ce and his wife went home together. When the Raja and
his wife saw their son-in-law again, they were terrified, but he said
nothing to reproach them. The princess however could not forgive them
for trying to kill her husband and always looked angrily at them;
then the Raja and the Rani took counsel together and agreed that
they had done wrong to the prince, and that he must be a magician;
and they thought that their daughter must also be a magician, as she
had recognised the prince when he was a caterpillar, and she could
not even see his long hair; so they were afraid and thought it best
to make over the kingdom to their son-in-law, and they abdicated in
his favour, and he took the kingdom.

LXXVI. The Monkey Nursemaid.

Once upon a time there were seven brothers who were all married and
each had one child and the brothers arranged to engage a boy to carry
the children about; so they sent for a boy and to see if he was strong
enough, they made a loaf as big as a door and they told the boy to take
it away and eat it; but he was not strong enough to lift it; so they
told him that he could not carry their children. Now a Hanuman monkey
was looking on from the top of a tree, and he came down and carried
off the loaf and ate it. Thereupon the mothers engaged him to carry
the children, and he used to carry the whole seven about on his back.

One day the children were running about the house and kept interfering
with their mothers' work, and the mothers scolded the monkey for not
keeping them out of the way. Then the monkey got sulky and carried
off the children to a distant hill and did not bring them back at
evening. So the mothers got very anxious, but the villagers laughed
at them for engaging a monkey, instead of a human being, to look
after the children.

When the mothers heard that the monkey had taken the children to
the hill, they were still more unhappy, for in the hill lived a
_rakhas_ (ogre) but it was too late to go in search of them that
night. Meanwhile the monkey for fear of the _rakhas_ had carried the
children up to the top of a palm tree and when the _rakhas_ spied
them out he tried to climb the tree, but the monkey drove him away
by throwing the palm fruit at him.

However the monkey was really in a fix, for he was sure that the Rakhas
would return, and he knew that if he let the children be eaten, their
parents would make him pay for it with his life. So he went off to a
blacksmith and bought