so he made up his mind to go to sleep by the fire.  He curled himself up beside it and was about to take off his waist cloth to spread over himself as a sheet when he found a bit of thread which he had tied up in one of the corners of the cloth.  “Why!” thought he “cloth is made of thread:  so this thread must be cloth!  I will use it as a sheet.”  So he tied one end of the thread round his big toe and wound the other end round his ears and stretching himself out at full length soon fell asleep.

During the night the fire died down and a village dog which was on the prowl came and coiled itself up on the warm ashes and also went to sleep alongside Kora.

Now the headman of that village was a well-to-do man with much land under cultivation and a number of servants, and as it was the time when the paddy was being threshed he got up very early in the morning to start the work betimes.  As he walked up the village street he came on the man and dog lying fast asleep side by side.  He roused up Kora and asked him who he was and whether he did not find it very cold, lying out in the open.  “No” answered Kora, “I don’t find it cold:  this is my dog and he has eaten up all my cold:  he will eat up the cold of a lakh of people.”  The headman at once thought that a dog that could do this would be a very useful animal to possess:  he had to spend a lot of money in providing clothes for his farm labourers and yet they all suffered from the cold, while if he could get hold of the dog he and all his household would be permanently warm:  so he asked Kora what price he set on the dog.  Kora said that he would sell it for fifty lakhs of rupees and no less:  he would not bargain about the matter:  the headman might take it or leave it as he liked.  The headman agreed to the terms and taking Kora to his house paid him over the money.  Kora made no delay in setting off homewards and when he arrived the first thing he did was to tell his brothers to find him a wife as he had now enough money to pay all the expenses of his marriage.  When his brothers found that the lazy one of the family had come home with such a fortune they gave him a very different reception from what they used to before, and set to work to arrange his marriage and the three brothers all lived happily ever after.

Meanwhile the headman who had bought the dog sent for his labourers and told them of his luck in finding such a valuable animal.  He bade them tie it up at the door of the hut on the threshing floor in which they slept:  and in the morning to lead it round with them as they drove the oxen that trod out the grain, and then they would none of them feel cold.  That night the labourers put the matter to the test but although the dog was tied up by the door the men in the hut shivered all night long as usual.  Then in the morning they one after the other tried leading the dog as they drove the oxen round the threshing floor but it did not make them any warmer, so they