OR, THE WORLD HAS CHANGED. 143 



would be mightily surprised. The shock was a severe one to 

 me, but I had the pleasure of beating the old gentleman that 

 very year; and I think he was sorry for the joke afterward, 

 when he found out that I was the son of his first sweetheart, 

 whom he had very earnestly courted in his younger days. 



T was greatly puzzled when my cotton commenced blooming 

 to find both white and red blossoms on the same stalk at the 

 same time ; why one should be red and the other white, I 

 could not get at the philosophy of it; the chemical action 

 on the part of nature I could not quite understand. This 

 brought another good laugh from my neighbors, and the dis- 

 covery to myself that I had gone off in this instance half 

 cocked, for had I waited and observed, would have learned 

 that the blossom is white the first day and red the next. 



But here's another rigid joke. One day I was sitting on the 

 fence watching my hands hoe cotton, when a stranger to me 

 drove up and alighting from bis buggy took a seat beside me 

 and commenced conversation (the whole thing was a put up 

 job). After awhile he said he had been driving around 

 through every part of the country and had never, in all his 

 Hfe, seen such grassy crops (it had been a very rainy season); 

 but he'd bederned if I wasn't considerably worse off than any- 

 body he had yet seen. This hit me heavy, for I thought I was 

 ruined, and as soon as the man left I got a hoe and let in and 

 whooped up the darkies and got rid of the grass, but the unac- 

 customed exertion cost me a spell of fever. I made one of 

 the best crops to my force in Lee County, that year, and fully 

 established myself as a cotton-planter. 



Now for the benefit of despairing humanity I will tell an 

 anecdote on a Lee County young man, who, at the time of 

 which we have been talking, was my neighbor farmer; our 



