h-loved wife are still alive and not yet
old. The last wife wanted the little girl to go and live with her. I
asked her why she did not go.

'You loved her so much,' I said. 'She was such a good wife to you.
Surely you would like to live with her again.'

'But all that,' she replied, 'was in a former life.'

Now she loved only her present father and mother. The last life was like
a dream. Broken memories of it still remained, but the loves and hates,
the passions and impulses, were all dead.

Another little boy told me once that the way remembrance came to him was
by seeing the silk he used to wear made into curtains, which are given
to the monks and used as partitions in their monasteries, and as walls
to temporary erections made at festival times. He was taken when some
three years old to a feast at the making of a lad, the son of a wealthy
merchant, into a monk. There he recognised in the curtain walling in
part of the bamboo building his old dress. He pointed it out at once.

This same little fellow told me that he passed three months between his
death and his next incarnation without a body. This was because he had
once accidentally killed a fowl. Had he killed it on purpose, he would
have been punished very much more severely. Most of this three months he
spent dwelling in the hollow shell of a palm-fruit. The nuisance was, he
explained, that this shell was close to the cattle-path, and that the
lads as they drove the cattle afield in the early morning would bang
with a stick against the shell. This made things very uncomfortable for
him inside.

It is not an uncommon thing for a woman when about to be delivered of a
baby to have a dream, and to see in that dream the spirit of someone
asking for permission to enter the unborn child; for, to a certain
extent, it lies within a woman's power to say who is to be the life of
her child.

There was a woman once who loved a young man, not of her village, very
dearly. And he loved her, too, as dearly as she loved him, and he
demanded her in marriage from her parents; but they refused. Why they
refused I do not know, but probably because they did not consider the
young man a proper person for their daughter to marry. Then he tried to
run away with her, and nearly succeeded, but they were caught before
they got clear of the village.

The young man had to leave the neighbourhood. The attempted abduction of
a girl is an offence severely punishable by law, so he fled;