inside of the pods and
as a result the unskilled person who tries to detach them in a hurry
will probably succeed only in extricating a bare half of what is
inside. And like as not he will break the fibers he does get out so
that their value will be sadly decreased. The trade has its tricks, you
see. Furthermore an amateur generally has fragments of husks and leaves
scattered through his cotton, all of which have to be removed and make
extra work later on."

"Then cotton-gathering is not really such brainless work as it might
be, is it, Uncle Frederick," Mary asserted.

"Oh, it requires a knack that comes through practice," conceded her
uncle quickly. "As soon as the pods crack open and show white it is a
sign the workers must be on hand for the picking, and early in the
morning they assemble that they may have a long day to work while the
sun is on the crop. For as I told you there can be no cotton-harvesting
without sun to dry off the night's moisture. The moment a bag or basket
is filled it is emptied into something larger and the picker starts
afresh. Before evening comes and the dew falls, the day's crop is
hurried under cover that it may not absorb any dampness. Here it is
packed into receptacles banded with the owner's name or private mark,
and made ready to be carried to the ginning factory."

"Don't the planters have their own cotton gins?" queried Carl in
surprise.

[Illustration: "The cotton is sent to factories to be ginned."
_Page_ 129.]

"Oh no, son! That would be an unnecessary and expensive luxury. Just as
corn is sent to the miller to be ground, so the cotton is sent to
factories to be ginned, weighed, and baled for shipment. You see the
cotton grown on any one plantation and cultivated under uniform
conditions will be practically of the same ripeness and weight; it will
also be, in all probability, of the same variety. This fact is
important when ginning and selling it, and greatly increases its value.
Such conditions, however, do not always prevail for there are districts
(and also countries) where small cotton farms exist whose output is not
large enough to make an entire bale. In such cases the product of
several farms has to be combined and this makes a bale mixed in
quality. This is true of part of the cotton that comes from India.
There many of the natives, owing to lack of commercial and industrial
enterprise, raise small batches of cotton. Often it takes a great many
of these little lots