Page:The Orient Pearls.djvu/17



upon a time there lived a young Brahmin and his wife in what would, judged even by the standard of asceticism of their class, be deemed extreme poverty. Dragging along a sort of dead-and-alive existence upon scanty and miserable fare, they were too proud to beg or borrow, and too honest to steal.

Yet, for all this, their faith in Providence never wavered, but, on tho other hand, they discerned in their present distress its iron hand forging for them a closely veiled destiny through its ever mysterious ways.

Fortified in this belief, they bore with philosophy their adversity until the gloom thickened around them, unrelieved, as it seemed to them, by a single redeeming gleam of hope.

One day, maddened by the sight of his starving wife (for to such straits had they been reduced) the young Brahmin set out towards the forest in search of wild roots and fruits for her, but alas! no sooner had he got there than he found the forest on fire and its denizens, terror-stricken, fleeing away in all directions.

Thus disappointed, he sat down at the foot of an ancient banyan-tree, under which a whole army might well have bivouacked, and began to pour forth his woes