e he would build, the stock he could own.
His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the South, his fox hunting
at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the old
floating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans--all these
depending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust of
his golden acres.

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The record
stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd years
elapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into the
wilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky have
furnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small part
of the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated in
Kentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowning
those ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the time
cannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct.
Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken by
metals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by the
same variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it in
Kentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost.

Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the
tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like
greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth,
trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroad
under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign in
the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth far
away at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of the
hemp, goes forth into the fields.

Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen birthplace.
Up-turned by the plough, crossed and recrossed by the harrow, clodless,
levelled, deep, fine, fertile--some extinct river-bottom, some valley
threaded by streams, some table-land of mild rays, moist airs, alluvial
or limestone soils--such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature.
Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcast
the sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small oval-shaped
fruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow.

Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they
lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about them
the sun rays penetrate day by da