in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it came to rest well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker (the shortnoosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the haul-back cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton followed, and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till another log lay in the chute, with its end butted against that which lay before. One log after another was hauled down till half a dozen rested there, elongated peas in a wooden pod.

Then a last big stick came with a rush, bunted these others powerfully so that they began to slide with the momentum thus imparted, slowly at first, then, gathering way and speed, they shot down to the lake and plunged to the water over the ten-foot jump-off like a school of breaching whales.

All this took time, vastly more time than it takes in the telling. The logs were ponderous masses. They had to be maneuvered sometimes between stumps and standing timber, jerked this way and that to bring them into the clear.

By four o'clock Benton and his rigging slinger had just finished bunting their second batch of logs down the chute. Stella watched these Titanic labors with a growing interest and a dawning vision of why these men walked the earth with that reckless swing of their shoulders. For they were palpably masters in their environment. They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low. Amid constant dangers they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of Hercules. Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did not always emerge victorious.

When Benton and his helper followed the haul-back line away to the domain of the falling gang the last time, Stella had so far unbent as to strike up conversation with the donkey engineer. That greasy individual finished stoking his fire-box and replied to her first comment.

Work? You bet," said he. "It's real graft, this is. I got the easy end of it, and mine's no snap. I miss a signal, big stick butts against something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man plumb in two. You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin' donkey. These woods is no place for a man, anyway, if he ain't spry both in his head and feet."

"Do many men get hurt logging?" Stella asked. "It looks awfully dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing everything. Look at that. Goodness! "

From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and broken limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar that stood in the way of its downward swoop. They could hear the pieces strike against brush and trees like the patter of shot on a tin wall.

The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough.

"Them flyin' chunks raise the dickens sometimes," he observed. Oh, yes, now an' then a man gets laid out. There's some things you got to take a chance on. Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a limb drops on you, or you get in the way of a breakin' line-though a man ain't got any business in the bight of a line. A man don't stand much show when the end of a inch'n' a quarter cable snaps at him like a whiplash. I seen a feller on Howe Sound cut square in two with a cable-end once. A broken block's the worst, though! That generally gets the riggin' slinger, but a piece of it's liable to hit anybody. You see them big iron pulley blocks the haul-back cable works in? Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch block to a stump an' run the main line through it at an angle to get a log out the way you want. Suppose the block breaks when I'm givin' it to her? Chunks of that broken cast iron'll fly like bullets. Yes, sir, broken blocks is bad business. Maybe you noticed the boys used the snatch block two or three times this afternoon? We've been lucky in this camp all spring. Nobody so much as nicked himself with an axe. Breaks in the gear don't come very often, anyway, with an outfit in first-class shape. We got good gear an' a good crew -about as skookum a bunch as I ever saw in the woods."

Two hundred yards distant Charlie Benton rose on a stump and semaphored with his arms. The engineer whistled answer and stood to his levers; the main line began to spool slowly in on the drum. Another signal, and he shut off. Another signal, after a brief wait, and the drum rolled faster, the line tautened like a fiddlestring, and the ponderous machine vibrated with the strain of its effort.

Suddenly the line came slack. Stella, watching for the log to appear, saw her brother leap backward off the stump, saw the cable whip sidewise, mowing down a clump of saplings that stood in the bight of the line, before the engineer could shut off the power. In that return of comparative silence there rose above the sibilant hiss of the blow-off valve a sudden commotion of voices.

The donkey engineer peered over the brush. "That don't sound good. I guess somebody got it in the neck."

Almost immediately Sam Davis and two other men came running. "What's up?" the engineer called as they passed on a dog trot. "Block broke," Davis answered over his shoulder. "Piece of it near took a leg off Jim Renfrew."

Stella stood for a moment, hesitating.

“Liable to run into some

"I may be able to do something. I'll go and see," she said. "Better not," the engineer warned. thing that'll about turn your stomach. What was I tellin' about a broken block? Them ragged pieces of flyin' iron sure mess a man up. They'll bring a bed spring, an' pack him down to the boat, an' get him to a doctor quick as they can. That's all. You couldn't

do nothin'."

Nevertheless she went. Renfrew was the rigging slinger working with Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when Benton introduced him to her. Twenty minutes before he had gone trotting after the haul-block, sound and hearty, laughing at some sally of her brother's. It seemed a trifle incredible that he should lie mangled and bleeding among the green forest growth, while his fellows hurried for a stretcher.

Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood giving signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar. Renfrew lay on his back, mercifully unconscious. Benton squatted beside him, twisting a silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound. His hands and Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground were smeared with blood. Stella looked over his shoulder. The overalls were cut away. In the thick of the man's thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in. She drew back. Benton looked up.

"Better keep away," he advised shortly. "We've done all that can be done."

She retreated a little and sat down on a root half-sickened. The other two men stood up. Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, and rolled a cigarette with fingers that shook a little. Off to one side she saw the fallers climb up on their springboards. Presently arose the ringing whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, that injury came to one, that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a battle-field.

COTTON AND THE OLD SOUTH

BY JAMES A. B. SCHERER

ROBERT FULTON, a friend of both Whitney and Cartwright, by applying the steam-engine of Watt to override the immense ocean barrier dividing the gin from the home of the power-loom, manifolded a thousand times over the carrying power of the ships; while Samuel Slater, the British spinner, by setting up from memory at Pawtucket a successful factory just three years before Whitney invented his gin, initiated in New England a demand for Southern cotton second only to that of the old England from which he had fled. It is little wonder that the South devoted itself thenceforward with undivided attention to the production of that precious commodity for which two continents clamored, and which the South alone could supply.

Certainly the life of the South from this time forward revolved around the cotton plant. Early in the spring the negroes with their multitudinous mules begin the plowing of straight, long, deep furrows in the fragrant mellow soil-the deeper the better, since cotton has a tap-root which, if properly invited, will sink four feet in searching for fresh food and moisture. Fertilizer, consisting of manure and malodorous guano, or, in later times, expensive phosphates, is laid in the center of the beds thrown up by the furrows; and the time of actual planting awaited. When first the song of the turtle dove" is heard, and the starry blooms of the dogwood light up the edge of the forest, and the frosts are thought to be over, come, in the old days, flocks of black women with hoes, scooping out the beds at rough intervals, followed by other women dropping careless handfuls of seed. The tender green plants, thrusting their way upward shortly, were thinned out, one stalk to a foot. When two or three weeks above the surface, more plowing was needful, to break the new crust of the soil, and kill weeds. Then, every three weeks thereafter, until the steaming "dog days" again of August, the patient plow would break the crust again and again, so that on the larger plantations the plows never ceased, but turned continually from the last furrows of far-stretching acres to break the first furrows

of another three weeks' task. Hoeing, meanwhile, kept the women busy with the grass and weeds. In early August the crop was "laid by," and required no more work till picking time.

Meanwhile, under proper conditions this incessant labor would transform the fields into flower gardens. By June the beautiful blossoms are blushing; bell-shaped and softly brilliant, here and there, with the magic trick of changing their colors, as a maid her clothes. Shimmering in the morning in a creamy white or pale straw dress, and closing its silky petals in the evening, the flower on the second day of its fragile life shifts to a wild-rose color, deepening by evening to magenta or carnation: all this, for three brief but brilliant days, on graceful stems knee-high, rich in glossy dark green foliage; so that the aspect of a spacious level field, with fresh blossoms budding into cream or cloth of gold, while elder sisters smile in pink and red amidst the trembling verdure, is of a splendid variegated beauty that lends to the Southern landscape half its charm. It is in this summer season the Southern children sing:

First day white, next day red,

Third day from my birth I'm dead;
Though I am of short duration,

Yet withal I clothe the nation.

From mid-August until winter, however, and especially in that season of mellow fruitfulness," October, the cotton shrub becomes a thing of wonder; adding to its garniture of bloom the bursting pods of snowy fleece that dominate the coloring of the fields into the semblance of a vegetative snowstorm. Then, on the old plantation, swarmed forth pickaninnies and black babes in arms, with bags and huge baskets and mirth, nimble fingers, as it were, predestined to the cotton pod, to live in the sunshine amid the fleecy snow, and pile up white fluffy mounds at the furrows' ends, chanting melodies, minor chords of song as old as Africa; the women troop home again at nightfall with poised overflowing baskets on their heads, to feasts of corn-pone and cracklin' and molasses in the blaze of a light'ood fire, within sound of the thrumming of the banjo.

Cotton was and is the Southern "money crop." From autumn the banker and merchant "carry" the South on their ledgers, and scant is the interchange of coin; but when the "first bale of cotton " rolls into town behind a jangling team of trotting mules, their grin