Lime is the great carrier into plants of other elements which go there to form their organic compounds, during the elaboration of which, organic acids are created, any and all of which would poison and kill the plants were it not for the action of lime; so lime, in addition to its all-importance as a salifiable base, becomes the great carrier of all foods into plants where it is again of paramount importance as a fixer of oxalic fermentation, thus having the natural and distinct power to act where all other elements are useless.
It will correct sourness in any soil regardless of its origin, it will neutralize all acids that come into the soil through cultivation, through commercial fertilizers or green manurial crops. It will facilitate cultivation and produce a greater porosity and granulation of all soils and thereby lessen the bad effects of drought by reducing surface evaporation, will obviate excessive capillary rise of moisture which elevates the water-soluble foods above the zone of roots, provide better circulation of air in the soil and will cause rapid percolation of rain and thus reduce surface washing. It stimulates and increases nitrification and decomposes vegetable matter, extracting from it all plant foods and leaving humus to lighten the soil and retain its moisture. It enters into the composition of all plant life and therefore into all animal life, giving to animals its carbon combined with the carbon of the air to furnish them fat, and its lime to furnish them bone. It is the phosphatic-limestone that has made Tennessee and Kentucky horses the strength to excel in work and racing, and it is this same soil constituent that has given to the Jersey cow sufficient butter fat to lead the world in butter tests. It enables the clovers and grasses to grow, and without such crops what would the brothers of the hoe do toward profitable farming and meeting the responsibilities of life? It perpetuates and permits the use of commercial fertilizers which are becoming so absolutely essential to husbandry, as it obviates the evil effects of the acids these products contain, and makes all plant food available to the plant. Finally, it is a property designed by the Creator to act for and enter into all vegetable and animal life, and evil will be the reward to him who rejects it.
The Watermelon Sermon
Watermelon time is in full blast in Tennessee now. Ordinarily, the whites in the South cease to eat watermelons after the fifteenth of September, because they know that as soon as the cool nights begin every melon contains a thousand chills. But not so with the darkey. A chill rattles as harmlessly off the armour of his constitution as buckshot from the back of the Olympia. He can absorb miasma like a sponge, and, like it, grow fat as he absorbs. The negro, then, eats his melon until the November frosts kill the vines. Even then he carries the half-ripe melon into his cabin and often, on Christmas morning, an ice-cold watermelon is his first diet.
And a great treat it is. Did you never wander over the fields, way down South, after the cotton was all picked, and the November breezes came cool and ladened with that delicate, indescribably rare flavor the frost gives when it first nips the mellow-ripe muscadine? You have shouldered your gun and gone out after old Mollie Cotton Tail. It was cool and crisp when you went out, but toward noon it has grown hot again. Flushed and tired, you stop to rest by the big spring that flows from under the roots of the big oak near the cotton field. In the shadow of that oak, half hid in the frost-bitten weeds, you find a little striped watermelon—a guinea melon, as the darkies call it—a kind of a volunteer melon that grows in the cotton every year, the first seeds of which were brought by some Guinea negro, from the coast of Africa, when he first came over to servitude, with silver rings in his nose and ears. And though he failed to bring his idols and his household gods along with him, yet did he not forget the melon of his naked ancestors. Planting it as he hoed his first crop of cotton for a new master, it has never deserted him since, and so, year after year, it comes up amid the cotton, to remind him of the days it grew wild in a sunnier clime.
And there you find it this November morning. Boy like, you pounce on it with a shout and soon it is laid open, as red as your first love’s lips and as sweet; and so cold it seems to have been raised in the [deep-delved] cellars of all the centuries. I am sorry for the boy who has grown to be a man and never, in a November morning’s hunt after Old Mollie, had the exquisite sweetness of this satisfying surprise—the like of which is not equalled by the sweetness of any other surprise on earth. No—not even should he grow to be a man, and awake some morning to find himself famous and the father of twins!
Every darkey of any standing in Tennessee “gives a treat” at least once in his life. He will stint and economize for months to save money enough to invest in watermelons and tartaric acid (the acid makes the lemonade). Then, when the glorious day arrives, Nero, giving free entertainment to the citizens of Eternal Rome, is not in it with that darkey. Henceforth he can get anything in that community he wishes, from constable to presiding elder, while the widows of the church are his’n by a large majority!
I had heard that old Wash was going to run again for justice of the peace and the “deaconship of Zion” over in the coon district of Big Sandy, and that he was going to give his annual treat.
These had always passed off beautifully and ended in the unanimous election of the old man to both offices and anything else he wanted. I thought it was all over and entirely harmonious until he came in the other night, looking like Montejo’s flag-ship after Dewey’s ten-inch shell went through her, “a-rippin’ out her very innards”—as Old Wash himself described it—“from eend to eend.”