Morning came , and the king got up , pale and sulky , and , after learning from the hermit which path to take , was soon mounted and found his way home without much difficulty . Directly he reached his palace he wrote a letter to the king of the land of the north , begging him , as a favour , to sell him his slave girl Puruna and her son , and saying that , if he consented , he would send a messenger to receive them at the river which divided the kingdoms . For five days he awaited the reply , and hardly slept or ate , but was as cross as could be all the time . On the fifth day his messenger returned with a letter to say that the king of the land of the north would not sell , but he would give , the king the slave girl and her son . The king was overjoyed . He sent for his Grand Wazeer and told him that he was going on one of his lonely expeditions , and that the Wazeer must invent some excuse to account for his absence . Next he disguised himself as an ordinary messenger , mounted a swift camel , and sped away to the place where the slave girl was to be handed over to him . When he got there he gave the messengers who brought her a letter of thanks and a handsome present for their master and rewards for themselves ; and then without delay he took the poor woman and her tiny baby-boy up on to his camel and rode off to a wild desert . After riding for a day and a night , almost without stopping , he came to a great cave where he made the woman dismount , and , taking her and the baby into the cave , he drew his sword and with one blow chopped her head off . But although his anger made him cruel enough for anything so dreadful , the king felt that he could not turn his great sword on the helpless baby , who he was sure must soon die in this solitary place without its mother ; so he left it in the cave where it was , and , mounting his camel , rode home as fast as he could . Now , in a small village in his kingdom there lived an old widow who had no children or relations of any kind . She made her living mostly by selling the milk of a flock of goats ; but she was very , very poor , and not very strong , and often used to wonder how she would live if she got too weak or ill to attend to her goats . Every morning she drove the goats out into the desert to graze on the shrubs and bushes which grew there , and every evening they came home of themselves to be milked and to be shut up safely for the night . One evening the old woman was astonished to find that her very best nanny-goat returned without a drop of milk . She thought that some naughty boy or girl was playing a trick upon her and had caught the goat on its way home and stolen all the milk . But when evening after evening the goat remained almost dry she determined to find out who the thief was . So the next day she followed the goats at a distance and watched them while they grazed . At length , in the afternoon , the old woman noticed this particular nanny-goat stealing off by herself away from the herd and she at once went after her . On and on the goat walked for some way , and then disappeared into a cave in the rocks . The old woman followed the goat into the cave and then , what should she see but the animal giving her milk to a little boy-baby , whilst on the ground near by lay the sad remains of the baby 's dead mother !
Wondering and frightened , the old woman thought XXXXX last that this little baby might be a son to her in her old age , and that he would grow up and in time to come be her comfort and support .
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