he sheriff came and took my mule and
corn and furniture--" "Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure
by law." "Well, he took it just the same," said the hard-faced man.
VIII
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
But the Brute said in his breast, "Till the mills I grind
have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!
"On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know;
They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,--its golden
fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with
dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from
Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes
half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece
after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a
pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons' teeth, and
blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the
Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its
birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and
most significant thing in the New South to-day. All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red
buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy withal that they
scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang
from dragons' teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world
still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied the
parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and
reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us
that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the
White Belt,--that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the
cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and
more than doubled, since the era of slavery, and
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