"Oh, it requires a knack that comes through practice," conceded her uncle quickly. "As soon as the pods crack open and show white it is a sign the workers must be on hand for the picking, and early in the morning they assemble that they may have a long day to work while the sun is on the crop. For as I told you there can be no cotton-harvesting without sun to dry off the night's moisture. The moment a bag or basket is filled it is emptied into something larger and the picker starts afresh. Before evening comes and the dew falls, the day's crop is hurried under cover that it may not absorb any dampness. Here it is packed into receptacles banded with the owner's name or private mark, and made ready to be carried to the ginning factory." "Don't the planters have their own cotton gins?" queried Carl in surprise. [Illustration: "The cotton is sent to factories to be ginned." _Page_ 129.] "Oh no, son! That would be an unnecessary and expensive luxury. Just as corn is sent to the miller to be ground, so the cotton is sent to factories to be ginned, weighed, and baled for shipment. You see the cotton grown on any one plantation and cultivated under uniform conditions will be practically of the same ripeness and weight; it will also be, in all probability, of the same variety. This fact is important when ginning and selling it, and greatly increases its value. Such conditions, however, do not always prevail for there are districts (and also countries) where small cotton farms exist whose output is not large enough to make an entire bale. In such cases the product of several farms has to be combined and this makes a bale mixed in quality. This is true of part of the cotton that comes from India. There many of the natives, owing to lack of commercial and industrial enterprise, raise small batches of cotton. Often it takes a great many of these little lots to make up a bale." "Do the natives of India take the seeds out of their own cotton?" asked Mary. "Some of them do, using the primitive gins so long known in India. The Chinese also gin much of their own cotton by amateur gins. But it goes without saying that much of the cotton fiber is broken by these methods. For the more perfect the gin the less loss results. Even with our best machinery however, a certain amount of injury is done which cannot be avoided." "Then Eli Whitney's gin isn't so perfect," ventured Carl.