to balance his accounts? When a lovely woman, grieving at the loss of her lover, sits down, the long, long day over, maybe at nine o'clock, to take her simple fare of rice, and has just taken up the cup of boiling milk, straightway you call kuhu! She leaves the milk untouched; or perhaps, her thoughts far off, she mixes salt with it and drinks it up. In truth there is some enchantment in your voice, else, when you were sitting singing in the bâbul tree, and the widow Rohini was going to fetch some water, carrying the kalsi on her hip, then―but first of all let me account for her going to fetch water.
It was thus: Brahmânanda Ghosh was a poor man. He could not afford to keep many servants. Whether that is an advantage or a disadvantage I can't say; whichever it is, he who keeps no women servants is free from four things—cheating, false reports, wrangling, and dirt. The gods have embodied these four things in the maidservant. Especially where there are many female servants the house is a veritable battle-field of Kurus,[1] or like an oft-repeated killing of Râban. One, brandishing her
- ↑ See Appendix, Note 5.
