Note 5 — Chapter LXVIII

And the cruel woman immediately sold him in his helpless bestial condition to a trader, who required a buffalo. The trader put a load upon the man, who found his transformation to a buffalo a sore trial, and took him to a village near the Ganges. He reflected, “A wife of very bad character that enters unsuspected the house of a confiding man, is never likely to bring him prosperity, any more than a snake which gets into the female apartments.” While full of these thoughts, he was sorrowful, with tears gushing from his eyes, moreover he was reduced to skin and bone by the fatigue of carrying burdens, and in this state he was beheld by a certain white witch. She knew by her magic power the whole transaction, and sprinkling him with some charmed water, she released him from his buffalo condition. And when he had returned to human form, she took him to her own house, and gave him her virgin daughter named Kántimatí. And she gave him some charmed mustard-seeds, and said to him; “Sprinkle your wicked former wife with these, and turn her into a mare.” Then Vámadatta, taking with him his new wife, went with the charmed mustard-seeds to his own house. Then he killed the herdsman, and with the mustard-seeds he turned5 his former wife into a mare, and tied her up in the stable. And in order to revenge himself, he made it a rule to give her every day seven blows with a stick, before he took any food.6