"Did you ever take any of it out?" asked one of them.

A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole.

A sinister looking man

Once upon a time there was a Miser who used to hide his gold at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains.

"Nay," said he, "I only came to look at it."

Wealth unused might as well not exist.

He tore his hair, and raised such an outcry that all the neighbours came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold.

"Then come again and look at the hole," said a neighbour; "it will do you just as much good."