288 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



time a severe freeze came on and the cane which 

 would have been worked but for this weather, was 

 lost. This mill was usually run day and night and 

 the quantity of cane which could be passed through 

 it was almost beyond belief; and it and the six-mule 

 team hitched to the largest plow I had then seen, 

 made farming in the North seem quite in- 

 significant. 



It is impossible to describe fully the two widely 

 different kinds of agriculture in the South. One 

 is planned on a very large scale in districts which 

 are most productive, the other is, to all intents and 

 purposes, peasant farming, conducted on 

 "patches" many of which are of irregular shape 

 and size and often seamed and gullied by reason 

 of the lack of grass roots and humus and by the 

 peculiar physical condition of the land and heavy 

 rainfall. Large areas of land appear so forlorn, 

 so wrinkled with the creases of the plow and so 

 tired with raising cotton, that they have lost all 

 agricultural and sylvan charm. Some friends 

 travelling in March, 1910, from New Orleans to 

 San Francisco via the Southern Pacific, wrote me 

 that after more than a thousand miles of such 

 land they thought it merely useful to " hold the 

 country together." 



