626 BLOOMFIELD— CHARACTER AND [April i8, 



Then he gave away to the needy all the money he had won at play. 

 And at night he came and stole my bedstead from under me, letting 

 me down gently on a heap of cotton while I remained asleep." We 

 must remember that gambling is Muladeva's pet vice which brings 

 him to grief in Devendra's novel, and that, furthermore, he is 

 " prince of thieves," author of a steya-gastra or " thieves' bible." 

 Stealing a bedstead from under such as he, is like stealing the white 

 of Sherlock Holmes' eyes. Muladeva continues : " So when I woke 

 up, and saw myself on a heap of cotton, without a bedstead, I was at 

 once filled with mixed feelings of shame, amusement, and astonish- 

 ment. Then, O king, I went at my leisure to the market-place, and, 

 roaming about, I saw there that boy selling the bedstead. So I went 

 up to him and said : * For what price will you give me this bedstead ? ' 

 Then the boy said to me, ' You cannot get the bedstead for money, 

 O crest-jewel of cunning ones; but you may get it by telling some 

 strange and wonderful story.' When I heard that I said to him, 

 'Then I will tell you a marvelous tale. And, if you understand it 

 and admit that it is really true, you may keep the bedstead ; but if 

 you say that it is not true and that you do not believe it, you will 

 be illegitimate, and I shall get back the bedstead. Now listen ! 

 Formerly there was a famine in the kingdom of a certain king; that 

 king himself cultivated the back of the beloved of the boar with 

 great loads of spray from the chariot of the snakes. Enriched with 

 the grain thus produced the king put a stop to the famine among his 

 subjects, and gained the esteem of man.' 



"When I said this the boy laughed and said: 'The chariots of 

 the snakes are the clouds ; the beloved of the boar is the earth, for 

 she is said to have been most dear to Visnu in his boar incarnation ; 

 and what is there to be astonished at in the fact that rain from the 

 clouds made grain to spring on the earth?'" 



The boy then, in his turn, poses a cosmic-mythological riddle — 

 dear to the heart of the Hindu from the time of the theological 

 brahmodya of the Veda — on the condition that, if Muladeva solves it, 

 he gets the bedstead; if not he becomes the boy's slave. Of course, 

 Muladeva fails ; the boy takes hold of his arm, and takes him to his 

 mother in Pataliputra. Muladeva, the unstable scape-grace, lived 



