“How is the business today?” asked his wife.
“Oh, it is the same as before,” he said. “I could not take the rice off my shoulder before they came for it.”
And so he went on with his business for a year, each day buying a half-cavan of rice and selling it for the price he had paid for it. Then one day his wife said that they would balance accounts, and she spread a mat on the floor and sat down on one side of it, telling her husband to sit on the opposite side. When she asked him for the money he had made during the year, he asked:
“What money?”
“Why, give me the money you have received,” answered his wife; “and then we can see how much you have made.”
“Oh, here it is,” said the man, and he took the twenty-five centavos out of his belt and handed it to her.
“Is that all you have received this year?” cried his wife angrily. “Haven’t you said that rice brought a good price at the mines?”
“That is all,” he replied.
“How much did you pay for the rice?”
“Twenty-five centavos.”