Then they both went home and collected what money they could lay hands on and, when the time arrived, started off early one morning.  After they had travelled some distance the Prince began to think of how his parents must be searching for him, for he had said nothing about his going away; but the merchant’s son comforted him by saying that he had left word of their intentions at his home, and his relations would tell the Raja; so they continued on their way, and after a time they came to a certain country where the merchant’s son proposed that they should look for employment.  But now that it had come to the point, the prince did not like the idea of becoming a servant and he said that he would live on the money which he had brought with him, and which would last for a year or two.  “You may do as you like” answered his friend “but for my part I must look for work.”  So he went to a village and found employment as a teacher in a school; his pupils gave him his food and also some small wages, so that he had enough to live on, without spending any of the money he had brought with him.

Meanwhile the Raja’s son hired a house in the village and began to lead a riotous life; in a very short time He had wasted all his money on his evil companions and was reduced to absolute starvation; for when his money came to an end, all his so-called friends deserted him.  Thin and wretched, he went to the merchant’s son and asked him either to take him back to his father’s home or to find him work.  His friend agreed to find him some employment, and after a little enquiry heard of a farmer who wanted a servant to take a bullock out to graze and to fill a trough with water once a day.  The prince thought that he could easily manage that amount of work, so he went to the farmer and engaged himself as his servant.

The terms of service were these:—­If the prince threw up his work one of his little fingers was to be cut off, but if the farmer dismissed him while he was working well then the farmer was to lose a little finger; and if the prince grazed the bullock and filled the trough with water regularly, he was to get as much cooked rice as would cover a plantain leaf, but if he did not do the work he was to get only what would go on a tamarind leaf.  The prince readily agreed to these terms, for he thought that the work would not take him more than an hour or two.  But unhappily for him, things did not turn out as he expected.  On the first morning he took the bullock out to graze, but the animal would not eat; whenever it saw any other cattle passing, it would gallop off to join them, and when the prince had run after it and brought it back, nothing would make it graze quietly; it kept running away in one direction or another with the prince in pursuit.  So at last he had to bring it home and shut it up in the cow-shed and even that he found difficult.