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Sam, the Turpentine Chopper
table, but two shelves held a water bucket, a cup and perhaps a half- dozen dishes with two pans and a skillet. That's all there was to the home of Sam and Lou, - except an open privy one hundred feet down the hill from the shack. It leaned crazily and served for two families.

But the pine trees gave volume to the whisper of the breeze at night. The huge moss-covered oaks cave shade for the hot days and here the family could rest and the children played while the mothers gathered and gossiped over trivial matters. There were no fences between the shacks, no gardens, no flowers and no automobiles only the squalid pine shacks with open, unscreened doors.

Sam was twenty-three. He had never seen the inside of a school.

"Taint no use to send cullud chillun to school. Gits too smart," Sam said. He had started in as a turpentine chopper when he was sixteen. His father had worked at it for thirty years and all the boys were in the turpentine work.

Day after day, week after week, and year after year, Sam had arisen at the first break-of-day and gulping his breakfast, hurried through swamps and up hill with his axe and batch of turpentine cups. Sometimes he tapped 2000 trees a day - if the woods-rider would let him. But 1500 trees was a good day's work.
That took him into first dark. For this work Sam got eighty cents per thousand trees chopped. Six dollars was an average weeks salary. Six dollars for the needs of a family! Six dollars a week could not buy much but Sam said their needs were simple.

On Saturdays the Boss Man sent a truck from town by which

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