A certain Peng of Wucheng — his wife sick, his child small — sold silk to keep the family alive.
One day he carried a bundle of silk to the brokerage to sell. The price offered did not suit him, so he set it on the counter. Just then many silk-sellers were coming and going, and the brokers, thinking his goods too small to matter, attended to other business. Peng blinked — and the silk was gone.
He seized the head broker and took the complaint before the magistrate.
“I run a house with tens of thousands in gold,” said the broker. “Would I cheat him out of a few thousand cash of silk?”
The magistrate found this reasonable, and did not pursue the matter.
The silk-seller went home in misery. His small son happened to be playing outside the door, and seeing his father back from selling silk, thought he must have brought sweets, and ran up to beg for them. Peng, hot with the wrong of the lost silk, kicked out at him with his foot. The child died on the spot.
Peng, mad with remorse, ran and threw himself into the river, and died too. His wife knew nothing of it. The neighbors saw the child lying at the door, lifted him, found the breath already gone from him, and called again and again for the sick mother — and told her the child was dead. The wife, wild with grief, threw herself from the tower at once, and died.
The magistrate held his inquest, and charged the neighbors with burying them.
Three days later a great thunderstorm broke, and thunder struck three men dead at the silk-seller’s door. After a little while one of them — a barber — revived, and testified:
“The pickpocket Sun lifted a bundle of silk at the brokerage. Xie, from across the street, saw it and demanded a share of the price as the price of not informing. The silk was sold through my shop. My share of the split was three hundred cash; the other two got two thousand each. Soon we heard the silk-seller had drowned himself, and after the inquest there was no more trouble. We never thought that today we would all be struck by lightning together. The other two are both struck dead; I was wounded in one leg.”
On examination, it was exactly so.
