In the evening, Xu Hao was walking alone in Xiaojia Village. He specially accompanied the old lady back to stay for a few days. He drove lightly and did not alarm anyone.

Red lanterns were hung on the entire street, among which the Xu family and Xiao family were the brightest. At this moment, the family was undoubtedly at the heyday of the fire cooking oil. The family and two families, and their relatives and friends who were related to each other were all wealthy and developed as long as they were willing to manage the family business with their hearts.

Perhaps because Xu Hao reached middle age, or perhaps because he was moved by Zhu Gaochi's health, his thoughts couldn't help but float to the future.

What will happen to the Xu family when they die? To sum up the saying in the game, "The power of the king is not eternal", sooner or later, the family will decline and the descendants will fall into pieces.

After walking and stopping, Xu Haofu thoughtfully came to Tongjiayuan at the north end of the village. The Tong family, one of the big families in the village, covers a large area, about half a size, and lives in the Xu family. They live in nearly 100 households. Most of the families in the courtyard have their surnames.

The same ancestor is enshrined in the ancestral hall. Xu Hao is not very clear about the history of the Tong family. He only knows that everyone says that his long house occupies the dragon veins of the Tong family. The family is getting bigger and bigger, and the people are becoming more and more grand, that is, the standard city people with fine skin and tender flesh.

The Xu family has no relatives with the Tong family, and even if there are any, they don’t know. However, although they are both large families, they are a bit ugly compared to the Xu family. The Tong family is a dilapidated house.

Today, Mr. Tong is a retired official from the county school. His family lives in the county. He often returns to the countryside to live. He is old and experienced. Since the Xu family moved away, he has been a well-known figure in this area.

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

At this time, Master Tong was also walking outside, taking official steps, and posing as a bureaucratic. Xu Hao shook his head disapprovingly. There were more people like this in the city. It turned out that he was just a quasi-bureaucrat. He failed to pass the imperial examination and entered the Ministry of Justice, and was specially trained for professional officials.

Xu Hao didn't want to meet with the other party, so he slowed down and walked in the shadows. He could vaguely see the shiny oily head on his head. He was wearing a straight Zhongshan suit made of high-quality materials, and a pair of black leather shoes on his feet that could shine on his shadow.

I remember at noon, he had a pair of gold-edged sunglasses on his nose. The first thing he did when he walked out of the sedan chair was to gently wipe the gray ground with his handkerchief and put a layer of gray on his leather shoes. Then he frowned and covered his nose, looking at the crooked earthen houses in Tongjiayuan, the rugged gray soil paths, and the welcome crowds that he didn't like.

Many of the people were his elders, who looked at the seventh grandfather, the fourth grandfather, the second grandfather, and the second grandfather, nodded slightly, and a humming sound, then left.

The two uncles who brought him back at that time said that he had a dispute with the master in the county town. Mr. Tong planned to return to the county town to be a candidate and wait for a shortage of candidates after his son was finished in the Ministry of Justice, so he could get a little bit of experience and get the opportunity to be promoted to a clerk. So Mr. Tong asked him to go back to the yard of the old house to worship his ancestors and sweep the graves. Because his career was just like that, he was also familiar with crops such as rice and wheat, and learned the tips of collecting rent and profits.

His father said that fallen leaves return to their roots. In the end, people always rely on their old foundation to support themselves, but Young Master Tong couldn't listen. How far is Jinling from Xiaojia Village? Where can I return to their roots? In short, I don't want to go back to the countryside.

"You can at least go to the countryside to breathe some fresh air!" Mr. Tong's last words touched him. So he brought his own sedan chair and came back tremblingly.

I didn't want to come back, and I couldn't help it when I smelled pig manure and cow dung in the countryside. I couldn't stand it anymore. I went to the ancestral hall to light incense and candles, burned paper money, and knelt straight in front of the ancestor's god lord card, kowtowed three times. Even if I completed the task, I fled back to the city in a sedan chair the next day.

The second young master was not as good as the boss. He first entered Jinling New School, but failed and was persuaded to leave. So he went to the martial arts lecture hall non-commissioned school, which was graduated after one year, and was specially set up to deceive the great young people.

A year later, the second young master obtained a rank of non-commissioned officers and became an officer. However, he was afraid of being sent to the sea or to fight in the north with flesh and blood, so he returned to the county magistrate to conduct an inspection. This errand was both majestic and safe, and these two were already the essence of the Tong family worth talking about.

The rest of the Tong family were like grass, not worth mentioning, and became the vassal and foil of the Changfang family like stars lying on the moon. Among the tiled tiled houses and straw sheds around the Changfang courtyard, some were descendants of the ancestors of the Tong family, and most of them had become tenants of the Changfang family. As for those who were not surnamed Tong, they were tenants among the tenants. Every household rented the fields for the Changfang house and paid the rent for the grain.

If you can't even plant the fields, you can either only fight the autumn wind every day, or work as a helper for the long house for many years.

The Tong family is very closed and self-organized, and has never had much contact with other families in Xiaojia Village. Others with the surname Tong live on the fields handed down from their ancestors. Once they encounter natural disasters or unexpected shortcomings, some of them are "middle people" who come up with ideas for the eldest son, and the land is either done or sold, or they are said to be due to the friendship between the same clan and the same ancestor.

In just a few decades, one by one, the land they had been separated was reborn under the name of the Changfang. These families were desperate and became slaves of Master Tong, long-term workers, sedan chairmen carrying sedan chairs, guards guards and gangs.

Xu Hao walked away, thinking that in the future, his descendants would become slaves to another descendants? It is very likely to learn from the history of the Tong family, unless he fully entered the modern world at that time.

Now the Tong family's house is basically unified with the Tong family courtyard, and he does not dare to reach out. At least he does not dare to approach Xiaojia Village, because Xu Hao would never allow it to touch the Xu family's reverse scale. In the Tong family courtyard, there is only one family who is unwilling to become a tenant, and he insists on ambitiously joining the Tong family, and revitalizing the family business with his own strength and agronomics.

This family's surname is Wang, named Wang Siliu. His ancestors once married the Tong family, which shows that they were a good match. Later, the family fell into decline. In the years when the Ming Dynasty was founded, the local tyrants were defeated and the land was divided. Most families in the courtyard were unwilling to become tenants of the old Zhu family. They had to live by their ancestors and live by their ancestors and pay less taxes under the power of the Changfang. The Wang family was one of the self-cultivated farmers who brought the fields from the government.

When Wang Siliu was young, he was nicknamed Lord Wang. He was born with great strength, about two meters tall, weighed 200 kilograms, and spoke loudly, and was very generous when doing things, so everyone in Xiaojia Village called him Lord Wang.

As the saying goes, height is not bad, and the villagers like to call him, and they can hold the pig alone, pull out the pig's knife in their mouths, and insert it into it with one knife, and the pig will not hum or scream.

Because there were no cattle at home and I often couldn't borrow cattle during busy farming, I saw that in the Wang family's fields, the one who was holding the plow behind was his young son. Lord Wang pulled the plow in front, which was no less than a strong bull.

Due to the great power consumption, we naturally eat more food than ordinary people. It is said that we can eat one liter of rice and two kilograms of rice.

Many people think that Lord Wang is a clumsy and rude man who is careless and easy to fool, but in fact, his IQ is proportional to his height and is good at making small calculations, especially when growing his own crops, he is really careful.

Wang Siliu is the only son, his parents died early, he had no cousins, and because he married his sister, his wife was ill in bed all year round and lived on twenty acres of thin land. He was a large and medium-sized farmer who could barely live in the Ming Dynasty. Although it was not as good as the income and expenditure of a year, and there were still some surplus households, they were not the lower-class households who could not afford to make money and dig the holes bigger and bigger.

Generally speaking, middle-aged farmers in ancient times were the backbone of tax payments, but they were also the most dangerous group. When encountering disaster years, or when there were continuous and festive weddings and funerals at home, the court suddenly imposed intensive taxes, etc., middle-aged farmers were the least resistant, otherwise there would be no famous refugees in the Ming Dynasty.

Although Wang Siliu lives in Xiaojia Village, he inevitably encounters all kinds of unlucky things. With his wife's medicine money, he has been in a state of being unable to eat enough or starve. In those years, even though he tightened his belt and changed from eating dry food to eating porridge, and eating two meals to eating one, he still had no money to buy medicine.

As he had no choice but to borrow a debt from Master Tong. It was either a "donkey rolling" or a "blacking profit". But the thing that Wang Siliu felt most distressed was that he later used a piece of land for the Tong family, but he did not "deadly" and could not redeem it.

What made Wang Siliu most proud was that several self-cultivated farmers who were almost the same as him at that time became Master Tong's tenant for various reasons, or under the temptation and coercion of the Tong family. Only Lord Wang survived the Tong family courtyard.

What a sad experience of struggle. It’s really a piece of money that I can’t use for eight pieces, and I can’t eat a piece of rice as eight pieces of rice.

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

After his life was better, he was not satisfied, so he rented a few acres of land from Master Tong to plant. This way, he would have a higher income in a year, but unfortunately he was the only real labor force in the family.

Because of the establishment of the female doctor, my wife received careful diagnosis and treatment. She was halfway through the condition and could not go to work in the fields. She could cook, wash clothes at home, manage her family plans, and take care of her children.

My son is already fourteen or fifteen years old, and finally has a half-labor worker. He also has an eight-year-old daughter. In addition to helping her mother do some housework within her ability, she can also beat pig grass and feed two big fat pigs.

Wang Siliu suffered a loss of illiteracy all his life and insisted on his son going to elementary school and middle school. In this way, the living children in the fields cannot help much. At most, his son goes to the fields during the busy farming season, his wife and daughter cut millet in autumn, picking wheat ears and rice ears, holding seedlings, and peeling newly planted corn and beans.
Chapter completed!