(4.) The same story, with some of the details of both 2 and 3, in Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst, Oesterley, p. 400, from the edition of 1533. In Pauli’s tale, the young man, after a year of exemplary life in the world, gives all his goods to the poor and turns hermit. (5.) =Persian.= Atalmulc’s extravagances cause his father great anxiety. The father, when near his end, charges his son, if he should be so unhappy as to dissipate the fortune he will receive, to hang himself to a branch of a tree in the middle of the garden. The bough breaks, and the trunk is found to be full of precious stones. Petis de la Croix, Les Mille et un Jour, Cabinet des Fées, XIV, 457. There is another and seemingly an independent story, summarized in two distichs in the Greek Anthology (IX, 44, 45, translated by Ausonius, Epigrammata, 22, 23), how a man, who was about to hang himself, found some money, and left his rope behind, and how the owner of the money, coming for it and not finding it, hanged himself with the rope.[21] La Fontaine’s fable, ‘Le Trésor et les deux Hommes,’ IX, 16, is this story, with a wall falling, not by precontrivance, but from its ruinous condition. The eighth tale in the ninth decade of Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, 1565, II, 563, is a modification of what may be called the Greek story. “Chera hid a treasure. Elisa, going about to hang herself, and tying the halter about a beam, found that treasure, and in place thereof left the halter. Philene, the daughter of Chera, going for that treasure, and busily searching for the same, found the halter, wherewithal, in despair, she would have hanged herself, but,” etc. (Painter’s argument to his translation of Cinthio’s tale in the Palace of Pleasure, 2d Tome (1567), 11th novel, ed. Jacobs, II, 264.) The Greek Syntipas has another variety. A man, reduced to want, takes a sword and goes to a lonely place to end his misery. He finds in a deep hole or fosse a quantity of gold which has been hidden there by a cyclops, takes it, and goes back to his house very happy. The cyclops, coming to the spot and not finding his gold, but seeing the sword lying about, slays himself. Matthæi, Syntipæ Fabulæ, 1781, p. 38, μη; Coray, Æsop, p. 246, No 384.[22]