"How large is it?"
"One hundred and forty acres."
"How much cleared?"
"Five or six acres—thereabout."
"How long have you been on it?"
"Five years."
"And only five acres cleared? That is very little in five years. I have seen people who had cleared twice that quantity of land in half the time."
He replied, almost with fierceness, "Then they had money, or friends, or hands to help them: I have neither. I have in this wide world only myself! and set a man with only a pair of hands at one of them big trees there!—see what he'll make of it! You may swing the axe here from morning to night for a week before you let the daylight in upon you."
"You are right!" I said, in compassion and self-reproach, "and I was wrong! pray excuse me!"
"No offence."