The third night he went to bed with a palpitating heart.  He put on his red nightcap, wrong side outwards for good luck.  It was deep midnight before his anxious mind could settle itself into sleep.  Again the golden dream was repeated, and again he saw his garden teeming with ingots and money-bags.

Wolfert rose the next morning in complete bewilderment.  A dream three times repeated was never known to lie; and if so, his fortune was made.

In his agitation he put on his waistcoat with the hind part before, and this was a corroboration of good luck.  He no longer doubted that a huge store of money lay buried somewhere in his cabbage-field, coyly waiting to be sought for, and he half repined at having so long been scratching about the surface of the soil, instead of digging to the centre.

He took his seat at the breakfast-table full of these speculations; asked his daughter to put a lump of gold in to his tea, and on handing his wife a plate of slap-jacks, begging her to help herself to a doubloon.

His grand care now was how to secure this immense treasure without it being known.  Instead of working regularly in his grounds in the day-time, he now stole from his bed at night, and with spade and pickaxe, went to work to rip up and dig about his paternal acres, from one end to the other.  In a little time the whole garden, which had presented such a goodly and regular appearance, with its phalanx of cabbages, like a vegetable army in battle array, was reduced to a scene of devastation, while the relentless Wolfert, with nightcap on head, and lantern and spade in hand, stalked through the slaughtered ranks, the destroying angel of his own vegetable world.

Every morning bore testimony to the ravages of the preceding night in cabbages of all ages and conditions, from the tender sprout to the full-grown head, piteously rooted from their quiet beds like worthless weeds, and left to wither in the sunshine.  It was in vain Wolfert’s wife remonstrated; it was in vain his darling daughter wept over the destruction of some favorite marygold.  “Thou shalt have gold of another guess-sort,” he would cry, chucking her under the chin; “thou shalt have a string of crooked ducats for thy wedding-necklace, my child.”  His family began really to fear that the poor man’s wits were diseased.  He muttered in his sleep at night of mines of wealth, of pearls and diamonds and bars of gold.  In the day-time he was moody and abstracted, and walked about as if in a trance.  Dame Webber held frequent councils with all the old women of the neighborhood, not omitting the parish dominie; scarce an hour in the day but a knot of them might be seen wagging their white caps together round her door, while the poor woman made some piteous recital.  The daughter, too, was fain to seek for more frequent consolation from the stolen interviews of her favored swain, Dirk Waldron.  The delectable little Dutch songs with which she used to dulcify the house grew less and less frequent, and she would forget her sewing and look wistfully in her father’s face as he sat pondering by the fireside.