Even then he would not have ventured had not the circumstances been peculiarly favourable.

Like the present, it was a time of depression generally, and in this particular case the former tenant had lived high and farmed bad.

The land was in the worst possible state, the landlord could not let it, and Hodson was given to understand that he could have it for next to nothing at first.
Now it was at this crisis of his life that he showed that in his own sphere he possessed the true attribute of genius.

Most men who had practised rigid economy for twenty years, whose hours, and days, and weeks had been occupied with little petty details, how to save a penny here and a fourpenny bit yonder, would have become fossilised in the process.

Their minds would have become as narrow as their ways.