every eye. More cavillings arose in the royal household concerning the king's consent to Kaikeyi's baneful demand; but Dasaratha, while owning his folly in so wildly promising whatever Kaikeyi might ask, now pointed out that the evil was, in truth, a punishment brought on him by a former sin. Once, in his youth, he had gone forth with bow and arrows to hunt and, mistaking the sound of a pitcher filling for the movements of an elephant, he had shot in that direction and wounded to death the water carrier, a young man, the son of an aged couple. When Dasaratha bore the news to them, the father laid on him the curse that he should die from grief for his son, and therewith the parents departed this life. So now, said Dasaratha, the curse had come upon him; his senses began to fail; and, cursing Kaikeyi as his family's foe, he breathed his last.
When the first grief of the widowed queen was past, Vasishtha declared that Bharat must at once be summoned. Trusty envoys were sent off, and, travelling apace, they came in good time to the capital of King Yudhajit, where Bharat and Satrughna were sojourning.
On that night, Bharat himself was vexed with fearful dreams. He seemed to see his sire, pale and dishevelled, plunge from a mountain-top into a horrible pool of filth; again, the king appeared in strange guise, borne southward in a car drawn by asses, and mocked by a grisly fiend. Bharat foreboded nought but ill from these visions, deeming that his father or one of his brothers must surely perish ere long.
Even while he spake of these things in the palace,
