Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,--its
golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery
cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving
like the foam of billows from Carolina to Texas across that
Black and human Sea? I have sometimes half suspected that
here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece after which
Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one
might frame a pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery
and dragons' teeth, and blood and armed men, between the
ancient and the modern quest of the Golden Fleece in the
Black Sea.
And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but,
in its birthplace, woven. For the hum of the cotton-mills is
the newest and most significant thing in the New South
to-day. All through the Carolinas and Georgia, away down to
Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and
yet so busy and noisy withal that they scarce seem to belong
to the slow and sleepy land.
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