he Brahman. Next day the cavalcade
reached the fourth halting-place. Food was cooked, and the queen first
filled the king's plate and then her own. After dinner she sent her
servants as before to bring in some poor and hungry man from the
neighbouring village. They found a man whose eyes were so crooked
that he could hardly see, who had no arms or legs, and who had not
even a name. For he was only known as "Lump of flesh." He was lying
on his face, but when they brought him into camp, the queen had him
placed on his back and had a jug of water poured over him. Then she
took six pearls. Three she kept herself, and three she placed on the
stomach of "Lump of flesh." Then she told him the tale of her father
and the wood-fairies. He listened, all attention, and as he listened
his arms and legs grew out of his body, and hands and feet appeared
at the ends of them. He too went away delighted, and he promised to
worship the sun in the way the wood-fairies had told the Brahman.

At the end of the next day's march the king and queen reached their
home. Food was cooked, and as they sat down to dinner the sun-god
himself appeared and joined them at their meal. The king had all
the doors flung wide open, and ordered a fresh and far more splendid
dinner to be prepared, with any number of dishes, each dish having
six separate flavours. When it was served the sun-god and the king
began to eat, but in the first mouthful the sun-god found a hair. He
got very very angry, and called out, "To what sinful woman does this
hair belong?" Then the poor queen remembered that during her twelve
years of poverty she had always sat under the eaves combing her hair,
and knew that it must have been one of her hairs which had got into
the sun-god's food. She begged for mercy, but the sun-god would
not forgive her until she had clothed herself in a black blanket,
plucked a stick out of the eaves, and had gone outside the town and
there thrown the stick and the hair over her left shoulder. Then the
sun-god recovered his good-humour, and finished his dinner. And the
Brahman, the king and queen, and the wood-cutter and the farmer whose
well had dried up, and the old woman who had lost her children, and
"Lump of flesh" with the cross eyes, they all remained in the favour
of the sun-god and lived happily ever afterwards.

CHAPTER II

The Monday Story

Once upon a time there was a town called Atpat. In it there lived a
very saintly king. One day he f