[Illustration: “_Busy over their little matters with that ceaseless energy of boyhood._”] From the back yard and quarters the laughter of women and the shrill, joyous voices of children came. Far off, in the fields, the white-shirted “ploughers” followed singing their slow teams in the fresh furrows, wagons rattled, and ox-carts crawled along, or gangs of hands in lines performed their work in the corn or tobacco fields, loud shouts and peals of laughter, mellowed by the distance, floating up from time to time, telling that the heart was light and the toil not too heavy. [Illustration: “_The test of the men’s prowess._”] At special times there was special activity: at ice-getting time, at corn-thinning time, at fodder-pulling time, at threshing-wheat time, but above all at corn-shucking time, at hog-killing time, and at “harvest.” Harvest was spoken of as a season. It was a festival. The severest toil of the year was a frolic. Every “hand” was eager for it. It was the test of the men’s prowess and the women’s skill. For it took a man to swing his cradle through the long June days and keep pace with the bare-necked, knotted-armed leader as he strode and swung his ringing cradle through the heavy wheat. So it demanded a strong back and nimble fingers in the binding to “keep up” and bind the sheaves. The young men looked forward to it as young bucks look to the war-path. How gay they seemed, moving in oblique lines around the “great parallelograms,” sweeping down the yellow grain, and, as they neared the starting-point, chanting with mellow voices the harvest song “Cool Water”! How musical was the cadence as, taking time to get their wind, they whet in unison their ringing blades! Though the plantations were large, so large that one master could not hear his neighbor’s dog bark, there was never any loneliness: it was movement and life without bustle; whilst somehow, in the midst of it all, the house seemed to sit enthroned in perpetual tranquillity, with outstretched wings under its spreading oaks, sheltering its children like a great gray dove. Even at night there was stirring about: the ring of an axe, the infectious music of the banjos, the laughter of dancers, the festive noise and merriment of the cabin, the distant, mellowed shouts of ’coon or ’possum hunters, or the dirge-like chant of some serious and timid wayfarer passing along the paths over the hills or through the woods, and solacing his lonely walk with religious song. Such was the outward scene. What was there within? That which has been much misunderstood,--that which was like the roses, wasteful beyond measure in its unheeded growth and blowing, but sweet beyond measure, too, and filling with its fragrance not only the region round about, but sending it out unmeasuredly on every breeze that wandered by.