Poor Mustapha hadn't a penny to his name and so it was impossible for him to buy the least little scrap of meat to go with his piece of bread. As he was walking along, he passed by an outdoor kitchen where a man was cooking meat over an open fire. Mustapha came closer and held his piece of bread out so it was in the path of the delicious odour of the cooking meat, thinking: "Maybe my piece of bread will have just a bit of flavour that way." But the cook saw him, grabbed him by the arm---as you might do if you were trying to stop a thief, dear friends---and asked him for a dinar.

"Whatever for?" asked Mustapha, quite surprised. "Because now that you've had the pleasure of the odour of the meat I'm cooking, you'll have to pay me for it!" said the cook. The two men argued about the matter for quite some time and finally decided to go see Nasreddine Hodja to settle the dispute, who listened attentively to their story. He thought about it for a moment, took a dinar out of his pocket which he then tossed on the ground so that it made that pleasant metallic sound that money produces when it hits a hard surface. He then picked up his dinar, put it back in his pocket and said to the cook, "Did you hear the sound my dinar made?" "Of course," replied the cook. "In that case, you may keep it, as the sound of the money is a fair price for the odour of the meat."