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In the Kathá Sarit Ságara it is related that a Bráhman told his foolish son one evening that he must send him to the village early on the morrow, and thither the lad went, without asking what he was to do. Returning home at night very tired, he said to his father, "I have been to the village." "Yes," said the Bráhman, "you went thither without an object, and have done no good by it."

The poet Ovid alludes to the story of Ino persuading the women of the country to roast the wheat before it was sown, which may have come to India through the Greeks, since we are told in the Kathá Sarit Ságara of a foolish villager who one day roasted some sesame seeds, and finding them nice to eat, he sowed a large quantity of roasted seeds, hoping that similar ones would come up.

And nothing more foolish is recorded of the Schildburgers than Somadeva relates, in his Kathá Sarit Ságara, of the simpletons who cut down the palm-trees: Being required to furnish the king with a certain quantity of dates, and perceiving that it was very easy to gather the dates of a palm which had fallen down of itself, they set to work and cut down all the date-palms in their village, and having gathered from them their whole crop of dates, they raised them up and planted them again, thinking they would grow.

It comes from the Katha Sarit Sagara, the 'Sea of Streams of Story' of Somadeva Bhatta of Cashmere, who, in the middle of the twelfth century of our era, worked up the tales found in an earlier collection, called the Vrihat Katha, 'the lengthened story', in order to amuse his mistress, the Queen of Cashmere. Somadeva's collection has only been recently known and translated.

This fable is also found in Babrius. ; in the Kathá Sarit Ságara; in the several versions of the Fables of Bidpaï; and in the Avadánas, translated into French from the Chinese by Stanislas Julien. To return to Gothamite stories.