they could eat.  When the crop was quite ripe the monkey boy gathered all the pumpkins and got sufficient rice from them to last for the whole year.  After this the brothers went out to buy horses, and the monkey boy went with them and as he had no money he took nothing but a coil of rope; his brothers were ashamed to have him with them and drove him away, so he went on ahead and got first to the place where the horsedealer lived.  The brothers arrived late in the evening and decided to make their purchases the following morning and ride their horses home, so they camped for the night.  The monkey boy spent the night hiding on the rafters of the stable; and in the night the horses began to talk to each other and discussed which could gallop farthest, and one mare said “I can gallop twelve kos on the ground and then twelve kos in the air.”  When the monkey boy heard this he got down and lamed the mare by running a splinter into her hoof.  The next morning the brothers bought the horses which pleased them and rode off.  Then the monkey boy went to the horsedealer and asked why the mare was lame and advised him to apply remedies.  But the dealer said that that was useless:  when horses got ill they always died; then the monkey boy asked if he would sell the mare and offered to give the coil of rope in exchange; the dealer, thinking that the animal was useless, agreed, so the monkey boy led it away, but when he was out of sight he took out the splinter and the lameness at once ceased.  Then he mounted the mare and rode after his brothers, and when he had nearly overtaken them he rose into the air and flew past his brothers and arrived first at home.  There he tied up the mare outside his house and went and bathed and had his dinner and waited for his brothers.

They did not arrive for a full hour afterwards and when they saw the monkey boy and his mount they wanted to know how he had got home first.  He boasted of how swift his mare was and so they arranged to have a race and match their horses against his.  The race took place two or three days later and the monkey boy’s mare easily beat all the other horses, she gallopped twelve kos on the ground and twelve kos in the air.  Then they wanted to change their horses for his, but he said they had had first choice and he was not going to change.

In two or three years the monkey boy became rich and then he announced that he wanted to marry; this puzzled his mother for she thought that no human girl would marry him while a monkey would not be able to talk; so she told him that he must find a bride for himself.  One day he set off to look for a wife and came to a tank in which some girls were bathing, and he took up the cloth belonging to one of them and ran up a tree with it, and when the girl missed it and saw it hanging down from the tree she borrowed a cloth from her friends and went and asked the monkey boy for her own; he told her that she could only have it back if she consented to marry him; she was surprised to find that he could talk and as he conversed she was bewitched by him and let him pull her up into the tree by her hair, and she called out to her friends to go home and leave her where she was.  Then he took her on his back and ran off home with her.