THE HIDDEN TREASURE—p. 442.

THE indirect source of this story is probably the following tale, from the Kathá Sarit Ságara, vol. i, p. 298, of Prof. C. H. Tawney's translation, published at Calcutta a few years ago:

There is a city named Srávastí, and in it there lived in old time a king of the name of Prasenajit, and one day a strange Bráhman arrived in that city. A merchant, thinking he was virtuous because he lived on rice in the husk, provided him a lodging there in the house of a Bráhman. There he was loaded by him every day with presents of unhusked rice and other gifts, and gradually by other great merchants also, who came to hear his story. In this way the miserly fellow gradually accumulated a thousand dínars, and going to the forest he dug a hole and buried it in the ground, and he went every day and examined the spot. Now one day he saw that the hole in which he had hidden his gold had been re-opened, and that all the gold was gone. When he saw that hole empty, his soul was smitten, and not only was there a void in his heart, but the whole universe seemed to be a void also. And then he came crying to the Bráhman in whose house he lived, and when questioned he told him his whole story; and he made up his mind to go to a holy bathing-place and starve himself to death. Then the merchant who supplied him with food, hearing of it, came there with others, and said to him: “Bráhman, why do you long to die for the loss of your wealth? Wealth, like an unseasonable cloud, suddenly comes and goes.” Though plied by him with these and similar argu­ments, he would not abandon his fixed determination to commit suicide, for wealth is dearer to the miser than life itself. But when the Bráhman was going to the holy place to commit suicide, the king Prasenajit himself, having heard of it, came and asked him: “Bráhman, do you know of any mark by which you can recognise the place where you buried your dínars?” When the Bráhman heard that, he said: “There is a small tree in the wood there; I buried that wealth at its foot.” When the king heard that he said: “I will find the wealth and give it back to you, or I will give it you from my own treasury; do not commit suicide, Bráhman.” After saying that, and so diverting the Bráhman from his intention of committing suicide, the king entrusted him to the care of the merchant, and retired to his palace. There he pretended to have a headache, and sending out the doorkeeper he summoned all the physicians in the city by proclamation with beat of drum. And he took aside every single one of them and questioned him privately in the following words: “What patients have you here, and how many, and what medicines have you prescribed for each?” And they thereupon, one by one, answered all the king's questions. Then one among the physicians, when his turn came to be questioned, said this: “The merchant Mátridatta has been out of sorts, O king, and this is the second day that I have prescribed for him nágabalá” [the plant Uraria Lagopodioides]. When the king heard that he sent for the merchant and said to him: “Tell me who fetched you the nágabalá?” The merchant said: “My servant, your highness.” When the king got this answer from the merchant he quickly summoned the servant and said to him: “Give up that treasure belonging to a Bráhman, consisting of a store of dínars, which you found when you were digging at the foot of a tree for nágabalá.” When the king said this to him the servant was frightened, and confessed immediately; and bringing those dínars, left them there. So the king for his part summoned the Bráhman, and gave him, who had been fasting in the meanwhile, his dínars, lost and found again, like a second soul external to his body. Thus the king by his wisdom recovered to the Bráhman his wealth, which had been taken away from the tree, knowing that that simple grew in such spots.

Many stories of hidden treasure being stolen and recovered by a clever device are current in Europe as well as in the East. For example, in No. 74 of the Cento Novelle Antiche, the oldest Italian collection of tales, a blind beggar conceals 100 florins under the floor of a church, and is observed by a sharper who next day takes the money away. When the blind man finds his treasure gone, he stands at the church-door at the time of service and bids his boy watch all who enter the church and let him know if any one should regard him (the beggar) as if with peculiar interest. The sharp-witted boy observes a man looking at his father and smiling, and when the beggar learns the name of the man, he scrapes acquaintance with him, tells him that he has 100 florins concealed under the floor of the church, and expects to receive 100 more in the course of a day or two, which he had lent out; and begs his new friend to meet him on such a day when they would lift the stone and deposit the additional money. The sharper, thinking to get this other sum as well, went privily and replaced the 100 florins he had stolen, and the blind man, anticipating he would do so, returned at night and took away his money, resolving to part with it no more.—The same story is found in the Breslau printed Arabic text of the ‘Thousand and one Nights’, and is translated by Mr. John Payne in his Tales from the Arabic, and also by Sir Richard F. Burton in the first volume of his Supplemental Nights, under the title of “The Melancholist and the Sharper.” A short version is given in Gladwin's Persian Moonshee; and another analogous story of buried treasure will be found in Roscoe's Spanish Novelists, ed. 1832, vol. iii, p. 215–234, entitled “A Prodigious Adventure,” by Isidro de Robles.