Xu Yuanhui of Lepo in Leping was a scholar. His father dreamed a guest in black came and said: “Yesterday I lent you three hundred cash. Today I return them.”
Before he could ask who it was and when the debt had been incurred, he woke. The next day he thought about it and could not understand it at all.
He ordinarily kept ten-odd ducks. That day one more came back than there should have been, and it was a black one. A small boy took it for someone else’s creature and drove it out, but the duck circled and settled on the edge, and laid an egg, and then left.
From then on for a month it was the same every day, and it laid thirty eggs in all, and then did not come again.
Nobody ever knew whose duck it was. Counting its value, it came to exactly three hundred cash.
