They pay this price for health.

And health is all they get for it.

How strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
The farmhouse stood in the middle of a very large yard, and the yard was fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings; against these stood the smokehouse; beyond the palings was the orchard; beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields.

The front yard was entered over a stile, made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights; I do not remember any gate.

In a corner of the front yard were a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the nutting season riches were to be gathered there.
Down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns, the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a limpid brook which sang along over its gravelly bed and curved and frisked in and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging foliage and vines--a divine place for wading, and it had swimming-pools, too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us.