Page:Folk Tales from Tibet (1906).djvu/122

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upon a time there lived a poor man and his wife who had only one child, and this Boy, as it happened, was born with a deformed head, which projected in front and behind, and gave him a very ugly appearance. The parents, although much grieved at their son's deformity, were, nevertheless, very fond of him and brought him up very carefully, Every day, when he grew big enough, he used to drive the cows out to pasture, and all day long he sat about on the hillsides watching the cattle graze. And so he passed his life very happily until, when he reached the age of fifteen, he began to think he should like to marry a wife as other young men did, but he feared that owing to his deformity no girl would ever look at him.

One day it chanced that he drove his cows to graze on the rich pasture on the edge of a small lake, and as he was sitting near the shore of the lake all of a sudden he saw a large white Drake descend from the sky, and light upon the surface of the water. As soon as it was seated upon the water it swam round the lake three times to the right and then three times to the left, and having