The earth was covered with two inches of snow, as white, as dazzling, as soft as northern snow and a hundred times more beautiful. Snow upon and beneath the moss-draped branches of the forests; snow along the bayou’s edges, powdering the low, pointed, thick palmetto growths; white snow and the fields and fields of white cotton bursting from dry bolls. The Natchitoches train sped leisurely through the white, still country, and I longed for some companion to sit beside me who would feel the marvelous and strange beauty of the scene as I did. My neighbor was a gentlemen of too practical a turn.
“Oh! the cotton and the snow!” I almost screamed as the first vision of a white cotton field appeared.
“Yes, the lazy rascals; won’t pick a lock of it; cotton at 4 cts, what’s the use they say.”
“What’s the use,” I agreed. How cold and inky black the negroes looked, standing in the white patches.
“Cotton’s in the fields all along here and down through the bayou Natchez country.”
“Oh! it isn’t earthly – it’s Fairyland!”
“Don’t know what the planters are going to do, unless they turn half the land into pasture and start raising cattle. What you going to do with that Cane river plantation of yours?”
“God knows. I wonder if it looks like this. Do you think they’ve picked the cotton – Do you think one could ever forget-“
Well some kind soul should have warned us not to go into Natchitoches town. The people were all stark mad. The snow had gone to their heads.
“Keep them curtains shut tight,” said the driver of the rumbling old hack. “They don’t know what they about; they jus’ as lief pelt you to death as not.”