is continual thought was
how he was to be a better man, how he was to use this life of his so
that he should gain and not lose, and where he was to find happiness.

All the pomp and glory of the palace, all its luxury and ease, appealed
to him very little. Even in his early youth he found but little pleasure
in it, and he listened more to those who spoke of holiness than to those
who spoke of war. He desired, we are told, to become a hermit, to cast
off from him his state and dignity, and to put on the yellow garments of
a mendicant, and beg his bread wandering up and down upon the world,
seeking for peace.

This disposition of the prince grieved his parents very much. That their
son, who was so full of promise, so brave and so strong, so wise and so
much beloved by everyone, should become a mendicant clad in unclean
garments, begging his daily food from house to house, seemed to them a
horrible thing. It could never be permitted that a prince should
disgrace himself in this way. Every effort must be taken to eradicate
such ideas; after all, it was but the melancholy of youth, and it would
pass. So stringent orders were given to distract his mind in every way
from solemn thoughts, to attempt by a continued round of pleasure and
luxury to attract him to more worldly things. And when he was eighteen
he was married to his cousin Yathodaya, in the hope that in marriage and
paternity he might forget his desire to be a hermit, might feel that
love was better than wisdom. And if Yathodaya had been other than she
was--who can tell?--perhaps after all the king might have succeeded; but
it was not to be so. For to Yathodaya, too, life was a very solemn
thing, not to be thrown away in laughter and frivolity, but to be used
as a great gift worthy of all care. To the prince in his trouble there
came a kindred soul, and though from the palace all the teachers of
religion, all who would influence the prince against the desires of his
father, were banished, yet Yathodaya more than made up to him for all he
had lost. For nearly ten years they lived together there such a life as
princes led in those days in the East, not, perhaps, so very different
from what they lead now.

And all that time the prince had been gradually making up his mind,
slowly becoming sure that life held something better than he had yet
found, hardening his determination that he must leave all that he had
and go out into the world looking for peace. Despite all th