"Let be, dear friend: if things happen that should not, how can I help it? Your son has been carried off by a hawk, as I say."

The other reviled him. "Ah, you scoundrel! you murderer! Now I will go to the judge, and have you dragged before him!" And he departed. The villager said, "As you please," and went to the court of justice. The rogue addressed the Bodhisatta thus

"My lord, this fellow took my son with him to bathe, and when I asked where he was, he answered, that a hawk had carried him off. Judge my cause!"

"Tell the truth," said the Bodhisatta, asking the other.

"Indeed, my lord," he answered, "I took him with me, and a falcon has carried him off."

"But where in the world are there hawks which carry off boys?"

"My lord," he answered, "I have a question to ask you. If hawks cannot carry off boys into the air, can mice eat iron ploughshares?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"My lord, I deposited in this man's house five hundred ploughshares. The man told me that the mice had devoured them, and showed me the droppings of the mice that had done it. My lord, if mice eat ploughshares, then hawks carry off boys: but if mice cannot do this, neither will hawks carry the boy off. This man says the mice ate my ploughshares. Give sentence whether they are eaten or no. [183] Judge my cause!"

"He must have meant," thought the Bodhisatta, "to fight the trickster with his own weapons.--Well devised!" said he, and then he uttered these two verses:--

"Well planned indeed! The biter bit,
The trickster tricked--a pretty hit!
If mice eat ploughshares, hawks can fly
With boys away into the sky!

"A rogue out-rogued with tit for tat!
Give back the plough, and after that
Perhaps the man who lost the plough
May give your son back to you now!"

[184] Thus he that had lost his son received him again, and he received his ploughshare that had lost it; and afterwards both passed away to fare according to their deeds.

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When this discourse was ended, the Master identified the Birth:--"The cheat in both cases was the same, and so was the clever man; I myself was the Lord Chief Justice."

Footnotes

^127:1 Here, in the last sentence but one, and in the verses the singular phalam is used. It is possible this may be a collective, but more likely that it harks back to a simpler and older version, where only one is spoken of. Readers cannot fail to have marked the fondness of the Jataka editor for round numbers, especially five hundred.