Page:Legends of Rubezahl, and Other Tales (1845).djvu/167

 proverb: ‘Help yourself, and your friends will bless you.’ Now, wife, let us at all events attend to this last proverb; let us help ourselves; let us talk no more of thy rich relations, but make the best use we can of our hands and heads, so that by the end of three years we may be able to pay principal and interest, the money I borrowed of thy rich relations, as thou thinkest, and then we shall be clear before the world.” The wife was a woman of good natural sense; she took the advice now given, and thenceforward heartily seconded her husband, who by slow and safe degrees bought one bit of land after another, until he had realized a hundred acres. A blessing was on the hundred dollars, and they went on doubling themselves as though there had been a decoy dollar among them. Veit sowed and reaped, and was already looked up to in the village as a man well to do in the world; every year he saved something towards the purchase of more land, so that at the close of the third summer he had considerably added to his hundred acres. Good fortune so attended him in all he did, that not a single investment he made but returned him large profits.

The time of payment approached, and Veit had so well managed that he was perfectly able to take up his note, without the slightest inconvenience. Having already put apart the hundred crowns, with interest,