"Your Majesty," he replied, "by birth I am a potter, and my name is Fight-Firm. This is not a sword-wound. But when I was unsteady with liquor, I was hurrying through a courtyard littered with broken pots, and tumbled over one. Later the scar from the potsherd became a horrible cicatrice."
Then the king reflected: "Good heavens! I was taken in by this potter who seemed a prince. Let a cuffing be administered."
When this had been done, the potter said: "Your Majesty, do not treat me thus, but witness my adroitness in battle." "No, my friend," said the king, "you may be a treasure-house of all the virtues. Yet you must begone. You may have heard the stanza:
Handsome you are, and valorous;
You have a scholar's brain:
But in your family, my boy,
No elephants are slain."
"How was that?" asked the potter. And the king told the story of
THE JACKAL WHO KILLED NO ELEPHANTS
In a part of a forest lived a lion and his wife. One day the lioness gave birth to twins. And the lion killed deer and things every day, and gave them to the lioness.
But one day as he ranged the forest, he had met nothing when the blessèd sun sank to his setting. As he trotted home, he found a baby jackal on the
