fade as other flowers do. At last it turns red. Where the flowers were, are bunches of green balls in husks like hazel nuts. These are called cotton bolls.
For six or eight weeks the cotton bolls swell until they are as big as eggs. The husk turns brown and cracks along five seams. Then it bursts wide, and out pops a fluffy snow ball. The cotton does not ripen all at once like wheat, and sometimes you may see and white blossoms, green pods and big snowy bolls all in one field. There is no prettier growing crop in the world than a field of cotton. The picking season lasts from July to Thanksgiving, and a field must be gone over and over.
This leis-ure-ly work in the warm, bright autumn days of the South just suits the sun-loving, happy-hearted negroes. As soon as the first bolls burst open, the negroes swarm out into the fields by thousands to pick cotton. The work lasts three or four months and they make a kind of picnic of it. They move from one plantation to another and live in camps. At night they dance and sing and play the banjo.
A ripe cotton boll when pulled from its brown husk, looks and feels like a soft mass of snowy lint. But if you squeeze it you can feel little hard lumps inside. Pull the fuzzy hairs apart. Every one of them grows tight to a dark brown seed about as big as an orange pit. The boll has as many seeds as an orange. The fibres are all fastened to the seeds, and they twist and cling and mat like felt about them. It would take you several minutes to pull the seeds from one boll, and a day to save a pound of cotton lint.
A hundred years or more ago, all the cotton seeds had to be pulled from the lint by human fingers. That made cotton cost a great deal, even when the work was done by slaves. Then an American invented a machine with rows and rows of little steel fingers. The fingers were set on a sort of rolling pin turned with a crank like a clothes wringer. This machine is the cotton gin (see Eli Whitney). The cotton gin of today is a big machine worked by steam. It can clean more cotton in a day than hundreds of men.
The pickers in the field carry big brown bags that will hold many pounds of bolls. When a bag is full it is emptied in wagon bed. When the wagon is full a man drives away with it to a cotton-ginning factory. (This is generally at a railway station beside the track.) The cotton is weighed and dumped into a big hopper outside the factory. Before you can wink twice, the whole wagon load
