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250 CRADLE TALES OF HINDUISM would stand quietly, watching the peasants in the rice-fields that stretched to the horizon behind them, sowing the seed, and, when the rains lay deep on the earth, transplanting the crops.

So the years passed, and the brooding silence of nature was all about them. Only in the sad heart of Suniti, all the joy of life was centred in her son.

At last, when Druwa was seven years old, he began to ask about his father. ^^ Could I not go to see him, Mataji, honoured mother ? " he said one day.

<'Why, yes, my child I " said the poor Queenj full of startled pleasure at the thought, yet so accustomed to sorrow, that she trembled at any change in the even tenor of their life, lest it should end by robbing her of the one thing that was still hers. ^^ Oh yes, thou shalt go, little one, to-morrow 1 "

And so, the next day, Druwa set out, in the care of a guard, to seek his father, and tell him that he was his son. Beautiful was the road by which they went. High over their heads spread the boughs of the shady trees, and on each side lay the wide fields. Every now and then they would pass a great pond, with its handsome bathing-steps on one side, crowned by an arch, and near by would see the children of the village playing. For each village had its own bathing-pond and its own