23. Now grown husbandless, and having of late lost my daughter also, and being thrown in a distant and barren land, I am become the most miserable and wretched of beings. Born of a low caste, I am cast out of all prospect in life, and have become a personification of terror to myself, and a sight of horror to others. 24. O! that the Lord has made me a widowed woman, and subjected me to the insult of the vulgar, and the hauteur of the affluent. Prostrated by hunger and mourning at the loss of a husband and child, I rove incessantly from door to door to beg alms for my supportance (as it is the case of most female beggars). 25. It is better that one who is unfortunate and friendless, or subject to passion and diseases, should rather die sooner than live in misery. The dead and inanimate beings are far better than the living miserable. 26. Those that are friendless, and have to toil and moil in unfriendly places, are like the grass of the earth, trampled under the feet, and overwhelmed under a flood of calamities. 27. The king seeing his aged mother-in-law mourning in this manner, offered her some consolation through the medium of her female companions, and then asked that lady to tell him, “who she was, what she did there, who was her daughter and who is his son.” 28. She answered him with tears in her eyes:—This village is called Pukkasa-Ghosha, here I had a Pukkasa for my husband, who had a daughter as gentle as the moon. 29. She happened to have here a husband as beautiful as the moon, who was a king and chanced to pass by this way. By this accident they were matched together, in the manner that an ass finds by chance a pot of honey lying on her way in the forest. 30. She lived long with him in connubial bliss, and produced to him both sons and daughters, who grew up in the covert of this forest, as the gourd plant grows on a tree serving as its support. CHAPTER CXXI. PROOF OF THE FUTILITY OF MIND. Argument. Lavana’s return to his Palace and the interpretation of his dream by Vasishtha. The Chandála continued:—O lord of men! After lapse of sometime, there occurred a dearth in this place owing to the drought of rain, which broke down all men under its diresome pressure. 2. Pressed by extreme scarcity, all our village people were scattered far abroad, and they perished in famine and never returned. 3. Thence forward O lord! we are exposed to utmost misery, and sit lamenting here in our helpless poverty. Behold us lord, all bathed in tears falling profusely from our undrying eyelids. 4. The King was lost in wonder, at hearing these words from the mouth of the elderly lady; and looking at the face of his follower the faithful minister, remained in dumb amazement as the figure in a picture.