A wealthy merchant, seeing that by small expenditure his means
were wasting away like collyrium with the passage of time, resolved to be richer still. He yoked two bulls to his cart and set. out on an adventurous journey to Cashmere :-
" As a young woman loves not to embrace an old husband, so Fortune loves not to embrace the inaction, the lazy, the fatalist, and him who lacks boldness."
One of the bulls broke its knee, was left in a forest, made friends with a lion and lived happily with him until the friendship was destroyed by the very covetous backbiting of a jackal. This is one of the many stories in Hitopadesa (Chapman and Hall, 21s.)—the thousand-year-old beast- fables Of Bengal. Mr. Barnett, of the British Museum, is to be congratulated on his editorship, and the publishers on the format: Delicious, cool, wise; sometimes cynical, always Vivid, this Eastern Aesop sheds a revealing light on the psychology of India.
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