Instead of saving fifty pounds a year, at first the two sides of the account (not that he ever kept any books) about balanced.

Then, by degrees, the balance dropped the wrong way.

There was a loss, of twenty or thirty pounds on the year, and presently of forty or fifty pounds, which could only be made good by borrowing, and so increasing the payment of interest.
Although it takes sixty years--two generations--to accumulate a village fortune by saving fifty pounds a year, it does not occupy so long to reduce a farmer to poverty when half that sum is annually lost.

There was no strongly marked and radical defect in his system of farming to amount for it; it was the muddling, and the muddling only, that did it.

His work was blind.