n the Brahma_n_a of the Ya_g_ur-veda. Omitting
a few particulars, the story is as follows:--

"Urvasi, a kind of Fairy, fell in love with Pururavas, the son of Ida,
and when she met him she said, 'Embrace me three times a day, but never
against my will, and let me never see you without your royal garments,
for this is the manner of women.' In this manner she lived with him a
long time, and she was with child. Then her former friends, the
Gandharvas, said: 'This Urvasi has now dwelt a long time among mortals;
let us see that she come back.' Now, there was a ewe, with two lambs,
tied to the couch of Urvasi and Pururavas, and the Gandharvas stole one
of them. Urvasi said: 'They take away my darling, as if I had lived in a
land where there is no hero and no man.' They stole the second, and she
upbraided her husband again. Then Pururavas looked and said: 'How can
that be a land without heroes and men where I am?' And naked, he sprang
up; he thought it too long to put on his dress. Then the Gandharvas sent
a flash of lightning, and Urvasi saw her husband naked as by daylight.
Then she vanished; 'I come back,' she said, and went.

Pururavas bewailed his love in bitter grief. But whilst walking along
the border of a lake full of lotus flowers the Fairies were playing there
in the water, in the shape of birds, and Urvasi discovered him and
said:--

'That is the man with whom I dwelt so long.' Then her friends said: 'Let
us appear to him.' She agreed, and they appeared before him. Then the
king recognised her, and said:--

'Lo! my wife, stay, thou cruel in mind! Let us now exchange some words!
Our secrets, if they are not told now, will not bring us back on any
later day.'

She replied: 'What shall I do with thy speech? I am gone like the first
of the dawns. Pururavas, go home again, I am hard to be caught, like the
wind.'"

The Fairy wife by and by relents, and her mortal lover became, by a
certain sacrifice, one of the Gandharvas.

This ancient Hindu Fairy tale resembles in many particulars similar tales
found in Celtic Folk-Lore, and possibly, the original story, in its main
features, existed before the Aryan family had separated. The very words,
"I am hard to be caught," appear in one of the Welsh legends, which shall
be hereafter given:--

Nid hawdd fy nala,
I am hard to be caught.

And the scene is similar; in both cases the Fairy ladies are discovered
in a lake. The immortal weds the m