The Miser and His Buried Gold

A wealthy but exceedingly miserly man, distrustful of banks and unwilling to invest his fortune in anything that might risk losing it, converted his entire life's savings into a single enormous lump of gold and buried it secretly in his garden, visiting the spot every single day just to dig it up briefly, gaze at it with quiet satisfaction, and bury it again unused.

A servant, growing curious about his master's mysterious daily ritual, secretly followed him one day and discovered the buried gold. That night, driven by simple opportunity rather than any elaborate scheme, he dug it up himself and made off with it entirely, leaving nothing behind but an empty hole.

The miser, arriving the next day to find his treasure gone, collapsed into loud, devastated wailing that drew his neighbors from their homes. When he explained through his grief what had been stolen, one neighbor, more puzzled than sympathetic, asked a simple question: had he ever actually spent even a single coin of that gold on anything at all? The miser admitted he had not — he had only ever looked at it. "Then," the neighbor said gently, "take a stone, bury it in the same hole, and visit it daily exactly as before. You will get precisely the same benefit from it that you ever got from the real gold, since looking without using was always worth nothing more than looking at nothing at all."