Thereupon she began to cry, and every day she sat and cried on the bank of the tank.

Now the two daughters of the Snake King and Queen had received the Saru Prince as he disappeared under the water, and when they heard the princess crying every day they had pity on her; she used to sing:—­

    “Oh husband!  Oh Raja! 
    My father has sacrificed you
    In the big tank. 
    Oh husband!  Oh Raja,
    Take me with you too.”

So the daughters of the Snake King and Queen took pity on her and told their frog chowkidar to restore the Saru Prince to his wife; and the Prince and his wife went home together.  When the Raja and his wife saw their son-in-law again, they were terrified, but he said nothing to reproach them.  The princess however could not forgive them for trying to kill her husband and always looked angrily at them; then the Raja and the Rani took counsel together and agreed that they had done wrong to the prince, and that he must be a magician; and they thought that their daughter must also be a magician, as she had recognised the prince when he was a caterpillar, and she could not even see his long hair; so they were afraid and thought it best to make over the kingdom to their son-in-law, and they abdicated in his favour, and he took the kingdom.

LXXVI.  The Monkey Nursemaid.

Once upon a time there were seven brothers who were all married and each had one child and the brothers arranged to engage a boy to carry the children about; so they sent for a boy and to see if he was strong enough, they made a loaf as big as a door and they told the boy to take it away and eat it; but he was not strong enough to lift it; so they told him that he could not carry their children.  Now a Hanuman monkey was looking on from the top of a tree, and he came down and carried off the loaf and ate it.  Thereupon the mothers engaged him to carry the children, and he used to carry the whole seven about on his back.

One day the children were running about the house and kept interfering with their mothers’ work, and the mothers scolded the monkey for not keeping them out of the way.  Then the monkey got sulky and carried off the children to a distant hill and did not bring them back at evening.  So the mothers got very anxious, but the villagers laughed at them for engaging a monkey, instead of a human being, to look after the children.

When the mothers heard that the monkey had taken the children to the hill, they were still more unhappy, for in the hill lived a rakhas (ogre) but it was too late to go in search of them that night.  Meanwhile the monkey for fear of the rakhas had carried the children up to the top of a palm tree and when the rakhas spied them out he tried to climb the tree, but the monkey drove him away by throwing the palm fruit at him.