The next day Mr. Price was able to get out of the little room and enjoy the fresh air of the open commons. He saw, what Mrs. M’Curdy said, that the shanties had no ground attached to them. In front was the road, and behind a precipitous bank, scarcely a foot-path behind that of Bonny Betty. Yet these poor people paid from ten to twelve dollars a year for a piece of ground not more than twenty feet square. Mrs. M’Curdy was on the edge of a common, and her plot took in a strip of land about twenty by a hundred feet; this was the admiration and envy of the neighbours, who all imagined that if they only had “the luck to get such a bit garding spot” they would thrive as well as Mrs. M’Curdy. At noon a gentleman called on Mr. Price; he was the owner of some of the land thereabout, and likewise of the little strip on which all the shanties, excepting Mrs. M’Curdy’s, stood. He came by consequence of the letter which Mr. Price had written to him the day before, and being a sensible and considerate man, he was soon convinced by this gentleman’s arguments that some change in the circumstances of these poor people, his tenants, would be beneficial to him as well as to them. He finally agreed to lease to Mr. Price a piece of land not more than a few rods’ distance from the shanties; it was to be about one hundred and sixty feet square. It was leased for twelve years. As money can command any thing, in two weeks two hundred loads of manure were spread over this spot and ploughed in, and a good rough board fence enclosed the whole, with a wide gate in the centre of each side. Near the upper gate, under a large hemlock, a comfortable shanty was built, well floored, with two rooms, and a chimney between. On the lower side was another, only larger, having four small rooms; this was shaded by a fine silver pine. This shanty guarded the south gate. The fence and gates, all the posts being made of cedar, cost Mr. Price one hundred and fifty dollars, the manure and ploughing were one hundred more, the two shanties cost three hundred and fifty dollars. Furniture for the two shanties, grape vines, currant bushes, strawberry plants, garden seeds, two carts, six wheelbarrows, and other garden tools, with a shed to keep them in, cost four hundred dollars more. Here was an expenditure of the round sum of ten hundred dollars. The interest of this at six per cent. amounted only to sixty dollars, and he was only charged one hundred and forty dollars for the rent of the land, so that the interest of the money was but two hundred dollars a year. What was this to a man worth twelve thousand a year?