ONE night as a man and his wife lay talking in bed, the woman told her husband that she had dreamt that in a certain place she had dug up a pot full of rupees, and she proposed that they should go and look for it and see whether the dream was true. While they talked, it chanced that some thieves, who had climbed on to the roof, overheard the conversation and at once decided to forestall the others. So they went off to the place which the woman had described and began to dig, and after digging a little they were delighted to come on a pot with a lid on. But when they took off the lid an enormous snake raised its head and hissed at them. At this the thieves cursed the woman who had misled them and agreed to take the snake and drop it through the roof on to the man and his wife as they lay in bed. So they shut the snake up again and carried it off to the house and, making a hole in the thatch, dropped it through. But as it fell the snake changed into a stream of money, which came rattling down on the couple below; the thieves found a snake, but it was not a real snake, it was Thakur; and it was his will to give the money to the man and his wife. When these two had recovered from their astonishment, they gathered up the money, and lived in wealth ever afterwards.
