reborn as an owl, you would highly esteem your corvine provenience. There is a story that illustrates the point:
Though mountain, sun, and cloud, and wind
Were suitors at her feet,
The mouse-maid turned a mouse again—
Nature is hard to beat."
"How was that?" asked Live-Strong. And Red-Eye told the story of
MOUSE-MAID MADE MOUSE
The billows of the Ganges were dotted with pearly foam born of the leaping of fishes frightened at hearing the roar of the waters that broke on the rugged, rocky shore. On the bank was a hermitage crowded with holy men devoting their time to the performance of sacred rites—chanting, self-denial, self-torture, study, fasting, and sacrifice. They would take purified water only, and that in measured sips. Their bodies wasted under a diet of bulbs, roots, fruits, and moss. A loin-cloth made of bark formed their scanty raiment.
The father of the hermitage was named Yajnavalkya. After he had bathed in the sacred stream and had begun to rinse his mouth, a little female mouse dropped from a hawk's beak and fell into his hand. When he saw what she was, he laid her on a banyan leaf, repeated his bath and mouth-rinsing, and performed a ceremony of purification. Then through the
