For I deem it righteous still,
Evil to repay with ill.
Thus you plotted the death of my household, and of yours."
When the king heard this, he hastened home, grief-stricken. And when the king had gone, the fiend, fully satisfied, issued from the water, and gleefully recited a verse:
Very good, my monkey-o!
You won a friend, and killed a foe,
And kept the pearls without a flaw,
By sucking water through a straw.
"And that is why I say:
Greedy folk who do not heed, . . . .
and the rest of it."
Then the gold-finder continued: "Please bid me farewell. I wish to go home." But the wheel-bearer answered: "How can you go, leaving me in this plight? You know the proverb:
Whoever through hard-heartedness
Deserts a friend in his distress,
For such ingratitude must pay—
To hell he treads the certain way."
"That is true," said the gold-finder, "in case one able to aid deserts a friend in a remediable situation. But this situation has no human remedy, and I shall never have the ability to set you free. Besides, the more I gaze at your face, distorted with pain from the whirling wheel, the surer I feel that I am going to
