Did you ever sing "Dixie Land?" "Dixie" is a loving nickname for our warm southern states, where cotton grows over hundreds of miles of country. The white men who own the cotton fields love their homes, and the cotton plant, and the song. So do the negroes who work in the sunny fields. The song begins: "Away down South in the land of cotton." It is sung to a gay American tune that makes your feet feel like dancing. But you will never know what a happy song it is unless you hear it sung by moonlight in a camp of negro cotton pickers, to the playing of banjos.

A hundred years ago so much cotton was grown in our Southern states, and it was worth so much money that it was called King Cotton, ruler of the cloth market. Cotton is still King, for there is more cotton clothing used than all the wool and silk and linen put together. Our Southern states grow three-fourths of all the cotton in the world. So you see it is "Dixie Land" cotton that is King.

When you think of a king you think of something big and strong, like the oak tree that is king of the forest, or the lion, king of the jungle, don't you? The cotton plant is more like a queen. It is a proud, dainty little bush, very clean and bright, and about four feet high. It is as par-tic-u-lar about the ground under its feet as Queen Elizabeth. You know the story about Sir Walter Raleigh, who spread his velvet cloak on the mud for the great Queen to walk on? Cotton wants soft, warm soil as fine and rich as velvet to grow in, and it will not have common weeds about it. It wants to stand all alone, and have two or three feet of room to spread its green satin skirts. It has a leaf like a three-lobed maple, and a blossom much like a pink holly-hock.

Like a real queen the cotton blossom has several gowns to wear. For its coming out party it has a snow white silk petticoat. The newspapers always mention it, saying: "Cotton is in blossom and looks well." Like wheat, cotton is always getting its name in the papers. It soon gets tired of its coming-out gown and changes it for one of shell pink, then for a rose pink. The blossom does not 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 pink 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.