ney, and, according to this,
Hodson made a great mistake. He should have given a high price for his
stock, have paid for cake, &c., and fattened them up as fast as possible,
and then realised. The logic is correct, and in any business or
manufacture could not be gainsaid. But Hodson did just the reverse. He did
not mind his cattle taking a little time to get into condition, provided
they cost him no ready money. Theoretically, the grass they ate
represented money, and might have been converted to a better use. But in
practice the reverse came true. He succeeded, and other men failed. His
cattle and his sheep, which he bought cheap and out of condition, quietly
improved (time being no object), and he sold them at a profit, from which
there were no long bills to deduct for cake.

He purchased no machinery whilst in this small place--which was chiefly
grass land--with the exception of a second-hand haymaking machine. The
money he made he put out at interest on mortgage of real property, and it
brought in about 4 per cent. It was said that in some few cases where the
security was good he lent it at a much higher rate to other farmers of
twenty times his outward show. After awhile he went into the great farm
now occupied by his son Harry, and commenced operations without borrowing
a single shilling. The reason was because he was in no hurry. He slowly
grew his money in the little farm, and then, and not till then, essayed
the greater. 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. They would have shrunk
from any venture, and continued in the old course to the end of their
time.

Old Hodson, mean to the last degree in his way of living, narrow to the
narrowest point where sixpence could be