“Des as shore, Miss Jule, as I’se livin’; I’se done drap de dish rag ergin. Ef I wuz you, I’d be skeered to risk it.” “Well, I think so myself, for George took butter this morning when he had butter on his plate, and that is a pretty sure sign. When the rooster crows in front of the house, and the cook drops the dish rag three times, and the head of the family takes butter when he’s got butter, all of the signs point one way. “I expect you had better call Charlie and catch that little red rooster that stays in the Irish potato patch, back of the garden.” Mrs. Parks continued to knit, and ponder. Her mind went from one thing to another. One moment she was thinking of her dear Tom, who would soon be home from the University, and the next of Ned, who had gone to Charlotte to get a new mowing machine. Most of her thoughts were of her children. Matt and Charlie chased the little red rooster through Marse George’s prize cotton patch, under the barn and out again, over the fence, around the carriage house, finally hemming him in a corner and catching him. Matt put him in a pie and Charlie went to carry water to the field hands, in response to Big John Ardrey’s call: “Sonny, sonny, sonny, ain’t you gwine to fetch de ole nigger no water to-day? He’s so thirsty!” The cotton and corn were beginning to show well in the more fertile fields. Every available man and woman on the place was at work, either plowing or hoeing, thinning the young truck to a stand, and making war on General Green, the farmer’s faithful enemy. Many fields were green with waving grain. Here and there wheat was turning yellow and would soon be ready for the reaper. To the right of the Big House, far out in the twenty-four acre field, eight plows, drawn by as many sturdy mules, still thin from hard spring plowing, breaking lands, and brown from the first scorching rays of the sun, manned by lusty negroes, black and glossy from eating rich Western-grown meat, were going, running around the cotton, thinned to a stand. “Lawdy, lawdy, lawdy, lawdy, It’s almos’ pay day, pay day, An’ I’se gwine to git my honey er hat,” sang Jerry, a loud-mouthed, animated young negro, who plowed Kit, a four-year-old mule, fifteen hands high, and valued by Squire Parks at one-seventy-five. There was no meter to his song, but it sounded well to him, and the neighbors for two miles around could hear it. “Listen, Miss Jule,” said Matt, to Mrs. Parks, who had gone to the kitchen to see about dinner. “Dat big mouf Jerry can’t keep quiet. “Hear ’im singin’ ’bout his honey? “He rakes ’roun’ all night, an’ hollers all day ’bout his honey? He better be givin’ dat Runt somefin’, dat chile uv Mary’s.” “Is that his child, Matt?” “’Cose hit’s his’n. “An’ he ain’t never as much as give it a moufful uv nothin’--no, not nary moufful!