of the Sullivan Expedition; once a year the early settlers, as a
community enterprise, had brought salt from Syracuse; the forest had
been rafted down the river; the rest is silence.

Perhaps this good old English stock, familiar for a thousand years with
oppression and gentility, wonted to immemorial fraud, schooled by
generations of cheerful teachers to speak no evil of dignities, to see
everything for the best in the best of possible worlds, found no
injustice in the granting of these broad manors--or, at least, no novelty
worthy of mention to their sons. There is no whisper of ancient wrong; no
hint or rankling of any irrevocable injustice.

Doubtless some of these land grants were made, at a later day, to
soldiers of the Revolution. But the children of the Revolution maintain a
not unbecoming unreticence as to all things Revolutionary; from their
silence in this regard, as from the name of Manor, we may make safe
inference. 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