Pebble pickers.

Aw right, that showed Jack Harpe was a expert lock picker.

But Ruth was such a little news-picker, with her music lessons!

She walked on through a narrow, mean street of mediaeval aspect where rag-pickers, drearily oblivious of the rain, quarreled weakly over their filthy piles of trash.

Cicely was a phenomenal cotton-picker, and John accompanied her to the fields and stayed by her hours at a time, though occasionally he would complain of his head, and sit under a tree and rest part of the day while Cicely worked, the two keeping one another always in sight.

"I might also drop a good word for the pine needle pickers among the thrushes?" volunteered the adder.

"You know, my old friend, Death, is a shrewd picker.

He was an excellent forger, a skilful lock-picker, an ingenious planner of shady projects, and had given a great deal of earnest study to the subject of the loopholes of the law.

Skillful pickers work with both hands, never touching the bolls, but removing the cotton by a single dextrous twist of the fingers.

When a boll was wide open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of the fingers; and a specially skilled one could keep both hands flying independently, and still exercise the small degree of care necessary to keep the lint fairly free from the trash of the brittle dead calyxes.

In the rich alluvium of the Mississippi the cotton will tower beyond the reach of the tallest "picker," and a single plant will contain hundreds of perfect "bolls;" in the neighboring "piney-woods" it lifts its humble head scarcely above the knee, and is proportionably meager in its produce of fruit.