A certain king's counsellor, having wasted all his wealth and become reduced to great straits, with the assistance of his son, breaks into the royal treasury and takes away a large quantity of gold. The king, having discovered the robbery, sets a large vessel filled with pitch close to the place where the breach had been made in the wall, in order to entrap the robber when he next came there. The counsellor, having once more fallen into poverty, went again one night with his son to procure a fresh supply of gold, and on entering the treasury, through the opening in the wall, instantly fell up to the neck in the vessel of pitch. Calling to his son, he warned him not to enter and attempt his release, for it was impossible; but desired him to draw his sword and cut off his head and carry it away, so that he should not be recognised and his family disgraced. The son accordingly cuts off his father's head, carries it home, and recounts the whole particulars of the misadventure.
In the Septem Sapientum, the robber of the king's treasury is a knight, who had spent all his wealth at tourneys and similar idle sports. After the son had taken home his father's head, the king is informed of the headless body found in his treasury, and orders it to be drawn at the tails of horses through the principal streets to the gallows, charging his soldiers to bring before him any persons whom they observed affected with excessive grief. As the body was being drawn past the knight's house, one of his daughters uttered loud cries of sorrow, upon which the son quickly drew his knife and wounded his hand, so that the blood flowed freely. The soldiers entered the house, and inquired the cause of the loud cries they had just heard, when the son, showing his wounded hand, said that his sister had been alarmed at seeing his blood, upon which the soldiers, satisfied with this explanation, quitted the house.
This story has been adapted from Herodotus, who relates it of Rhampsinitus, King of Egypt, and his architect, who in building the royal treasury left a stone loose, but so nicely fitted in that it could not be discovered by any one ignorant of the secret: his two sons, after his death, frequently enter the treasury by this means, until at length one of them is entrapped, as above. A similar legend is found in Pausanias, B. ix, c. 37, relating to the treasury of Hyrieus. It occurs also in the Kathá Sarit Ságara, eighth section, in the tale of Ghata and Karpara, which bears a very close analogy to the leading incidents of the story in Herodotus, especially the device of drugging the soldiers that guarded the body. From the Seven Wise Masters it was probably taken by Ser Giovanni (Day ix, Nov. i), and by Bandello (Par. i, nov. 25). The story is also found in an old French romance, L'Histoire du Chevalier Berinus, in which Herodotus has been imitated in the concluding incident, of the king's daughter's attempt to discover the clever thief; and it forms one of the exploits of the Shifty Lad in Campbell's Tales of the West Highlands.
VI—The Third Master relates the story of