the refuse, or coarse part of hemp.

flagration and the heavens are as rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on the horizon an array of answering lights; not in one direction only, but leagues away, to see the fainter, ever fainter, glow of burning hempherds-this, too, is one of the experiences, one of the memories.

And now along the turnpikes the 10 great, loaded, creaking wagons pass slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to be scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March are dying the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelve months before.

A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the hemp. The planet has described its vast 20 orbit ere it be grown and finished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions and extremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of the warming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat; the long, silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbing winds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strong virtues 30 is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will have a mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or exhausted soil cannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade, basking only in the eye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the whole sky for the walls of its nursery.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

1. This selection is taken from The Reign of Law, by James Lane Allen. What is "the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature"? At what time is the seed sown?

2. How does the author describe the growth and development of the hemp, from its beginnings to its blossoming?

3. Outline briefly the steps or stages in the harvesting of the crop of hemp.

Library Reading. "Hemp," Carpenter (in How the World Is Clothed).

PLOWING ON A WHEAT RANCH
FRANK NORRIS

The evening before, when the foreman had blown his whistle at six o'clock, the long line of plows had halted upon the instant, and the drivers, unharnessing their teams, had taken them back to the division barns

leaving the plows as they were, in the furrows. But an hour after daylight the next morning the work was resumed. After breakfast, Vanamee, 10 riding one horse and leading the others, had returned to the line of plows, together with the other drivers. Now he was busy harnessing the team. At the division blacksmith shop-temporarily put up-he had been obliged to wait while one of his lead horses was shod, and he had thus been delayed quite five minutes. Nearly all the other teams were harnessed, the drivers 20 on their seats, waiting for the foreman's signal.

"All ready here?" inquired the foreman, driving up to Vanamee's team in his buggy.

"All ready, sir," answered Vanamee, buckling the last strap.

He climbed to his seat, shaking out the reins, and turning about, looked back along the line, then all around 30 him at the landscape inundated with the brilliant glow of the early morning.

The day was fine. Since the first rain of the season, there had been no other. Now the sky was without a cloud, pale blue, delicate, luminous, scintillating with morning. The great brown earth turned a huge flank to it, exhaling the moisture of the early dew. The atmosphere, washed clean 40 of dust and mist, was translucent as crystal. Far off to the east, the hills on the other side of Broderson Creek stood out against the pallid saffron of the horizon as flat and as sharply outlined as if pasted on the sky. The

campanile of the ancient Mission of San Juan seemed as fine as frost work. All about between the horizons, the carpet of the land unrolled itself to infinity. But now it was no longer parched with heat, cracked and warped by a merciless sun, powdered with dust. The rain had done its work; not a clod that was not swollen with 10 fertility, not a fissure that did not exhale the sense of fecundity.

The plows, thirty-five in number, each drawn by its team of ten, stretched in an interminable line, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, behind and ahead of Vanamee. They were arranged, as it were, en echelon, not in file-not one directly behind the other, but each succeeding plow its 20 own width farther in the field than the one in front of it. Each of these plows held five shares, so that when

17. en echelon, a French military term meaning literally, in the form of steps.

the entire company was in motion, one hundred and seventy-five furrows were made at the same instant. At a distance, the plows resembled a great column of field artillery. Each driver was in his place, his glance alternating between his horses and the foreman nearest at hand. Other 30 foremen, in their buggies or buckboards, were at intervals along the line, like battery lieutenants. Annixter himself, on horseback, in boots and campaign hat, a cigar in his teeth, overlooked the scene.

The division superintendent, on the opposite side of the line, galloped past to a position at the head. For a long moment there was a silence. A 40 sense of preparedness ran from end to end of the column. All things were ready, each man in his place. The day's work was about to begin.

Suddenly, from a distance at the head of the line came the shrill trilling

of a whistle. At once the foreman nearest Vanamee repeated it, at the same time turning down the line, and waving one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle, till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the line of plows lost its immobility, moving forward, getting slowly under way, the horses 10 straining in the traces. A prolonged movement rippled from team to team, disengaging in its passage a multitude of sounds-the click of buckles, the creak of straining leather, the subdued clash of machinery, the cracking of whips, the deep breathing of nearly four hundred horses, the abrupt commands and cries of the drivers, and, last of all, the prolonged, soothing 20 murmur of the thick brown earth turning steadily from the multitude of advancing shares.

The plowing thus commenced, continued. The sun rose higher. Steadily the hundred iron hands kneaded and furrowed and stroked the brown humid earth, the hundred iron teeth bit deep into the Titan's flesh. Perched on his seat, the moist, living reins slipping 30 and tugging in his hands, Vanamee, in

the midst of this steady confusion of constantly varying sensation, sight interrupted by sound, sound mingling with sight, on this swaying, vibrating seat quivering with the prolonged thrill of the earth, lapsed to a sort of pleasing numbness, in a sense, hypnotized by the weaving maze of things in which he found himself involved. To 40 keep his team at an even, regular gait, maintaining the precise interval, to run his furrows as closely as possible to those already made by the plow in front-this for the moment was the entire sum of his duties. But while one part of his brain, alert and watchful, took cognizance of these matters,

28. Titan, Earth. In mythology the goddess Earth was the mother of the Titans, or giants.

The plowing, now in full swing, enveloped him in a vague, slow-moving whirl of things. Underneath him was the jarring, jolting, trembling machine; not a clod was turned, not an obstacle encountered, that he did not receive the swift impression of it through all his body, the very friction of the damp soil, sliding incessantly from the shiny surface of the shares, seemed to re- 60 produce itself in his finger-tips and along the back of his head. He heard the horse-hoofs by the myriads crushing down easily, deeply, into the loam, the prolonged clinking of trace-chains, the working of the smooth brown flanks in the harness, the clatter of wooden hames, the champing of bits, the click of iron shoes against pebbles, the brittle stubble of the surface 70 ground crackling and snapping as the furrows turned, the sonorous, steady breaths wrenched from the deep, laboring chests, strap-bound, shining with sweat, and all along the line the voices of the men talking to the horses. Everywhere there were visions of glossy brown backs, straining, heaving, swollen with muscle; harness streaked with specks of froth, broad, so cup-shaped hoofs, heavy with brown loam, men's faces red with tan, blue overalls spotted with axle-grease; muscled hands, the knuckles whitened in their grip on the reins, and through it all the ammoniacal smell of the horses, the bitter reek of perspiration of beasts and men, the aroma of warm leather, the scent of dead stubbleand stronger and more penetrating 90 than everything else, the heavy, enervating odor of the upturned, living earth.

At intervals, from the top of one of the rare, low swells of the land, Vanamee overlooked a wider horizon.