Once a farmer was put in prison. Even though this farmer was in prison, he wasn’t a bad man. He hadn’t done anything wrong. At this time the King’s men were collecting money. The king needed money so that he could fight his wars and the people had to pay a lot of taxes. Now this farmer didn’t have any money. He told this to the king’s men. When they came to his house, he said, “I can’t give you any money. I am such a poor man I’ve hardly got enough to live.”
The King’s men laughed. “You don’t expect us to believe that,” they said. “We’ve heard you’re so rich that you’ve got a pot of gold.” They looked in every room in the house, but even though they didn’t find anything, they arrested the poor farmer and put him in prison. “You will stay there until we receive the pot of gold,” they said.
The poor farmer was very sad. He hadn’t done anything wrong. While he was in prison he thought about his farm. His wife couldn’t dig the fields by herself. One day he received a letter from his wife. She wrote, “I am so worried about our farm. It’s nearly spring. It’s time to plant the potatoes. I must dig up the fields.” The farmer read this letter sadly. “What can I do?” he thought. Then he smiled. He had had a good idea. He wrote a letter to his wife. “Don’t dig the fields,” he wrote. “This is where my pot of gold is. Don’t plant the potatoes until I tell you to.”
The farmer gave this letter to the prison guard. “Please send this letter to my wife,” he said. Now, of course, the prison guards read all the letters which the prisoners wrote and received. They had read the letter from the farmer’s wife and now they read the farmer’s answer. “Mm,” they said. “This sounds very interesting. It looks as though this farmer really is a rich man. He writes that there is a pot of gold in his fields.” “He doesn’t say which field,” another guard said. “This farmer has got lots of fields.” “It doesn’t matter,” the first guard answered. “We know there’s gold in his fields. He has hidden it there.”
Two weeks later, the farmer received another letter from his wife. “Something funny happened,” his wife wrote. “Two weeks ago, about ten men came to our farm. They all had spades and they all began to dig our fields. They dug all our fields and now they’ve gone away. I can’t understand it. It looks as though they were looking for something. What shall I do now?”
The farmer smiled when he read his wife’s letter. He didn’t feel sad now, even though he was in prison. He wrote a letter to his wife at once. It was very short. “These men have dug up our fields,” he wrote, “so now you can plant the potatoes.”
