him due respect, and relieved his fatigue. At night they lay on the same couch and started to relate pious tales. But Crop-Ear's thoughts were so preoccupied with mice that he kept striking the alms-bowl with a frazzled bamboo and returned an absent-minded answer to Wide-Bottom as he told a pious tale.
Then the guest grew extremely angry and said: "Come, Crop-Ear! I perceive that your friendship is dead. For you do not talk with me whole-heartedly. So, night though it be, I shall leave your cell and go elsewhere. For there is a saying:
'Come! Enter! News from town?
A chair! You look run down!
Welcome! Why have you slighted
Our home so long? Dee-lighted!'
Such kindly words as these
May set the mind at ease,
And friends be glad to go
Where they are greeted so.
And again:
Wherever hosts look vaguely round
Or fix their glances on the ground,
The guests who visit such a place
Are hornless, yet of bovine race.
You should not visit any home
From which no gentle greetings come,
Which fails in eager promptitude,
With gossip touching bad and good.
"But this you do not understand, having forgotten friendship through pride in the ownership of one mere
