That sounds like heaven, but it is not the heaven the negro wants. That’s the white man’s heaven, and the white man would just be fool enough to work right on till dark, making that extra two dollars and saving it and all the rest of his week’s wages by keeping away from the dives of near-by towns. But the white man is a vain and foolish creature to the negro. He has aspirations and he lives for the morrow. The negro has none—the pure-blooded negro never had an aspiration in his life—and he lives not even for the day but for the night following it, when his work ends and he may be a nigger among his kind. The white man works to accumulate; the negro to spend. And Saturday afternoon and night is a bully time to spend what he has made the rest of the week. There is only one better time, and that’s the next day, if there is a foot-washing or a funeral. That’s enough for the negro. His problem is nearly solved, for the tide of immigration that has been flowing westward is being turned southward. And when it turns there will be no negro question. Like everybody else he will take his place in the order of things where his nature fits. He will be then one muscle in the South’s great arm of labor, but he will never be the biceps. I found the people primitive, but honest and kind. They have lived around here all their lives, and this thing is a revelation to them. It is more money than they ever heard of before. Why, people actually carry bags of silver around with them to pay off pickers. Heretofore the land had been most anybody’s for the asking, but now they can make more money on one acre properly tended to berries than they had before on a whole farm. [Illustration: Berry field and pickers, Marble, Alabama.] [Illustration: A group of berry pickers.] A small boy came in going to mill, driving two little steers hitched to a cart with wheels as primitive as the ancient Britons used, sawn from the sound pine logs. He is immediately surrounded by the jolly drummers, while their picture is taken for Trotwood’s. The big, two-wheeled log carts used for hauling the big pine logs, are everywhere. Four, five, six and even twelve yoke of oxen are seen in the woods or on the roads, with tall, rawboned, sinewy fellows driving them with a long whip able to reach to the farthest yoke. He whirls it around his head and it cracks with a noise that would make it a great thing for a small boy on the fourth of July. Only it takes a man to crack it, and I noticed that it never fell on his patient team—only the terrible exploding crack popped in the air above their ears, and I rather thought the yoke seemed as proud of it as their driver, for after every crack I noticed he added soothingly and softly: “Haw there, Buck!” and Buck hawed calmly, as if he was not at all afraid, nor even in a hurry, and they all went forward together with the steady pull of perfect understanding between the man and his team.