Joe Harper had the offer from his master of a small farm, if he chose to employ his capital in stocking it; but Joe had seen so much of the danger and difficulty incurred by beginning to farm without sufficient capital, that he did not choose to venture. As for borrowing a little to add to his own and buying a very small property, as his father hinted that he might, he would not for a moment listen to it. He declared that he knew small properties to bring nothing but ruin, if they were the only dependance of the labouring man; and that if he had a legacy to-morrow of a farm of fifty acres, he would sell it immediately, unless a very pretty capital in money were left with it. This was said in the hearing of two or three neighbours who were curious to know what he had seen abroad that gave him such a horror of small properties. “I have seen more misery than I could easily give you an idea of: and that, too, in spite of the most indefatigable industry. In Languedoc, a province of France, there are mountains which are cultivated to the very top, by means which no one dreams of here. But those who cultivate them are miserably poor, because each possesses a piece of ground which can never, by the best management, be made to maintain a family. I have seen people carrying earth in baskets on their backs to the top of a mountain which was of itself too rocky for anything to grow upon it.” “That puts me in mind,” said the sergeant, “of what I have heard about China. The people there are too numerous for the produce of the land, and therefore many are in the lowest depths of poverty. I am told that it is no uncommon thing there for a man to take possession of a ledge of rock which cannot be got at but by his companions letting him down by a rope from the mountain top. They let down baskets of earth to him, which he spreads to a sufficient thickness, and then sows his seed, and he and his neighbours share the produce. There he hangs, poor creature, in the heat of the day, toiling on the burning rock, to raise a quantity of food which would not be thought worth the trouble of a day’s work in England.” “But,” inquired a neighbour, “why do they spend their labour in any such way? There must be some better means of getting their bread.” “In such a case as that in Languedoc, of which I was speaking,” said Joe, “the people are attached to the soil from its being their own. It is the custom there for families to divide the paternal property; and hence arises all this poverty. A man with a family may be well off with a farm of two hundred acres, and his two sons may do well enough on one hundred each: but when this one hundred is divided among five children, and then again among their five children, it becomes too small to be tilled with any advantage. And yet these young folks are deceived by the notion of having landed property; and they marry when the land is divided into roods, as readily as if they had a fine estate.” “Surely, Joe, that cannot be?”