It meant change--redemption--prosperity. And more: that the white blood which had made Alabama, need not now leave her for a home elsewhere. It was a year glorious, and to be remembered. One which marks an epoch. One wherein there is an end of the old and a beginning of the new. The cotton--the second picking--still whitened thousands of acres. There were not hands enough to pick it. The negroes, demoralized for a half score of years by the brief splendor of elevation, and backed, at first, by Federal bayonets and afterwards by sheer force of their own number in elections, had been correspondingly demoralized and shiftless. True to their instinct then, as now, they worked only so long as they needed money. If one day's cotton picking fed a negro for five, he rested the five. The negro race does not live to lay up for a rainy day. And so the cotton being neglected, its lengthened and frowseled locks hung from wide open bolls like the locks of a tawdry woman in early morning. No one wanted it--that is, wanted it bad enough to pick it. For cotton was cheap that fall--very cheap--and picking cotton is a back-bending business. Therefore it hung its frowsy locks from the boll. And nothing makes so much for frowsiness in the cotton plant, and in woman, as to know they are not wanted. The gin-houses were yet full, tho' the gin had been running day and night. That which poured, like pulverized snow, from the mouth of the flues into the pick-room--where the cotton fell before being pressed into bales--scarcely had time to be tramped down and packed off in baskets to the tall, mast-like screws which pressed the bales and bound them with ties, ere the seed cotton came pouring in again from wagon bed and basket. The gin hummed and sawed and sang and creaked, but it could not devour the seed cotton fast enough from the piles of the incoming fleece. Those grew lighter and larger all the time. The eight Tennessee sugar-mules, big and sinewy, hitched to the lever underneath the gin-house at The Gaffs, sweated until they sprinkled in one continual shower the path which they trod around the pivot-beam from morning until night. Around--around--forever around. For the levers turned the pivot-beam, and the pivot-beam turned the big shaft-wheel which turned the gin-wheel, and the gin had to go or it seemed as if the valley would be smothered in cotton. Picked once, the fields still looked like a snowfall in November, if such a thing were possible in a land which scarcely felt a dozen snowfalls in as many years. Dust! There is no dust like that which comes from a gin-house. It may be tasted in the air. All other dust is gravel compared to the penetrating fineness of that diabolical, burning blight which flies out of the lint, from the thousand teeth of the gin-saws, as diamond dust flies from the file.