“O Raja don’t be so scornful” said the jackal, “I am a cleverer judge than you.”  “You, who are you?  I have grown old in judging cases and rinding out the truth; and you dare to talk to me like that!” “Well,” retorted the jackal, “if you are so clever guess the meaning of my dream; and if you cannot, give the man back his cow; if you can say what it means, I will acknowledge that you are fit to be a Raja.  This is what I dreamt.—­I saw three die in one place; one from sleepiness; one from anger and one from greed.  Tell me what were the three and how did they come to be in one place.”

This riddle puzzled every one, but the friends of the man who had lost his cow saw their opportunity and began to call out to the Raja to be quick and give the answer.  The Raja made several guesses, but the jackal each time said that he was wrong, and asserted that the real answer would strike every one present as satisfactory.  The Raja was completely puzzled and then suggested that there was no coherency in dreams:  if the jackal had had some meaningless dream, no one could guess it.  “No,” said the jackal, “you just now laughed at the idea that any one should come to a panchayat and go to sleep; and what you said was true; I would not really go to sleep on an occasion like this; and I did not really dream.  Now show that you are cleverer than I; if you can, you keep the cow.”

The Raja thought and thought in vain, and at last asked to be told the answer to the puzzle.  First the jackal made him write out a promise to restore the cow and to pay twenty-five rupees to the panchayat; and then it began:—­“In a forest lived a wild elephant and every night it wandered about grazing and in the day it returned to its retreat in a certain hill.  One dawn as it was on its way back after a night’s feeding, it felt so sleepy that it lay down where it was; and it happened that its body blocked the entrance to a hole which was a poisonous snake.  When the snake wanted to come out and found the way blocked, it got angry and in its rage bit the elephant and the elephant died then and there.  Presently a jackal came prowling by and saw the elephant lying dead; it could not restrain itself from such a feast and choosing a place where the skin was soft began to tear at the flesh.  Soon it made such a large hole that it got quite inside the elephant and still went on eating.  But when the sun grew strong, the elephant’s skin shrunk and closed the hole and the jackal could not get out again and died miserably inside the elephant.  The snake too in its hole soon died from want of food and air.  So the elephant met its death through sleepiness and the snake through anger and the jackal through greed.  This is the answer to the puzzle, but Chando prevented your guessing it, because you unjustly took the poor man’s cow and as a lesson to you that he is lord of all, of the poor and weak as well as of Rajas and Princes.”

When the jackal concluded all present cried out that the answer was a perfect one; but the Raja said “I don’t think much of that; I know a lot of stories like that myself.”  However he had to give back the cow and pay twenty-five rupees to the panchayat.  In gratitude to the jackal the owner of the cow bought a goat and gave it to the jackal and then the jackal went away and was seen no more.