out her
joy. So proud in fact was she, and so much noise did she make, that a
monkey that lived on the other side of the lake was struck with the
remembrance of how he had once dined with great satisfaction on eggs
laid by the sparrow's sister, and in a few minutes he was on his way to
repeat the performance.

In vain the little bird cried and begged him to spare her brood,
promising to show him where the sweetest plantains in all the country
were growing; the monkey only laughed at her and climbed the tree to get
the prize.

The next moment the robber would have gotten his spoil, and this
wonderful story would never have been told, but just then the great lord
Sa Kyah looked earthward and saw the tragedy that was taking place.

Like a drop of rain that falls from a tree when the wind blows after a
shower, the mighty lord descended, and when the would-be robber reached
the nest his hand entered an empty one.

[Illustration: "On his way he saw what seemed to be a bed of flowers."
Page 79.]

The eggs were soon brought back from the _hpea_ country where the lord
Sa Kyah had taken them for safety, and in due time were hatched. Out of
the first protruded a sharp bill, and a kingfisher, bright of plumage
and swift of wing, broke out of its speckled prison. The next egg broke
and a buffalo came out, to be followed by a lordly striped tiger from
the next. A terrible _hpea-loo_, with head and claws like a bird and
body like a man, tore his way out of the next one, already looking
around for a man whom he might devour for his first meal.

Only one egg remained, and that the smallest of all, but out of it came
a man, and the mighty lord Sa Kyah smiled when he saw him, and said that
although he was the smallest and the last, yet he must feed his brothers
and take care of them.

One hot day in summer the buffalo that had come out of one of the eggs,
walking through the jungle, much troubled by mosquitoes, thought how
nice would be a wallow in a hole well known to him under the shade of
the trees by the bank of the lake, where the sun had not dried the mud
to the hardness of bricks as it had in every other wallow, and
accordingly turned his huge body in its direction, and slowly set off
toward it.

On his way there he saw on the ground what appeared to him to be a bed
of flowers growing on the bank of the lake, and after smelling it
carefully over, leisurely ate it all up.

The sun was hot, the earth dry, and the flowers