Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/85

Rh When the lizard had thus spoken she thought to herself:—"This fellow will lay wait for and eat me." So to save her life she immediately took to flight.

But the lion and tiger were also friends of the partridge. Sometimes they used to come to see the partridge, and sometimes he went to them, and, after giving them instruction, returned home. But on this particular day the lion said to the tiger,—"Friend, we have not seen the partridge for a long time; it's seven or eight days since he came here. Go now and tell him so, and then come here again." The tiger agreed to go, saying, "Be it so."

As the lizard was fleeing, the tiger came to the very spot where that base fellow was lying asleep, and saw some of the wise partridge's feathers clinging to his matted hair; and he noticed, too, the bones both of the cow and her calf. When the tiger had seen all that, and, moreover, missed the partridge in the golden cage, he thought, "This wicked man has murdered these creatures." Striking him with his foot, he roused him up. At the sight of the tiger he was terrified and alarmed.

Then the tiger asked, "Did you murder and eat these creatures?"

He replied, "I, of a truth neither killed nor ate them."

"O sinful man, if you did not kill these creatures, who else has killed them? Speak! If you don't you are a dead man!"

Frightened to death, he replied, "Yes, sir, the young lizards, together with the cow and calf, I both killed and ate, but I did not murder the partridge."

The tiger did not believe him, notwithstanding all his much speaking.

"From whence did you come here?" he asked.

"Master," answered he (relating all the various pursuits he had followed), "in the Kâlinga territory I carried, for the sake of a living, the wares of traders, and, doing one thing and another, I at last came to this place."

"O, thou ill-conditioned man, if thou didst not murder the partridge who else did? Come, I'll bring you before the lion, the king of beasts." So saying, he proceeded on his way, with the man quaking for fear in front of him.