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Rh An impression also seemed to be gradually gaining ground in the colony that the owners of farms could do their own work with the help of machinery more satisfactorily than with the assistance of town-bred thieves; and a friend of ours, in whose house for many years past nine ticket-of-leave men had daily sat down to dinner, had reduced the number of his retainers to two only before we returned to England, and had bought a sort of mechanical Briareus which, guided by one of his sons, was cutting his wheat-fields, when we paid him our farewell visit, in place of the seven servitors dismissed.