confounded to hear it come from underneath the stone. Again the cry was, "O my moon! now that after twelve years you are near me, let me embrace you."
Neel's companions were at a loss to solve the mystery. That a voice could be heard from under the ground, and that a stranger, a merchant, claimed their prince as his son, were puzzles to them; and having by the most assiduous attentions roused Neel, they communicated to him the strange words they had heard, and at his request removed the stone. A lady of great beauty was then visible, and something told Neel that it was his mother. He addressed his friends thus, "Brothers, while lying on the stone I dreamed that I was reposing on my mother's breast, and she whom I saw in my dream is the very lady before us. She must be my mother, and I will never leave her."
His friends tried to make him believe that he was being deluded, and led him into the palace, for the solution of the riddle by the queen. Neel fell at her feet, and asked her if she was in reality his mother, but she, with a great fear at her heart, said, "Neel, what do you say? What nonsense are you talking?"
"Mother, tell me, as if you were standing before your tutelary deity, whether you bore me in your womb, or that lady near the tank did so," Neel adjured her. The wood-cutter's wife, ostensibly the queen, roared forth—"Wretch, were you born in a hovel, and thence brought to sit on a throne? A witch has taken possession of you. Ho! who is there, get a rojha[1] so that my son may be freed from the evil influence under which he seems to be." Neel at this harangue left the woman's presence, to think out what his best course was. The rumour had got abroad that he had been claimed as her son by a witch; and this so cut him to the quick as to compel him to seek solitude, for he could not bear public criticism on a point so near his heart. One day he saw his friend, the prime minister's son, and consulted him on the difficult question.
- ↑ An exorcist.
