The Rajah brought the girl down, while the crows circled
about his head.
When the old Rajah and Ranee (the young Rajah’s father and mother) saw what a very beautiful girl he had brought back with him from the jungle they gladly welcomed her as a daughter-in-law.
The young Ranee would have been very happy now in her new life, for she loved her husband dearly, but always the thought of her brothers was like a weight upon her heart. She had a number of trees planted outside her windows so that her brothers might rest there close to her. She cooked rice for them herself and fed them with her own hands, and often she sat under the trees and stroked them and talked to them while her tears fell upon their glossy feathers.
After a while the young Ranee had a son, and he was called Ramchundra. He grew up straight and tall, and he was the joy of his mother’s eyes.
One day, when he was fourteen years old, and big and strong for his age, he sat in the garden with his mother. The crows flew down about them, and she began to caress and talk to them as usual. “Ah, my dear ones!” she cried, “how sad is your fate! If I could but release you, how happy I should be.”
“Mother,” said the boy, “I can plainly see that these crows are not ordinary birds. Tell me whence come they, and why you weep over them and talk to them as you do?”
At first his mother would not tell him, but in the end she related to him the whole story of who she was, and how she and her brothers had come to the jungle and had lived there happily enough until they were changed into crows; and then of how the Rajah had found her and brought her home with him to the palace.
“I can easily see,” said Ramchundra, when she had ended the tale, “that my uncles must have met a Rakshas somewhere in the forest and have been enchanted. Tell me exactly where the tree was—the tree where you lived—and what kind it was?”
The Ranee told him.
“And in which direction did your brothers go when they left you?”