The usurer Sintram lives and breathes for money and, for this very reason; he disinherits his charitable son Floridan. Embittered, Sintram buries his fortune in the forest and hides a will in a beech tree, with his estate left to anyone who finds it. This act is the only hard physical work the old usurer has done in his life and, ironically, the exhaustion kills him. Meanwhile, Floridan has been employed at a sawmill when he receives the news of his father’s death and his own disinheritance. However, as fate would have it, a certain beech tree finds its way to Floridan’s sawmill.