As King Dushyanta, King of India, is driving in his chariot through a forest, armed with his bows and arrows, in hot pursuit of a black antelope, a word forbids him to slay the innocent creature. It is the word of a hermit and the antelope belongs to the hermitage. The king is obedient to the request, and is conducted to the dwelling of the great saint Kanva, who is absent upon a distant pilgrimage, and has left his foster-daughter Shakuntala in charge of his companions. The king finds himself in the midst of a secret grove. He stops his chariot and alights. As he goes reverently through these holy woods "he feels a sudden throb in his arm. This argues happy love and soon he sees the maidens of the hermitage approaching to sprinkle the young shrubs with watering pots suited to their strength." Among these beautiful maidens, rare in form and grace, the king observes one especially; it is Shakuntala, foster-daughter of the hermit, half concealed by the trees, but standing "like a blooming bud enclosed within a sheath of yellow leaves." A beautiful girl is she, but the king stands puzzled. For if she be of purely Brahmanic birth, she is prohibited from marrying one of the warrior class, even though he be the king. As Shakuntala moves about watering the flowers of the wood, she starts a bee from one of the jasmine flowers. The bee pursues her, as if to do her harm with its sting, but Dushyanta comes to the rescue; and the fair girl of the hermitage feels some strange thrill as she sees the king, an unusual visitant in that hallowed neighborhood. Off she hurries with her two companions, but a series of happy accidents enables her to cast side glances at the king: a prickly Kusa-grass has stung her foot, she must wait a moment, a bush has caught her robe, she must stop to disentangle it. And love is born. In the second act, while Dushyanta is thinking of his love, two hermits arrive who tell him that demons have taken advantage of Kanva's absence from the sacred grove and are disturbing the sacrifices, and requests that he come and defend the grove from their intrusion. He consents with keen delight and he will not leave the grove, even though his mother requests his presence at a sacrifice offered in his own behalf. He sends his representative, but cautions him to say nothing concerning his love for the fair Shakuntala. In the third act, the king is discovered walking in the hermitage calling upon the god of love "whose shafts are flowers, though the flowers' darts are hard as steel." He tracks the object of his love by the broken stems of the flowers she had plucked in her rambles, and at length finds her in an arbor with her attendants. She reclines upon a stone bench strewn with flowers, she looks pale and wasted. Her maidens seek to know the cause of her sickness, and she tells her love in a poem, written on a lotus leaf. Just here the king rushes in and avows his passion. He tries