The Peasant and His Wife
Once upon a time, in a peaceful village embraced by sweet-smelling pine forests, there lived a poor peasant and his wife. From morning until evening they worked the soil with their calloused hands and tried to fill their bellies with their limited means. The evening sun that filtered through the window of their wooden hut lit up their modest table adorned with simplicity. The poor peasant was patient and content; but his wife often sighed with dreams of wealth. The woman envied the ostentatious life of the merchants in the neighboring town and never found the small field they had sufficient. On a warm autumn day, while the man was resting under the old oak at the edge of the field, he found a copper pot buried in the soil.
When he opened the lid of the pot with excitement, he met dozens of gold coins glittering brightly in the daylight. He ran home with joy, put the pot on the table and gave his wife the good news. The woman, her eyes shining with greed, shouted, "Now we will say farewell to this poor life and live a life worthy of palaces!" The man, warning his wife, said, "Greed takes a person's mind away, we must spend this fortune carefully." But the woman paid no heed to her husband's words and went at once to the town and bought expensive fabrics and jewels. She even threw all the old belongings in the house out into the street in order to boast to her neighbors.
Before long, the gossip of this suddenly arrived wealth reached the ears of cunning bandits. At midnight two thieves who drew their swords slipped silently into the hut and stole the pot on the table and all the valuable goods that had been bought. When they woke in the morning and saw that their house had been plundered, the husband and wife were left in great astonishment and sorrow. As the woman understood her mistakes in tears, she grasped that she had lost the peace she had and her old safe order through her own greed. The peasant took his wife's hand and embraced her, and together they decided to return to the soil and to work by the sweat of their brow. In a short time they put new things in place of the belongings they had lost and returned to their peaceful and modest life. Unless a person knows the value of what he has and is content, he may lose his peace entirely in pursuit of adventures with an uncertain end. A man who is not content with little will find nothing with much.