Page:The Orient Pearls.djvu/22

6 At night-fall Haro and Gouri were again taking their evening walk on earth, and his cries and lamentations, loud enough to rend the heavens in twain, reached their ears. "Hark, lord! hark!" said Gouri to her spouse, "another mortal seems to be in distress. Can you not do something for him too?"

Haro saw the prospect of another evening being spoilt, but, finding it impossible to dissuade his headstrong consort, he accompanied her to the foot of the banyan-tree, where the Brahmin had stationed himself. As the latter saw them approaching, he set up a still louder wailing, as if desirous of enlisting their sympathy by the strength of his cries rather than by the actual measure of his distress; for, Brahmin as he was, he had a shrewd insight into the mind of the gods.

Gouri, moved to pity by his cries, and failing to recognize him in the twilight, enquired the reason of his tears, and the Brahmin repeated, between his sobs (the characteristics of all beggars) the same story as on the previous evening.

Haro walked up close to the man, and, after rubbing his eyes and scanning the man's features well, said: "You silly man! what have you done with the magic cup we gave you only last evening? You have sold it, have you not, and come again for another? You are a dishonest rogue."

The Brahmin, taking the dust off the toes of the god, powdered his hair, or rather the top-knot of his order, and, with folded arms, protested his innocence. "I do not know, my lord," said he, "what thou art pleased to call a magic cup; both my wife and I tried it, but it conceived nothing and brought forth nothing, and my wife had to go to bed hungry. I did, indeed,