Page:The Orient Pearls.djvu/20

4 down, the Brahmin got up and, amidst the vociferous thanks of their parents, took his leave.

He now hurried home, and, arriving late at night, as he had to walk a long distance across the fields, found his wife sitting up anxiously waiting for him. As soon as she caught sight of her husband, she rushed forward to receive what he had brought, and, seeing a cup in his hand, fancied it contained something for her to eat. She seized the cup with eagerness, for she had not broken her fast that day, but, finding it empty, threw it straight away. The Brahmin, however, immediately rushed up and caught it before it could touch the ground.

"What a silly thing you have done!” said the Brahmin to his wife in a tone of rebuke. "You have desecrated the gift of the gods." Having told her all about the cup, and how and where and from whom he had received it, he said, "Do not fancy the cup is empty! Ask of it whatever you wish to eat, and that you will have at once, and in any quantity."

"I am dying of hunger," replied the wife in a tone of penitence. "I do not hanker after delicacies, but a little of the coarse fare I am used to will quite content me."

As she said this, she wept and repented of her sacrilege in contemptuously throwing away a sacred gift—of her folly in attempting to kill, as it were, the goose that was to lay golden eggs for the rest of their mortal lives.

However, being extremely hungry, she was going to ask the cup for her usual fare, when her husband interposed and pressed her to ask of it some tempting morsel; so she asked for this, that, and a dozen other delicacies all at once, but alas! nothing, absolutely nothing, came