Tobacco seeds are as small as grains of sand, and we BERRY WAGON BOYS have held in our hands enough seeds to furnish plants for a large plantation. A field of tobacco is a beautiful sight, for the plants grow quite high and have huge, smooth, dark green leaves. When the leaves grow yellow, the farmers cut off the stalks and hang them on sticks or wires, and when the leaves are stripped from the stems they are hauled to the "curing barn" to be "cured" or dried. These barns are kept hot all of the time, until the leaves are cured when they are started off to market.
In many places tobacco is grown under great tents which make the fields look like an army encampment.
A cotton field is a great sight. The plants come up about to our waists and the fluffy tufts of white cotton pop out of the green pods or bolls just as chestnuts burst out of their burrs. The negro cotton pickers go up and down the rows many times, for the cotton does not all ripen at the same time.
We saw loads and loads of cotton being taken to the ginhouse where the cotton gin picks out all the seeds and leaves the snowy cotton ready to be pressed into bales. The seeds are not wasted for the oil is pressed out and sold to be used, as olive oil is used in cooking and salad. Sometimes this oil is sold to men who get mixed in putting on the labels and instead of marking the bottles of oil with American labels, they get marked as fancy olive oil from Italy. This must be very humiliating to the cottonseed oil, for it cannot speak a word of Italian and is ashamed of the lie that is printed on its front.
When the cotton is taken out of the gin, it is ready to go to the compress and be pressed into bales or huge bundles. A bale is about the size of a traveling man's sample trunk and the cotton is squeezed in so tightly that the bales have to be wrapped in burlap and bound with iron bands to keep the cotton from bursting out. These great bales weigh about five hundred pounds and we have seen the river boats loaded down to the water's edge and railroad stations piled high with them. They are sent to the cotton mills in various parts of our own country and in foreign lands to be made into cloth. People all over the world use cloth that once grew on our southern plantations. When we learned this, we looked at the fluffy tufts with new interest. Perhaps this tuft would be woven into a Kimona for a Japanese girl. Maybe that one would someday be in the sail of a fishing boat off New Foundland or a tent on the Sahara Desert, or a sheet on a hospital cot in San Francisco or New York.
Cotton is grown some in other countries, but American cotton is considered the best and brings in great wealth to our Uncle Sam.
In SEEING AMERICA FIRST, we have left Washington till the last just as you have cake and ice cream to wind up a dinner.
The capitol is like a great marble palace and it would be easy to get lost in those long corridors. We saw the House of Representatives with the congressmen sitting at their desks like grown-up schoolboys in a very handsome school-room. We climbed into the huge dome, and we went into the Senate Chamber. The most impressive place was the Supreme Court with the Chief Justices in their long black silk robes. We wondered how people ever dared to break any American laws.