Much agitated, the two brothers, Bharata and Ýatrughna, loudly lamented and KausalyŒ clasped them to her bosom. She comforted Bharata in many ways and tendered words of wisdom to him. Bharata too in his turn consoled all his mothers, narrating legends from the PurŒ˜as and Vedas. Joining both his palms he addressed them in guileless, innocent, simple and charming words: “The sins attaching to the murder of one’s mother, father or son and to the act of setting fire to a cowpen or a village of BrŒhma˜as, and those incurred by slaying a woman or child and by administering poison to a friend or a monarch, nay, all the major and minor sins of thought, word or deed, that have been enumerated by the seers,—let all such sins be mine if, my mother, this plot has my concurrence.” (1—4)