Tobacco! Tobacco for the millions of the past! Tobacco for the millions of the present! Whence come the supplies for these? Whence come the supplies for these? For a time, Virginia supplied the world, but the culture of the weed spread with its use, until it came to be grown in many parts of the old world. The United States, however, produces more tobacco than any other country in the world, and of her great output,--Kentucky, possessed of the soil combined with conditions of climate that makes good tobacco in greater measure than any other of the States, raises more than one-third. Within Kentucky's borders, friend, the number of the agricultural folk who depend for daily bread on crops of tobacco, is great. Every year's August sees more than three hundred thousand of Kentucky's rich acres, yellow green with the growing tobacco, and every year's March sees near three hundred millions of pounds of matured tobacco sent away. The central and north central parts of the State, embracing the Blue Grass region, wherein lies the home of the great Pacificator, is known as the White Burley District, and is world-renowned for the quality and quantity of the famous White Burley tobacco, largely used in the domestic trade. Here this tobacco is produced at its best. In the western part of the State, the lands south-bounded by the waters of the Cumberland, and over which, in the olden day, annual prairie fires swept, are known as the Regie, or Dark Tobacco district, and here are grown the dark heavy varieties of tobacco, adapted to the export trade. A hard life the tobacco tiller's, friend. He who has not seen the tobacco grown, can have no conception of the physical hardships endured, the ceaseless toil, the care and the anxiety as to the likelihood of failure, that enter into the growing of a tobacco crop. It is a crop that requires the very best quality of land on which to cultivate it, and the most arduous of toil in its cultivation. Work may be hard in another crop, but set the work necessary to raise any crop beside the labor entailed in a tobacco crop--from its beginning until it is ready for the manufacturer--and friend, it will be as the labor of the little lad who digs a miniature trench in the beach sands, beside the completed digging of the canal that will unite two oceans! THE TOBACCO TILLER CHAPTER I MR. DOGGETT AT HOME "Awake, awake my lyre, and tell thy silent master's humble tale." "Dock and me went out this mornin' and scraped up about three tablespoonfuls o' frost offen that plank a layin' right thar by the fence,--yes, sir, three tablespoonfuls, nigh about. Ef we don't watch, some o' our terbaccer's a goin' to git ketched a standin'. Frost a holdin' off ontel the last o' September hain't seasonable. What you thenk about hit, Mr. Brock?"