cone heavenward. On other farms and stolid water wagon attached in single file ranches was the same process. to the rear. One day the farmer came among us with a generous roll of greenbacks. Martin, some of the town workers, and a part of the college boys walked down the road, caught the north-bound freight, and followed the harvest as it went on to higher latitudes. As the train puffed noisily beyond the horizon, another trail of smoke came from the east-threshing days were at hand. IV "Look at the auto-with trailers," called Jim, the leader of the town men, now that Mart, the union organizer, had moved on. Sure enough-over the crest of a little slope it came, sturdily pushing its way at the beck of a grimy engineer-the touring car of the plains, a traction engine. The driver was protected by a spacious canvas, and the crew of the outfit, dusty but contented, sat in apparent ease on the unwieldy separator, the neat cook shanty and Six of the "hands" were kept busy on the ranch to help in the threshing, the doctor among them. He had won the farmer's heart by prescribing for a lame horse, so saving the purchase of another. "Going to be harder work to keep up with that than with the reaper," he remarked, as the engine and its dependents turned into the yard. Then there was much discussion of location, some shovelling as the true level for the machine was sought, unloading of coal, and search for water. At last all was in readiness for the beginning the following morning. Tom Whitney, the rotund, strong-shouldered owner of the "outfit," looked it over proudly. "There ain't a better one in the West," he declared. "Th' cook shack's th' best ever made in these parts-and th' machine's a honey." After supper, while the men of the farm were milking, the doctor and I walked out to the windmill, and gazing across the plains caught a view of the silent stacks, standing, like misers, defiant to the world's demands, with their garnered gold fast in covetous grasp. It seemed a veritable sacrilege to rob the sombre group of its possessions. Summer evenings on the plains are marked by a hush that seldom comes to domains of thick hedgerows and many orchards. The west loses its orange as a curtain of blue creeps up the eastern sky; the twinkle of a light in a farmer's dwelling, three miles away, is the only touch of kinship with humanity-but the sweep of the winds is a benediction, and the breath of the fertile lands is a joy. "I'm up against a real union this time," mused Farmer Mangold, as we returned to the house. "The threshers have combined." "Are they on a strike?" "Not yet-but it's eight cents a bushel or let it rot. I'm going to pay." It was decided that all hands should board at the cook shanty, which was placed beside a hedge in the lower part of the field. Susan had finished her term as helper at the ranch. The doctor tried to get the position of water-wagon driver, but lost out. He went on the straw stack-at the business end of a very steady toiler, the carrier. "But it's not so bad as it was when I was a boy," explained he. "Then th' straw came up in a broad stream that kept two of us sweating to pitch it away. Now it's poured out of a pipe where you want it." He meant the long tube with a powerful fan at the bottom, driving the straw and dust by the force of the air, to the far stackshence "wind" stacker. For my own part, I tried to steal a march on the doctor, and applied for the place of weigher and measurer at the side of the machine. "Ain't no such thing nowadays," laughed fat Tom Whitney. "This machine measures and weighs every bushel of grain itself without any help. Likewise it puts it in th' wagon.' "Then, I will cut bands at the front end of the concern." "Don't need ye. We've got a self-feeder -all you have to do is to shove th' bundles in and th' machine does th' rest." He was right. The modern threshing machine is an automatic contrivance. It has shared the advancement of the age. The harvesters became plain, every-day heavers of straw. Armed with pitchforks they began their onslaught on the heapedup gleanings of the fields. More than one column of smoke vexed the clear skies. On adjoining farms other engines were puffing and other machines were rattling. It was a busy time. Work commenced at daybreak and it ended with sundown. The long-drawn, low note that used to sing between the bays of my father's big barn in western New York in boyhood years was softened by the great out-of-doors surrounding the group of stacks-but it was yet the same key of labor. It rose and fell, as in the old days, and I stood reminiscent, seeing the friends and surroundings of youth. "Hurry up ther' on th' left stack!" was Tom Whitney. His reward depended on the amount of grain the machine turned out during the twenty-four hours. He could not afford to pay for periods of retrospection. Very unpoetic man, this Tom Whitney. Farmer Mangold did something else. He and his sturdy sons hurried to the horse sheds, and strong teams were hitched quickly to ploughs. Then helter-skelter, ploughs bumping and jumping, back and forth they turned the stubble under chocolate ribbons of earth to protect other stacks on the farther edge of the section. But Tom Whitney thought only of saving his "outfit." The engine was yet steamed up, the fires only banked; clouds of smoke It covered both it and its industrious companion. He leaped to the low platform at the rear, turned on the power, and started the "auto" through the blurred atmosphere in the direction of the machine. He veered, backed, and halted. Flames were scorching the canvas cover over his head; they had already caught the rear of the machine. But he reached down and made a coupling-then pulled steadily out of the furnace, and came with his three-thousanddollar possession safe into clear air. Quick hands put out the fire on the varnished machine, and the regular engineer hurried on, taking all to a safe place beyond the protecting barrier of hastily ploughed ground. The mistress of the cook shanty waved a table-cloth from the rear door of her castle, and the engine slowed down, the wheels ceased their whirr, the men tumbled from the stacks, dusty, worn, perspiring, hungry. The cook shanty was a beauty. It appealed more directly to the men who tramped up from the machine than ever did the most perfectly equipped café on the boulevard to an after-theatre party. Its screened windows and doors, the long white table that extended through the middle, the big roast of beef, the smoking rolls, the steaming cabbage-they needed no hunger-sauce to appeal to the guests of the occasion. "Say, Susie," exclaimed one of the college boys, "you're doing fine." "I'm not Susie," was the response. "I'm Hannah." "What's th' mat-" began the listening group, but Tom Whitney interposed: "Boys, I hope you'll like my gal's cookin'." They were glad they had not concluded the yell. They did like her cooking; they ate until it seemed that she must begin another batch of supplies. There were apple dumplings with cream and "Fire! fire!" Everybody jumped from the table. Tom Whitney had seen it first and was already running, bareheaded, toward the array of stacks, where the red separator and the black engine waited in helplessness. "Guess I didn't cover up the ashes right," muttered the engineer, as he joined in the chase. VOL. XXXVI.-2 The stacks burned. That night, a score of miles away, farmers watched the red glow of the embers. The threshers moved to another position. By mid-afternoon the "whi-r-r-r" of belts and the thuds of bundles thrown on voracious feeding tables came as familiarly as before. "Got you now," whispered the doctor that evening, as he lay on the knoll, smoking. "I'm going to drive a wheat wagon." "Ah-couldn't stand real work?" "Not that, but I am so far recovered that I feel like travel. In fact, I've prescribed it for myself." He started with the first load the next morning-fifty-five bushels, the product of two acres of prairie soil. Four other loads went at the same time. It was a long, slow journey, with little variation in the level of road or experience. The prairie elevator rearing its ungainly form beside the tracks had no capacity commensurate with the demands upon it. "Sorry, sorry, boys," was the manager's greeting. "We can't get cars enough, and th' elevator's full to th' top. You c'n do like th' others an' dump it on th' ground out ther' if ye want to-that's th' best I farmer himself, laughing, was helping Tom c'n do." Whitney cut them in generous slices. They did it. Out on a clean piece of buffalo grass they found forty thousand bushels of the red-brown grain, a drift of wheat, the overflowing largess of Nature's bounty. It would lie in the sunshine of late summer and early autumn, unharmed. None could steal it, and there was little likelihood of rain to do it injury. The cook shanty had been moved twice, and was down near the workers. The last lot of stacks was going through the greedy separator, and was giving up its hoarded wealth. Hannah waved the table-cloth in mid-afternoon. The men stopped-was she in danger? Tom Whitney hurried as rapidly as his style of architecture would allow. Then she waved some more, and Tom stood by her side. The machine was deserted-certainly this was an important occasion. All was quiet as the company approached. Where was Tom? On the other side. But that was not all—with him, piled in luscious greenness, were a dozen of Farmer Mangold's best watermelons, and the "It's my treat, boys," was the announcement. "Help yourselves." The last stack was fed into the devouring cylinder. Instead of many symmetrical mounds of grain-laden bundles on the shorn acres, now were great misshapen heaps of discarded straw, later to light winter nights with beacon blaze, as they returned to ashes in destroying fire. Company after company of harvesters had moved on; only those joined to threshing crews remained. "Which shall we do-go north with th' harvest or go home?" asked the doctor. We stood at the station, and two ways were open: On one track was a freight, bound east with creaking loads of grain; on another, a line of inviting passenger coaches headed toward the hard-wheat region of the Dakotas. No word was spoken, but with one accord we walked along-side the waiting cars of wheat and climbed up the steep steps of the little red caboose. For us harvest was ended. BETWEEN THE WORLDS By Louise Chandler Moulton THOU hast gone on so far I cannot find thee- Oh, must it be that when I follow after Vagrant among the millions of the stars The scornful Worlds will mock with careless laughter Did Time and Space, stern foes, have power to sever When thou did'st take that path beyond the sun? THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO A ONE FACTOR IN THE SOUTH'S STANDING PROBLEM By Thomas Nelson Page MONG the various factors that have contributed to bring about the recrudescence of the Negro question in the last year or two a prominent one is the movement in the South to disfranchise the ignorant element of the Negro race. This is usually termed the "Disfranchisement of the Negro." But although the object of the movement is frankly to disfranchise a large element among that race, while the corresponding element among the whites is left the ballot, the term is by no means exact. Few things are rarer and nothing is more important than accuracy in definitions. In the matter under consideration much misapprehension exists as to the extent of the disfranchisement, and possibly more as to its effect. Reams of paper have been covered with frantic denunciation; courts have been appealed to; threats have been made against the Southern States of reducing their representation in Congress, and still the movement has gone on under the direction of the most enlightened and conservative men in the South. And so far as has yet been tested, it has proceeded by legal methods. The disfranchisement-clauses have not only caused an outcry on the part of the politicians, white and colored, and the doctrinaires who were brought up on hostility to the South, but they have excited unfavorable comment even among some friendly enough to the South, who, while conceding that the former experiment has proved a disastrous failure so far as the South is concerned, yet believe that a manifest injustice is done to the rest of the country by one section holding a representation in Congress which, according to the votes cast there, appears to be in excess of that held by the rest of the country. A singular feature of the case is that the division-line of opinion for or against the measure is not so much that of party affilia tion as that of familiarity with the conditions that have brought about the changes in the constitutions of the Southern States. Within the last year, a man of national reputation, a gentleman of high standing, of broad sympathies and much learning, whose affiliations are with the party that is dominant in the South, in an address before the New England Suffrage Conference, warmly approved the reconstruction measures of Thaddeus Stevens, setting aside the governments in the South, putting the Southern States under military control, and providing for the Congressional system of reconstruction based on Negro suffrage. "The measure finally adopted was," he says, "of proved necessity. Thus, and thus only, could the lives of the colored men and white Union men be protected. They needed every weapon that we could place in their hands, and this weapon was among them.” This statement presents clearly the basic error which underlies all others. It is that the Negro needs weapons with which to oppose the white, and that "we" must place them in his hands. Yet another gentleman of varied experience and extensive general knowledge, whose affiliations have at times been with the same party, has recently published a paper written with all his well-known ability, based, however, mainly on a study which he made of conditions at the South during a rapid tour in 1865. Neither of these men has added much to his knowledge of the Negro question since that time. That men of these gentlemen's standing can really believe at this day the facts stated by them demonstrates the hopelessness of ever having the matter clearly viewed by a large body of well-meaning people. The weapon which the advocate of universal suffrage applauds himself for having helped to place in the Negro's hands has been his destruction. It was a torch placed in the hands of a child, with which he has |