When the black labourer worked, not freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by magic.

To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel's ancestors had got out of the habit of trying.

The beneficent charity of the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have remained--and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another.
In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and unrewarded was the act of toil.

So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel's father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the hearth to which his mother had called him.
The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves.

Small shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on.