Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are ordinarily extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night⁠—for it must be done at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle, breaks his mattock, and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on the “treasure,” what does he find? What is the devil’s treasure? A sou, sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio, sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon’s verses seem to announce to the indiscreet and curious:⁠—

Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,

As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque.

Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca, As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque.