Then the man said, “Hā! At each place that I go to, the boys say ‘Father’ to me. I am a Kaḍambāwa man. I am going to Puttalam. At two villages on the road the boys called me ‘Father.’ ”
As he was setting off to go again, the man’s wife came and spoke to him. Then the man having recognised that it was his own house, unfastened the bull, and having sent it off to eat food stayed quietly at home.
In The Orientalist, vol. ii, p. 102, there is a story by Mr. A. E. R. Corea, in which a man who was going to a village in order to hire out his bull, allowed the animal to take its own way while he trudged behind it. The bull wandered about eating, and at last lay down near a stream. The man being tired out also lay down, and fell asleep. He was close to his own house, and was found by his children when they went for firewood. When they spoke to him, he denied that he was their father, and drove them away; but his wife afterwards came, and by means of her broom-stick convinced him that he was at home.
No. 41
The Kaḍambāwa Men and the Hares
The Kaḍambāwa men having gone to set nets, a great many hares were caught in the nets. Afterwards the men, having seized the hares, doubled up the hind legs of the hares at the joints, and the fore-legs at the joints, and threw them on the ground, in order to make a heap of them in one place afterwards. Then all the hares ran away into the jungle.
After all the hares in the nets had been finished, when they looked for the dead hares there was not even one hare. Then the men were astonished at the coming to life of the hares which they had killed, saying, “How thoroughly we killed the hares!” After having become fixed like stone [with astonishment] until nightfall, they went in the evening to their houses.