A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful
stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre,--that
strength of cables when the big ships are tugged at by the joined
fury of wind and ocean. And now some morning at the corner of the
field stand the black men with hooks and whetstones. The hook, a
keen, straight blade, bent at right angles to the handle two feet
from the hand. Let these men be the strongest; no weakling can
handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A heart, the doors and
walls of which are in perfect order, through which flows freely the
full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep, clear, easily
filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist and be
straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs
tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval
nature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader
strides to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which
the muscles play, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the
stalks over, and with his right hand draws the blade through them
an inch or more from the ground. When he has gathered his armful,
he turns and flings it down behind him, so that it lies spread out,
covering when fallen the same space it filled while standing. And
so he crosses the broad acres, and so each of the big black
followers, stepping one by one to a place behind him, until the
long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the prostrate hemp lie
shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the smell of it,
impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the
air.

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the
stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened