Reign of Law , livre ebook

The Floating Press - Lane Allen James

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

126 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Kentucky author James Lane Allen achieved literary prominence as a skillful chronicler of his home state's heritage, traditions, and natural beauty. All three of these elements are brought to bear in the lyrical novel The Reign of Law, which unfolds against the backdrop of the region's long-vital hemp farming industry.

Informations

Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 février 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776530731
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE REIGN OF LAW
A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS
* * *
JAMES LANE ALLEN

*
The Reign of Law A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields First published in 1900 Epub ISBN 978-1-77653-073-1 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77653-074-8 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
Hemp I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII
*
TO THE MEMORY OF A FATHER AND MOTHER WHOSE SELF-SACRIFICE, HIGH SYMPATHY, AND DEVOTION THE WRITING OF THIS STORY HAS CAUSED TO LIVE AFRESH IN THE EVER-GROWING, NEVER-AGING, GRATITUDE OF THEIR SON
Hemp
*
The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold,freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers ofhemp—with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestralBritain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flockin frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water,salt, game, tillage—in the very summer of that wild daylight ride ofTomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnightride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse ina boy's nursery—on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolutionthe Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army,rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements andthe saving of the West—hemp was growing tall and thick near the wallsof the fort.
Hemp in Kentucky in 1782—early landmark in the history of the soil, ofthe people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and clearingsolely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and shirt. By and bynot for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-homespun, fur-cladKentucky alone. To the north had begun the building of ships, Americanships for American commerce, for American arms, for a nation whichNature had herself created and had distinguished as a sea-faring race.To the south had begun the raising of cotton. As the great period ofshipbuilding went on—greatest during the twenty years or more endingin 1860; as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling wenton—never so great before as that in that same year—the two parts ofthe nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them,to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It wasin those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged withRussian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for apatriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared fibre;and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the outbreak ofthe Civil War, the country had become second to Great Britain alone inher ocean craft, and but little behind that mistress of the seas. Sothat in response to this double demand for hemp on the American shipand hemp on the southern plantation, at the close of that period ofnational history on land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky,in the year 1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of thewell-cleaned bast.
What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentuckyitself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like ofwhich no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forestwent its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those longlimestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with thefarms—they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. Forthe sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancingprice of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequentdispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither theycarried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant,—thusmaking Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,—theregulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at therope-walk, in the factory,—what phase of life went unaffected by thepursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmeroftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be,the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, theluxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the stock he could own.His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the South, his fox huntingat home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the oldfloating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans—all thesedepending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust ofhis golden acres.
With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The recordstands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd yearselapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into thewilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky havefurnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small partof the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated inKentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowningthose ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the timecannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct.Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken bymetals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by thesame variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it inKentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost.
Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in thetossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-likegreenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth,trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroadunder the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign inthe low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth faraway at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of thehemp, goes forth into the fields.
Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen birthplace.Up-turned by the plough, crossed and recrossed by the harrow, clodless,levelled, deep, fine, fertile—some extinct river-bottom, some valleythreaded by streams, some table-land of mild rays, moist airs, alluvialor limestone soils—such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature.Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcastthe sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small oval-shapedfruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow.
Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now theylie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about themthe sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes oflight, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, dropsfrom the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness,closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles ofmaternal earth more closely. Suddenly—as an insect that has beenfeigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action—ineach seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from asleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts itsashen woody shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white,fibril-tapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearingits lance-like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm.
Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into hisbarn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees—ordoes he not see?—the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertainflush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green?A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, buryingit out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling.Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are thepastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green ofyoung oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye: withorderly dots of dull dark green in vast array—the hills of Indianmaize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far andnear, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turnsto the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in natureseem dead and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant,strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight.
Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce darkeras to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker in the tops.Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants paler, smaller,maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker, taller, livinglonger, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads.
A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have comeforth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic,swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. Ahundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, sothat it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steamingair floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes andstalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin ofthe great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell outdeeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in thememory afterward and able to bring b