Page:Tales from the Indian Epics.djvu/134

128 sent out Prince Dhruv and a band of fresh horsemen. He and the king's general fully avenged Prince Uttam's death, and with great pomp and laden with spoil and captives Prince Dhruv and the army returned in triumph.

But the loss of her son and the triumph of Prince Dhruv unsettled Queen Suruchi's mind. One day she ran out of the city and into the woods and was never heard of afterwards. Then King Uttanpad felt that the time had come for him, as an Aryan king, to resign his crown to his son. So he gave up his robes and sceptre to Prince Dhruv and in the garb of a pilgrim wandered forth into the forest and there led the life of an ascetic until death freed him.

Then King Dhruv ruled in his father's place. And for many a score of years he ruled beloved by his subjects. And his armies were always victorious and the frontiers of his kingdom daily widened and no monarch in all India was so greatly feared or honoured as he. Yet his heart was always sad. For he often thought with sighs of the happy years in which as a boy he had worshipped Krishna in the Madhu forest. And often he said to himself, "Fool that I was to return to my father's home. How happy I should have been had I but spent my life in the woods, worshipping the god Krishna. In the end he would surely have borne me away and gathered me to his bosom."

One day he could bear it no longer and handing over the reigns of sovereignty to his son he made his way back to the Madhu forest on the banks of the Yamuna. He came at last to his old hermitage and suddenly in front of him he saw what he had never seen when he lived there before—a rugged path which rose