When the honey-moon waned Jan would sometimes get into an angry mood. Then his wife would, unobserved, slip the charm-stone into her mouth, and (let him talk or fume) keep quietly about her work. In a short time with good humour, like sunshine returned, he would again be heard ringing his lap-stone to the measure of some lively old tune. The quiet ways of Patience and her gentle bearing, kept love and content, with peace and plenty, in their happy dwelling; and her charm had such power that, over a while, she had seldom occasion to use it. Yet, indeed, some women, living near, who liked to let their crabbed tongues run like the clapper of a mill, would say that Patience was a poor quiet fool, and that the more one let blockheads of husbands have their own way the more they will take till they go to the dogs, or the devil, at last. Jan would tell these idle cacklers, who stuck up for woman's misrule, to mind their own affairs and that for such 'tungtavusses' as they were the old saying held good—that "a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be." But gentle Patience, heedless of their prate, kept on in the even tenor of her life, and retained her husband's unabated love till the peaceful close of her days. Now it happened about three years after Tom had returned from the East Country, there was a large farm in St. Levan for sale. "Ah, poor me," said Tom one night, after a hard day's work, "I have been toiling and moiling, like a slave, all my life long, but we shall never have an inch of land to call our own till laid in the church-hay. Yet here are our hunting gentry, who have more than they can make good use of, and they can't live on that. If we could but scrape together enough to buy an acre or[93] two of fee, or only the corner of a croft, where one might have a hut and a gar'n for herbs, with the run of a common for a cow or anything else, and none to say us nay, how happy we should be. But now," he continued, "it is only by the lord's leave, and that I don't like to ask of any man; and why should one who hath hands to work when there is so much land in waste untilled?" "Tom, my son, cheer up," his wife replied; "there are many worse off than we are, with our few pounds laid by for a rainy day, and health and strength to get more. Why I am afraid," said she, "that thou would'st go crazy, or die for joy, if any one gave thee enough to buy a few acres." "I wish to gracious somebody would but try me," Tom replied. "Well now, suppose I were to tell thee," said she, "that we have saved enough to buy good part, if not all, of the land for sale, as you shall soon see."