At the end of the next day’s march the king and queen reached their home. Food was cooked, and as they sat down to dinner the sun-god himself appeared and joined them at their meal. The king had all the doors flung wide open, and ordered a fresh and far more splendid dinner to be prepared, with any number of dishes, each dish having six separate flavours. When it was served the sun-god and the king began to eat, but in the first mouthful the sun-god found a hair. He got very very angry, and called out, “To what sinful woman does this hair belong?” Then the poor queen remembered that during her twelve years of poverty she had always sat under the eaves combing her hair, and knew that it must have been one of her hairs which had got into the sun-god’s food. She begged for mercy, but the sun-god would not forgive her until she had clothed herself in a black blanket, plucked a stick out of the eaves, and had gone outside the town and there thrown the stick and the hair over her left shoulder. Then the sun-god recovered his good-humour, and finished his dinner. And the Brahman, the king and queen, and the wood-cutter and the farmer whose well had dried up, and the old woman who had lost her children, and “Lump of flesh” with the cross eyes, they all remained in the favour of the sun-god and lived happily ever afterwards.
The Monday Story