Page:My people stories of the peasantry of West Wales.djvu/56



Jane, who will no longer give the land the labour it requires to keep it clean and good. Sara Jane has more than she can do in tending to her five-year-old twins and her dying parents, and she lets the fields pass back into wild moorland.

In the days of his sin and might Simon had been the useful man of Manteg. He was careless then that the gates of Sion were closed against him. He possessed himself of a cart and horse, and became the carrier between the cartless folk of Manteg and the townspeople of Castellybryn, eight miles down the valley. He and Beca saved; oil lamp nor candle never lit up their house, and they did not spend money on coal because peat was to be lifted just beyond their threshold. They stinted themselves in halfpennies, gathered the pennies till they amounted to shillings, put the silver in a box till they had five sovereigns' worth of it, and this sum Simon took to the bank in Castellybryn