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Chapter 5 The Great Election: The Emperor¡¯s Armored Face 282 Benefactor Mr. Fang (Part 2)

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    Lao Zhou searched for Fang Bingsheng and found him because his words carried weight on the street and the neighbors praised him: Forget about his second son Zhou Tianen, he is a talented person from Peide Middle School and might become an official one day.  The eldest son is even more difficult to mess with. When he used to set up a fish stall, he would often take out the machete under the stall and follow the gangsters to kill people. It was normal for them to bully the market and beat people at will. Now it is even worse. He is wearing the uniform of the Health Bureau.  , is even more majestic, no one dares to mess with him, and has become a very important voice in several nearby gangs.  In the past, the Dechang Kerosene Store was offered protection money by the Annan Gang, but Zhou Lizai was asked to negotiate with the other party, and the other party asked for half of it. In addition, the children of the Dechang Kerosene Store owner and his wife had always wanted to attend Teacher Luo's school.  I have been begging the elementary school coachman Zhou Hengfu to intercede with the teachers.  So this is why Dechang Keli Oil Store did not hesitate to hire a master as a bookkeeper. He owed the Zhou family a favor.

    In this way, with the help of his former servants, Fang Bingsheng stayed in Shuihuo Street: with a salary that could not buy a few buttons of his coat before, in order to save money for food and accommodation, he did not dare to buy newspapers, and his wife worked part-time  Pasting matchboxes is not enough to pay for the schooling of his two sons, and he has to borrow money from his wife's family, so Fang Bingsheng usually uses his beautiful calligraphy to write some elegiac couplets for the coffin shop to supplement the family income. In short, life is very difficult.

    ===========================

    This day, Fang Bingsheng happened to meet the Zhou family and his son after get off work. The two former masters and servants and now good neighbors were naturally very happy and started chatting on the street with a smile.

    "Master, you bought chicken and wine today, are you trying to replenish the young master's health?" Li Zai asked with a smile, pointing to the things in Fang Bingsheng's hand.

    Actually, it was because that bastard Weng Jianguang was also finished. He was so happy that he gritted his teeth and didn't think about his son at all. But when people asked, Fang Bingsheng immediately smiled and said, "Yeah, isn't this about the imperial examination?"

    "Oh, our family also bought one, look." Zhou Hengfu immediately bent down and opened the lid under the rickshaw seat.  Revealing the overstuffed vegetables, egg frame and a big fish that was still jumping and thrashing around.

    "Huh. You know how to favor this little brother, and feed him all the money you make every day." Li Zai pouted his lips jokingly, pretending to be distressed.

    "Little bastard!" Zhou Hengfu raised his arm as if to hit his eldest son, then turned around and said to the other party Bingsheng: "Oh. You may not know that the second son has given me more face?! When I first moved here two or three years ago, he still had  I'm living on campus. I've never seen anyone here. That day I was gambling with a group of coolies and rickshaw pullers at Huang Laoyi Tavern. The second brother came home and came to me for dinner. He was wearing the western blue uniform of Peide Middle School and had a tattoo on his chest.  badge, and the Junior Crusaders armband wrapped around his arm! Oh my god, when I stood at the door, everyone in the pub was stunned. Then when my son walked towards me, all those coolies stood up and raised their hands.  I put it away and looked at him without daring to move. He was secretly asking: 'Who is this little gentleman?'. Haha, I was so proud that I couldn't sleep well for several days."

    This is not unusual for Fang Bingsheng: in the Manchu Dynasty, Confucianism was the priest. When the illiterate people saw a person with a good reputation, or even a person dressed as a scholar, they would often stand up to show respect; it is the same now, and Peide,  New schools like St. John's had uniforms. After wearing them, in the eyes of the common people, they were equivalent to candidates for government officials, a hundred times more powerful than the Confucian students of the past.  When a virtuous student enters a tavern in a slum filled with coolies at the lowest level, they all have to stand up.

    At this time, Li Zai poked his father, whose face was glowing with excitement, and said: "Dad, can we stop talking about this nonsense every day, all the time, and just when we meet people? My ears are ringing, sir.  What big things have you not seen in the world? You should also calm down."

    "Go!" Lao Zhou was disturbed by his son and felt that he had lost his composure. At this time, he let go of Fang Bingsheng's arm, snatched the wine and chicken from Fang Bingsheng's hand, turned around and handed it to his son, and then handed it to his son.  He threw his son's uniform back to his son, revealing his muscular upper body wearing only a cardigan. He pushed his son out of the handlebar ring that was lying on the ground. He squatted down and held the handlebar crossbar. He turned to Bingsheng and said with a smile: "  Master, come up quickly and I will pull you back."

    "No need really" Fang Bingsheng declined with a wry smile.

    Carrying the wine and chicken, Li Zai put his uniform on his shoulders and shouted: "This old man! I can just pull him, what are you doing with all this?"

    "Go! You don't know how to pull a cart! These dirt roads are full of potholes, and you'll knock me over!" Lao Zhou squatted on the ground and yelled angrily.

    ========

    Fang Bingsheng couldn't resist the Zhou family and his son, so they still got in the car. In fact, it was a really short journey. After a while, Lao Zhou pulled Fang Bingsheng to the door of his house.

    Lao Zhou¡¯s home is a very small courtyard, with two main rooms inside. A thatched shed is built next to the gate, and a stone stove is used as a kitchen below.The courtyard walls are made of broken bricks, stones and rotten wood, but among the crooked wooden buildings, the momentum is like a mansion.

    Zhou Hengfu stopped the car and carefully tipped the car forward until the handlebars were firmly planted on the ground. Then he straightened up and bent down to help Fang Bingsheng get out of the car.

    Li Zai came running behind him, sweating profusely. Before he reached the door, he raised the chicken in his hand and shouted to a girl squatting by the river not far away washing clothes: "Ah Hui, hurry up."  Come over here and clean up this chicken for me."

    "Oh, you're too polite, I really don't need it" Fang Bingsheng saw that someone wanted to kill a chicken and remove its feathers for him, how embarrassed he was.

    "It's okay. Isn't Madam not in good health? Ah Hui is quick with her hands and feet. She will send it to you after a while." Lao Zhou looked at the girl coming over and said with a smile.

    "Look, I'm bothering your family every day." Fang Bingsheng spread his hands in embarrassment.

    "Anyway, you are the great benefactor of our Zhou family. Without you, our family would not exist!" Lao Zhou immediately shouted.

    Seeing the beautiful girl coming over, she lowered her head and smiled at herself, took the chicken and went in to get the knife. Fang Bingsheng turned to Zhou Hengfu and said, "Old Zhou, Ah Hui is about fourteen or fifteen years old, Li Zai didn't remember."  If I¡¯m wrong, you¡¯re eighteen this year? You haven¡¯t gotten married yet?¡±

    Li Zai over there came over, handed the bottle to Fang Bingsheng respectfully with both hands, and said with a smile: "Dad is partial to the younger brother, isn't this because he is about to take the science test? The family doesn't have much money left, and the father said that the younger brother will finish the exam this year  Let¡¯s get married.¡±

    "Ah, Tian'en did well in last year's exam. I'm sure I'll get a good result this year. My younger son will become an official and my eldest son will get married. Ah Fu, are you planning on having double happiness?" Fang Bingsheng said with a smile.

    "Ah haha!" Zhou Hengfu couldn't hide the joy in his heart when the master said the central thing. He raised his head and laughed. He was a little rude to his counterpart Bingsheng, the "master", raised three fingers, narrowed his eyes and said: "I  The three things that I am most proud of in this life: The first one, that year I didn¡¯t want the child¡¯s fucking compensation and I had to live or die with the master! The second one, my youngest son went to a foreign school! The third one, he moved here  I bought the house and Ah Hui! Everything was given by you, Master!"

    It turns out that with the rapid economic development in the Song Dynasty, the lower class's cost of getting married and married was getting higher and higher, and everyone liked to compare. Lao Zhou tied the family's glory to his younger son, so naturally he would not save money on his studies.  "The only way to find money was elsewhere, so he started thinking about finding a wife for his eldest son.

    The eldest son is getting married soon, and it would be good if he found a local one; but the cost of a wedding in Haijing is several times that of other prefectures and counties. When looking for a wife in his hometown, his son was not happy at first, thinking that he was a "young man from the capital".  The price of a daughter-in-law in the countryside has dropped; secondly, the expenses for betrothal gifts, wedding banquets, etc. will not be much less. They will also be picky about the house and property, and they may even ask for the four major foreign-style houses, foreign clothes, foreign watches, and foreign furniture.  When the time comes, the wedding will be held in the countryside, and the wife will have to live in the capital, which will cost a lot of money.

    Otherwise, with the development of business, the age of young people getting married in the Song Dynasty is getting older and older, because the economic requirements are rising; this is a global phenomenon, and it is the same in Great Britain. In the era when Great Britain ruled the world, countless leftover women married because the requirements were too high.  If you don't go out, you can only live in the church until you die, or even go to the Indian colony thousands of miles away. There are a lot of ideal marriage partners here, commonly known as "thousand-pound men" (officials and businessmen with an annual income of more than one thousand pounds).  )

    In order to save money, Lao Zhou took a criminal route: after arriving, he bought Ah Hui directly on the Shiligou black market.  Ah Hui's family was also a refugee, living in a shanty town. Her father fell ill and died, and her mother couldn't survive with her two younger brothers, so she sold the twelve-year-old girl for thirty silver dollars.

    Although it is illegal, this kind of transaction is common in slums such as Shiligou. Poor people often sell virgins to work as servants since they were young. When they grow up, they become the wives of their sons. They are the so-called child brides. This is very economical. If you encounter ruthless people,  For those who insist on recouping costs, buying a child bride may be equivalent to buying a skinny donkey; the disadvantage is that the risk is very high, because you are already poor, poorly fed, and exhausted. If the child bride gets sick, there will be no  If the rice planter dies within a few years, then the loss will be huge.

    ?The safest product is a girl aged ten to twelve years old. This means that his family has raised this little donkey, so he can also buy a daughter-in-law directly. This age is the most expensive.

    In order to carry on the family line for his eldest son, Lao Yiyi gritted his teeth and bought Ah Hui, the most expensive product on the market at that time, because he thought the child looked good and seemed sensible.

    In the end, Lao Zhou made the right bet: Ah Hui is indeed a very honest, sensible and hard-working girl. The daily life of the Zhou family is well organized. After all, she is a child who grew up from a rolling dragon with a tile eaves on her head.  They are all very satisfied.

    However, because it was too expensive for the younger son to study, the matter of consummating the marriage with the older son as soon as possible was postponed again and again. Until this year, Lao Zhou decided that no matter how well the second son did in the exam, he would definitely let Li Zai and the two get married.

    Seeing other people¡¯s homes being so happy and happy, and thinking that his own home was in ruins, Fang Bingsheng sighed deeply in his heart.  (To be continued, please search Piaotian Literature. The novels will be better and updated faster!However, because the younger son's education was too expensive, the matter of consummating the marriage with the older son as soon as possible was postponed again and again. Until this year, Lao Zhou decided that no matter how well the second son did in the exam, Li Zai and the two of them would definitely get married.

    Seeing other people¡¯s homes being so happy and happy, and thinking that his own home was in ruins, Fang Bingsheng sighed deeply in his heart.  (To be continued, please search Piaotian Literature. The novels will be better and updated faster!
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