Page:Bengal Fairy Tales.djvu/22



HERE is a legend in Bengal, that weavers, as a class, are very stupid people, there being this peculiar element in their composition, that while very expert in matters of weaving and selling the products of their labour, they betray an extraordinary lack of common sense in every other respect.

Padmalochan was a weaver, and from what we have said, it is needless to add that he was a first-class dolt. One day, being at leisure, he was seated on his haunches at his door and regaling himself with the fumes of his hooka, when he beheld the well-known palmist of his village passing by. After the usual form of salutation, the weaver asked the palmist to tell him his fortune, especially calculating the time of his death. As, however, the reader of fortune made his living by his trade, and knew his customer to be too stingy to pay even a pice for his labour, he in ill-humour took up the weaver's right palm, and dropped it again in a second, saying that he would die the very moment a line of thread should pass out from behind his body. The parties then separated, the palmist to practise his art among those more liberal, and the weaver to work at his loom.

Several days passed after this prophecy concerning the weaver's time of exit from the world, when, as chance would have it, the thread round his shuttle got so entangled in his loin cloth, that it was difficult to extricate it. The more he tried to draw it out, the more did it lengthen itself, till at last, being sure that this was the fulfilment of the prophecy