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The beneficiaries, chosen because of their indigence, were transported at the expense of the trust and given fifty-acre homesteads with equipment and supplies. Instruction in agriculture was provided for them at Savannah, and various regulations were established for making them soberly industrious on a small-farming basis.
Nowhere are the ruins of the feudal elements more plainly visible than in the forest regulations; the forest alone assures the rural population in true medieval style a subsidy for its existence, untouched by the fury of competition and small-farming.
Having lived for a year and a half in the neighborhood, and been favored with the gossip of the washerwoman, and of the farmer's wife, and of the girl who came to clean house now and then, they had come to know the affairs of their neighbors they had got a cross-section of an American small-farming community.
The Hodges were known to all the neighbors for miles about, and the amount of energy which each farmer expended in fighting them would have maintained the whole family in comfort for their lives. Thyrsis had travelled enough about the New England and Middle Atlantic states to know that these conditions were typical of the small-farming industry in all the remoter parts.
Corydon had been observing the customs of her neighbors in this typical "small-farming" district, and declared that they had two leading characteristics: first, they were not happy until they had had all their own teeth extracted, and a complete set of "store-teeth" substituted; and second, as soon as they moved into a house, they boarded over the open fire-place and covered the boards with wall-paper.
The only notable increase in the rural white population of the district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had little to do with sugar culture. The flow of population into the distant interior followed the lines of least resistance and greatest opportunity. In the earlier decades these lay chiefly in the Virginia latitudes.
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