But the frog answered him,—
“I should be foolish indeed if I came of my own account to give up my sweet life to your voracity. The Three Precious Treasures[2] may decide whether I have so little courage and pride as that!”
So saying, she leapt into a cleft of the rock out of reach of the crow.
Meantime her former tamer had come up, and began searching about, trying to recover her, having bethought him he might incur the King’s anger in having let her go. And when he saw her not he began digging up the earth and hewing the rock all round the streamlet.
When the frog saw him digging up the earth and breaking the rock all round the streamlet, she cried out to him,—
“Dig not up the source of this spring. The King of the same hath given me charge over it, and I will not that thou lay it bare by digging round it.” She said further, “Though now thou art in sorrow and distress, I will presently render thee a gift that shall be a gift of wonder. Listen and I will tell thee. I am the daughter of the Serpent-king, reigning over the white mother-o’-pearl shells[3]. One day I went out to see the King’s daughter bathe, and she, seeing me, sent and had me fished out of the stream with a mother-o’-pearl pail, and took me with her.”
Meantime, the King began to notice that the parrot and the frog came no more to entertain him, so he sent for the tamer, and inquired what had become of his charges.
“The frog is gone her way in the stream,” answered the man, “and the parrot must have been taken by a hawk.”
The Khan was wroth at this answer, and ordered that the man should be taken and put to death.
Then came the first of the thirty ministers to the Khan, saying,—