[22]

21

years of rest, and assert that although the first crop on old-fields are better than when first cleared, a great falling off occurs after the second crop, the soil wearing out much more rapidly than in the first instance.

These old pine fields, when they have a gray, sandy soil, and yellow subsoil, are the best of tobacco lands. A man selected a few acres which had grown up in "black-jacks," scrub hickory, chincapin and sourwood. All indications of a very poor land and the crop raised sold for fifty cents a pound at the barndoor. When the soils are the right kinds, old fields which have lain for years in andropogon scoparius, or broom sedge, grow the very finest tobacco while they are almost worthless for other things. This broom sedge is turned under in the Fall, before frost, and the tobacco is planted the next Spring.