The children from the North watched as the colored pickers pulled off the great, fluffy balls of white, stuffing them into bags or baskets which were later taken from the field on two-wheeled mule carts.
"What are all those brown things in the cotton?" asked Sue, as she looked at a fluffy clump on a near-by bush.
"Seeds," answered Grace. "The cotton clump, or boll, is full of seeds, and these have to be taken out before the cotton is baled up for the mill."
"Oh, I 'member about that!" cried Bunny. "We learned it in school. A man named Eli Whitney made a machine for taking seeds out of the cotton."
"That's right," admitted Sam. "I'll take you to the gin, as it is called, where the seeds are taken from the cotton and the white stuff is pressed into bales. You ought to see the big presses! It squeezes the cotton all up!"
"I hope it doesn't squeeze us!" laughed Sue.
"I'll keep you back out of danger," promised Grace.
The children walked through the cotton field of the plantation and were greeted by broad grins and smiles on the part of the colored folk. There seemed to be more children than grown people working in the field, and Sam said it was sometimes hard to get old pickers, so children had to be used.
The darkies did not work very fast, and often, as Bunny and his sister walked along with their new friends, the hands would stop working to look at the children. This, with their habit of stopping to sing every now and then, slowed up the cotton picking.
"I'd like to go to the mill and see the cotton pressed into bales," said Bunny after a while.