"A Crow with indigestion? Nonsense!" says the Pigeon. "Even a lamp-wick hardly stays any time in your stomach; and anything else you digest in a trice, as soon as you eat it. Now you do what I tell you. [363] Don't behave in this way just for seeing a little fish!"

"Why, Sir, what are you saying? I tell, you I have a bad pain inside!

"All right, all right," says the Pigeon; "only do take care." And away he flew.

The Cook got all the dishes ready, and then stood at the kitchen door, mopping the sweat off him. "Now's my time!" thinks Mr Crow, and alights on a dish with some dainty food in it. Click! The cook heard the noise, and looked round. Ah! in a twinkling he caught the Crow, and plucked off all his feathers, except one tuft on the top of his head; then he powdered ginger and cinnamon, and mixt it up with buttermilk, and rubbed it in well all over the bird's body. "That's for spoiling my master's dinner, and making me throw it away!" said he, and threw him into his basket. Oh, how it hurt!

By and by, in came the Pigeon from his hunt. The first thing he saw was our Crow, making a great to-do. What fun he did make of him, to be sure! He dropt into poetry, as follows:--

"Who is this tufted crane I see
Where she has no right to be?
Come out! my friend the Crow is near,
Who will do you harm, I fear!"

[364] To this the Crow answered with another verse:--

"No tufted crane am I--no, no!
Nothing but a greedy Crow.
I would not do as I was told
So I'm plucked, as you behold."

And the Pigeon rejoined with a third:--

"You'll come to grief again, I know--
It is your nature to do so.
If people make a dish of meat,
'Tis not for little birds to cat."

Then the Pigeon flew away, saying--"I can't live with this creature." And the Crow lay there groaning until he died.

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When the Master had ended this discourse, he declared the Truths and identified the Birth:--at the conclusion of the Truths the greedy Brother reached the Fruit of the Third Path:--"The greedy Brother in those days was the greedy Crow; and I was the Pigeon."

Footnotes

^248:1 The same story occurs in vol. i. p. 112 (no. 42). It has been also translated and slightly shortened by the writer, in Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales, page 222. The two birds and the nest-basket seem to be figured on the Bharhut Stalin (Cunningham, pl. XLV. 7).

^249:1 The epithet "whose grandfather is the cloud (lit. swift one)" is added. I hope the reader will pardon its omission; it is unmanageable. The scholiast explains it by the curious superstition:--Cranes are conceived at the sound of thunder. Hence thunder is called their father, and the thundercloud their grandfather.