Doubtless many of the royalist estates were confiscated at that time.

Doubtless, again, our Government, to encourage settlement, sold land in such large parcels in early days.

Incurious Abingdon cares for none of these things.

Singular Abingdon! And yet are these folk, indeed, so singular among citizens?
So unseeing a people?
Consider that, within the memory of men living, the wisdom of America has made free gift to the railroads, to encourage their building, of so much land as goes to the making of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; a notable encouragement! History does not remark upon this little transaction, however.

In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner imaginable.