THE ALABAMA OPPORTUNITY. 101 



An old-fashioned, wooden screw, with a heavy cap of shin- 

 gles, out of which runs long black beams, stands across the road 

 a hundred yards in front of the ranch house. The gin house, 

 its companion of other years, has rotted and gone and the old 

 wooden screw is fast following it into oblivion. It has pressed 

 its last bale of cotton : its heavy wooden beams have made their 

 last circuit. The scenes that it knew for so many years, it 

 v/ill never know again. It will never hear the laughter and the 

 shouts of the negroes at work in the gin house on a crisp fall 

 morning, or the crack of the mule driver's whip when the box 

 is full of lint, nor give forth againa a protesting creak when the 

 mules tug at the long lever. 



THE CHANGED SCENE. 



It is a lonesome symbol of an era that is past and gone on the 

 old plantation. In the years past the old screw overlooked a 

 thousand acres of green and vigorous cotton waving in the June 

 breeze. Today not a stalk of cotton is in sight. The old screw 

 is surrounded by a wilderness of verdant grass ; as' far as the 

 eye can reach, nothing but grass may be seen. The old planta- 

 tion has been crossed and criss-crossed with wire fences. Cot- 

 ton fields have become cattle pastures. In this one the mellilo- 

 tus is higher than a horse's back, in that one is Johnson grass 

 almost as high and a little ways off is the bright green of 

 a bermuda grass pasture. 



Behind the house the big lot of the old plantation is still in 

 use, but it no longer shelters a little army of work mules. It 

 if, now filled with horses and cattle ponies brought from the 

 plains of Texas. For each of the riders according to the Wes- 

 tern customs must have at least four or five ponies for his work 

 of rounding up the cattle, inspecting them at regular intervals 

 and keeping a general supervision of the grazing cattle. 



And like a Western ranch, this Alabama ranch has with the 

 exception of tjie cook no negroes at work upon it. What labor 

 is done is done by white men. for the l$ibor is only the labor of 

 riding and of performance of certain duties accurately and ex- 

 actly. The men who do the work are young men of good 

 C'reensboro families, who find the open air work to their liking. 

 The whole is under the management of W. M. Murphy Jr., a 

 yovmsr man of stalwart stature who came from the law school 



