For these early farmers slavery seems to have been the solution of their problem of trying to tie a laborer to his job. While land was available in practically unlimited amount and money was scarce, any man might find himself a proprietor, a point illustrated by an amusing story of Winthrop’s. A certain man, lacking cash, paid off his farmhand by giving him a pair of oxen. The laborer was willing to continue such service. “But how shall I pay you?” asked the man. “With more oxen.” “And when the oxen are gone?” “Then you can work for me and earn them back again.” But in the North, as time went on, and land was taken up in comparatively small farms that could be profitably worked by owners who could pay for necessary labor, the convenience of slaves was easy to forego, and the public conscience began to work for abolition. As early as 1733 Sandwich voted: “that our representative is instructed to endeavor to have an act passed by the Court to prevent the importation of slaves into this country; and that all children that shall be born of such Africans as are now slaves among us, shall after such act be free at twenty-one years of age.” Five years later selling slaves in the American market was prohibited at Boston. It is at Truro, one may believe, that one of the last slave trades on the Cape was consummated when, in 1726, Benjamin Collins bought from a neighbor Hector, aged three, for thirty pounds, and in due time made a Christian of him, as the parish records show. Hector grew to a great age, and evinced confidence in salvation, among other ways, by praying in loud tones as he went to his labor in the fields of the Truro Highlands where, sure gage of notability, certain expressions to commemorate him crept into the vernacular—“Old Hector,” “black as Hector,” “Hector’s Nook,” “Hector’s Stubble,” “Hector’s Bridge.” In the later years, preceding the Civil War, it was natural that among a people which had always counted many progressives, there should be Abolitionists. They were kindly folk, it is said, “with strong convictions, never attending church because the sermons did not condemn slavery”—the early racial touch cropping out, it seems, in this later generation. Some of the ships of an Osterville owner even landed runaway slaves on the south shore whence they passed along by “underground railway” to a certain house in Barnstable. One remembers that as a boy he used to go there to teach them their letters; and he also remembers that “they were treated as equals; but sometimes they made their way to ‘Mary Dunn’s Road’ where they found rum and congenial companions.”