banyan tree and dozed. In the middle of the night, as he slept, he saw two human figures whose eyes were bloodshot with fury, and heard them abusing each other.
The first of them was saying: "Come now, Doer! You know you have, in every possible way, prevented this fellow Soft from getting any capital beyond food and clothes. So you have no right ever to let him have any. Why did you give him three hundred gold-pieces?"
"Now, Deed!" said the other, "I am constrained to give the enterprising a reward in proportion to their enterprise. The final consequence is your affair. Take it from him yourself." On hearing this, Soft awoke and looked for his bag of gold.
When he found it empty, he thought: "Oh, dear! It was so much trouble to earn the money, and it went in a flash. I have had my work for nothing. I haven't a thing. How can I look my wife in the face, or my friends?" So he made up his mind to return to Growing City. There he earned five hundred gold-pieces in just one single year, and started home again by a different road.
When the sun went down, he came upon the very same banyan tree, and he thought: "Oh, oh, oh! What is fate up to—damn the brute! Here is that same fiendish old banyan tree once more." But he dozed off on a branch, and saw the same two figures.
One of them was saying: "Doer, why did you give
