The Three Bags of Gold

There was once a man in a seaside town who had more money than he needed, which does not sound like a problem, but it was keeping him awake.

He would walk down to the harbour in the evening and look at the boats, and on the way home he would pass the houses. And because he was a man who noticed things, he noticed which houses had smoke coming from the chimney and which ones did not.

There was one that did not. Three sisters lived there with their father, and the father had lost everything — his ship, his money, all of it — and in those days a family with nothing had very few roads left open to them. The eldest sister had begun to talk about what she might have to do. The father had begun to sit very quietly in the evenings and not answer.

Now, the man with the money could have knocked on the door. He thought about it. He stood in the street one evening and very nearly did.

And then he thought: if I knock, they will have to thank me. They will have to stand in their doorway with nothing and say thank you to a man with everything, and they will remember it every time they see me for the rest of their lives.

So he did not knock.

He waited until it was dark. He took a bag of gold, and he went very quietly up the lane, and he threw it through the open window.

Then he ran.

In the morning there was uproar in that house. Gold — actual gold, on the floor, under the window, and nobody could think where it had come from. The eldest sister was saved. There was smoke from the chimney again by evening.

A while later he did it again, for the second sister. Same window. Same running away.

But by the third time, the father had worked out that it was going to happen, and he was not going to let it happen unseen. He sat up all night by that window in the dark, waiting.

And near morning, a bag came through — and the father was out of the door and down the lane and had hold of the man's cloak before he had got twenty paces.

And the man turned round, and he was terribly embarrassed, which is not how this sort of story usually goes. He asked the father please, please, not to tell anyone. He said the gold was no use to him and a great deal of use to them and that was the whole of it and there was nothing more to say about it.

And then he went home.

The father did tell people, eventually. That is why we know. But the man never talked about it once, not in his whole long life, and when people asked him he changed the subject.

His name was Nicholas. And every single thing that has happened since — the stockings by the fire, the shoes by the door, the coins wrapped in gold paper, a man coming down a chimney in the dark and being gone before anybody wakes up — every bit of it is people, for sixteen hundred years, still copying a man who ran away so he would not have to be thanked.