"I do not and I do not want to." "Just wait a moment and do not interrupt," I urged.

"You do not understand, there is no use in being a proprietor if you do not know more than your tenantry.

There are a thousand, there are ten thousand details in which the management of the farms may be made more profitable or less profitable, and all these details have to be watched and must be well in the proprietor's mind." "Could you not get some kind of overseeing general estate bailiff to do all that for you ?" he suggested.
"I can," I said, "and I'm going to get one.

My uncle's overseer died of the plague and my uncle was too old and too set in his ways to get another, so he acted as his own overseer for the last four years of his life.

I must know of my own knowledge just how the place ought to be managed or I can never detect and forestall unnecessary and ruinous friction and trouble between my tenantry and any new superintending overseer." "I do not know," Tanno ruminated, "which to admire more, the beauties of the Sabine tenant system or the wonders of the Sabine character.