This chapter reveals two stories. The first story is an artist who pays for his meals using currency that he draws. He draws life-like images of money and pays with it, sometimes expecting actual change. The artist's point was to see how much value was put on simple paper money versus the amount of time he put into drawing replicas. He was able to challenge society's emphasis on monetary values set forth by the government.
In the second story, a rich man gives a poor man some food in exchange that the peasant watch over he grave for 3 days and nights. When the man died, the peasant protected his grave. Along came an ex-soldier who joined with him, in hopes to get paid. At the end of the third night, the devil came by to take the rich man's soul. However the peasant and soldier tricked the devil into giving them gold until the sun rose and the devil left. In the end, the rich man's body was safe, the peasant received food, and the soldier donated the gold. The moral of the story that the author tried to convey was that in each and everyone of us, we contain traits of each character. We have the greed of the devil, the kindness of the peasant, and the morality of the soldier. Though we try to escape the temptations of money, we are always drawn back into its paper web.
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