In the evening, Xu Hao walked alone in Xiaojia Village, and he deliberately accompanied the old lady back to live for a few days, and the car was simple and simple, without alarming anyone.

The whole street is hung with red lanterns, among which the Xu family and the Xiao family are the brightest, the family at this moment is undoubtedly out of the heyday of the fire cooking oil, the family has two families, relatives and friends are all rich and prosperous, as long as they are willing to manage the family business with their hearts.

Xu Hao may be middle-aged, or perhaps because of Zhu Gaochi's health, his thoughts can't help but drift to the future.

When he dies, what will happen to the Xu family? To paraphrase a phrase in the game, "There is no eternity in royal power", sooner or later the family will decay and the children and grandchildren will be scattered.

Walking and stopping, Xu Hao came to the Tong's house located in the north of the village, as one of the big clans in the village, the Tong family covers an area of not small, the size is almost half the size of the Xu family, and there are nearly 100 households living together, and most of the people in the compound are surnamed Tong.

The ancestral hall enshrines the same ancestor, Xu Hao doesn't know much about the history of the Tong family, only knows that everyone says that its long house occupies the dragon vein of the Tong family, the family is getting bigger and bigger, and the people are becoming more and more magnificent, that is, the standard city people with fine skin and tender meat.

The Xu family and the Tong family are not related, and even if they do, they don't know, but although they are both big families, compared to the Xu family, it is more difficult to say, and the Tong family is a broken household

Today's old man Tong is a retired official of the county school, the family lives in the county, he himself often goes back to the countryside to live, he is old and senior, since the Xu family moved away, he is the leading figure in this party.

He has two sons, the eldest son has been studying and going to school in the capital since he was a child, and he doesn't know what kind of official he is now. Xu Hao saw the sedan chair carried by two people at noon, and came back tremblingly, and the Tong family said that the eldest young master was back to breathe fresh air.

At this time, Young Master Tong was also walking outside, taking official steps and putting on a bureaucratic posture. Xu Hao shook his head disappre一门ly, there are many such people in the city. It turned out that he was just a quasi-bureaucrat, and he could not enter the criminal department through the imperial examination, an institution specializing in training professional officials.

Xu Hao didn't want to meet the other party, slowed down and walked in the shadows, and could vaguely see the young master Tong with a shiny oily hair on his head, wearing a straight tunics that seemed to be made of ordinary fabrics but not high-quality materials, and a pair of black leather shoes on his feet that could shine on people's shadows.

I remember that at noon, he had a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses on his nose, and the first thing he did when he walked out of the sedan chair was to gently wipe the dust on his leather shoes when he stepped on the gray ground with a handkerchief. Then he frowned and covered his nose, and looked dissatisfiedly at the crooked earthen houses in the Tong Family Courtyard, the rugged dirt paths with pits, and the welcoming crowd that was not pleasing to the eye.

There were many elders in the crowd, who nodded slightly as if greeting and ignoring the seven-room grandfather, the fourth-room grandfather, and the second-room cousin, and then walked away.

At that time, the two uncles who carried him back said that he had an argument with the eldest master in the county seat. Master Tong plans that after his son completes his studies in the Criminal Department, he will return to the county seat to be an alternate official, and strive for the opportunity to be promoted to a warden. So Master Tong asked him to go back to the courtyard of the old house to worship his ancestors and sweep the tombs, because his career was like that, and by the way, he was familiar with crops such as rice and wheat, and learned the trick of collecting rent and profit.

His father said that the fallen leaves return to their roots. In the end, people always have to rely on the old foundation to support their old age, but Tong Dashao can't listen to it, how far is Jinling from Xiaojia Village? Which one returns to the roots? In short, I don't want to go back to the country.

"You can at least go to the countryside and get some fresh air!" Master Tong's last sentence touched him. So he brought his own sedan chair and came back trembling and trembling.

I don't want to come back, I can't help but smell the smell of pig dung and cow feces in the countryside, and I can't stand it immediately, so I don't go to the ancestral hall to light incense and candles, burn paper money, kneel straight in front of the ancestors' gods, kowtow three times, even if I have completed the task, I fled back to the city in a sedan chair the next day.

The second young master is not as good as the boss in his studies, he first entered the Jinling New School, but he failed to go down, and he was persuaded to quit if he failed the Koko, so he went to the Jiangwutang Non-commissioned Officer School that graduated after a year, which was specially set up for the purpose of abducting and deceiving good young people.

A year later, the second young master got a non-commissioned officer rank and became an officer. However, he was afraid of being sent to the sea or the flesh-and-blood north to fight, so he returned to the county order to do an inspection, this errand was both powerful and safe, and these two were already the essence of the Tong family.

The rest of the Tong family is like a mustard, not worth mentioning, like the stars and the moon, they have become vassals and foils of the Changfang family. Among the crooked tiled houses and straw huts around the long-house compound, some of them are the descendants of the ancestors of the Tong family, and most of them have become tenants of the long-house house.

If you can't even afford to plant a field, you can either only fight the autumn breeze every day, or work as a helper for the longhouse for a long time.

The Tong family is very closed and self-contained, and has always had little contact with other families in Xiaojia Village. Other people with the surname Tong live on the fields handed down by their ancestors, and once they encounter natural and man-made disasters, or unexpected three long and two short, some are 'middle-aged people' who make ideas for the long house, and the land is either sold or sold, and it is said that it is for the sake of the same ancestor.

In just a few decades, the family was defeated, and the land that was originally divided was returned to the name of the long house, so that these families were desperate, and they became the house slaves of the old man, long-term and short-term workers, the palanquin bearer who carried the sedan chair, and the caretaker whistled the trumpet to help the idle and so on.

Xu Hao walked and walked, and said in his heart that in the future, will his children and grandchildren become the domestic slaves of another group of descendants? Drawing on the history of the Tong family, it is quite possible, unless it is then fully entered into the modern world.

Now that the children's parents' houses are basically unified with the children's house, they don't dare to reach out, at least near Xiaojia Village, because it will touch the reverse scales of the Xu family, and Xu Hao will never allow it. In the courtyard of the Tong family, there is only one family that is unwilling to become tenants, so they have to be ambitious to top the Tong family, relying on their own strength and one-handed agronomy to revitalize the family business.

This person's surname is Wang, named Wang Siliu, and his ancestors have married the Tong family, which shows that they were the right people back then. Later, the family fell in the middle of the road, and in the years when the Ming Dynasty was founded, the local tyrants divided the fields, and most of the families in the courtyard did not want to become tenants of the old Zhu family, and they had to live and die to guard the ancestral property, and pay less taxes under the power of the long house, and the Wang family was one of the yeoman farmers who received the land from the government.

Wang Siliu was nicknamed Lord Wang when he was young, he was born with great strength, about two meters tall, weighing 200 pounds, big hands and feet, talking loudly, and doing things big, so the people in Xiaojia Village called him Lord Wang.

As the saying goes, height and strength are not lost, and people in the village like to call him when they kill pigs, and a person can hold down the pig, pull out the pig-killing knife in his mouth, and insert a knife into it, and the pig will not hum or bark.

Because there were no oxen at home, and he often could not borrow them when he was busy with the farm, he saw his young son in the king's field, and his young son was holding the plow behind, and the king was pulling the plough in front of him, no less than a strong bull.

Due to the large amount of power consumed, the food eaten is naturally more than ordinary people, and it is said that they can eat one liter of rice and two catties of rice.

Many people think that Lord Wang is a clumsy old man, and he is easy to fool with his lack of heart, but in fact, his IQ is directly proportional to his height, and he is good at making small calculations, especially when he grows his own crops, which is really called a careful person.

Wang Siliu is an only son, his parents died early, he has no cousins, and because he married his sister, his wife was sick in bed all the year round, living on 20 acres of thin fields, and belonged to the vast number of medium-sized farmers who could barely live by hard work in the Ming Dynasty. Although it is not comparable to the upper class households that have a surplus and have some surpluses, they are not the kind of low-class poor households that cannot survive and get out of the holes.

Generally speaking, the ancient medium-sized peasant households belonged to the backbone of paying taxes, but they were also the most dangerous people, in the event of a disaster year, or there were continuous funeral celebrations at home, and the imperial court suddenly imposed harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, etc., the medium-sized peasant households were the most resistant, otherwise there would be no famous homeless people in the Ming Dynasty.

Although Wang Siliu lives in Xiaojia Village, he inevitably encounters all kinds of unlucky things, coupled with his wife's medicine money, he has been in a state of not having enough to eat and starving. In those years of famine, although he tightened his belt, changed from eating dry rice to porridge, and ate two meals to one meal, it was inevitable that he would have no money to buy medicine.

had no choice but to borrow a debt from Master Tong, not "donkey rolling" or "knocking profit", but it is still the most distressing thing for Wang Siliu to feel, that is, he later gave a piece of land to the Tong family, and there was no way to redeem it.

What Wang Siliu was most proud of was that several homesteaders who were in a similar situation to him back then, for various reasons, or under the temptation and persecution of the Tong family, they all became tenants of Master Tong, and only he, Lord Wang, survived in Tong's courtyard.

What a poignant experience this is, it's really a money that I can't wait to use eight petals, and a rice I can't wait to eat as eight rice.

In the past ten years, Xu Hao's kindness has benefited the village, and also benefited the Wang family, coupled with Wang Siliu's careful calculation, hard work, and now the family has five acres of cotton fields, five acres of paddy fields and seven or eight acres of dry fields, one acre of vegetable garden, and a small orchard.

He was not satisfied with the good days, so he rented a few acres of land from Master Tong to plant, so that in a year, the income could be more, but unfortunately he was the only real laborer in the family.

Due to the establishment of a female doctor, his wife has been carefully diagnosed and treated, and her condition has improved for the most part, and she can no longer work in the field, but can cook and wash clothes at home, take care of the house, and take care of her children.

The son is fourteen or fifteen years old, and he is finally the last one and a half laborers, and he has an eight-year-old daughter, who can not only help his mother do some housework within her ability, but also beat pigweed and feed two big fat pigs.

Wang Siliu suffered a lifetime of illiterate losses, and he had to ask his son to go to primary and secondary school, so that the living children in the fields could not help much, at most the sons went to the fields when the farm was busy, and his wife and daughter cut the grain in the autumn, went to the field to pick ears of wheat and rice, hugged the seedlings, and peeled the newly planted corn and beans.

Potatoes and other products brought back from overseas can only fill their stomachs in a short period of time, but they cannot increase farmers' incomes. (To be continued......)