Then they returned to the chamber and played blind man's buff. Iagu caught the king, who then had his eyes bandaged. The girls jumped about and scurried to and fro under his very nose, strummed on citherns, stamped with their bare feet on the floor, imitating the oxen threshing and sang a song:
"Hey! Hey! Hey!
It's fine and fresh to-day,
Fine workmen, oxen,
Work, work away!
Stamp upon the threshing floor!
You'll have something for your trouble.
We'll have the grain and you the straw!"
The king, awkwardly spreading out his arms, kept catching empty air or embracing pillars. At last he caught Ankhi, Tuta's twelve year old wife.
"You moved the bandage," she cried. "There, the left eye is peeping out! You mustn't cheat, abby!"
'Abby' was the diminutive from the Canaan word Abba—father.
"No, I haven't, it slid off," the king tried to justify himself.
"You have moved it, you have!" Ankhi kept on shouting. "I know you, abby, you are a dreadful little rogue! But that's not the way to play. You must catch again."
She bandaged his eyes tighter than before and he had to catch them again.
The poodle, Dang, as though also playing, walked about on its hind legs holding a sounding cithern in its front paws. The king, imagining from the sound, that it was the little Zeta—Zetepenra—bent down rapidly and threw his arms round Dang. The dog barked and licked him in the face. The king cried out in alarm, sat down on the floor and pushed Dang away. But it rushed up to him again, put its front paws on the king's shoulders and licked him squealing with delight.
All laughed and shouted.