Leo Tolstoy, who in his fifties gave up much of his wealth and devoted himself to a life of pacificism and asceticism, had as one of his disciples a certain wealthy aristocrat named Chertkov.
Last year they bought unhusked rice from the peasants in Wanan and Taiho Counties at fifty cents a picul and sold it in Kanchow for four yuan, making a sevenfold profit.
And this was the fifties, the grayest, bleakest, most blinkered and culturally repressive period in the entire second half of the twentieth century, especially in small-town America.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. Dead is dead, he said. We have no business with the dead.
My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.