the gesture, I felt it better to keep the sentence as it is in the Thai edition. Only after Ven. Nṅgasamṅla is chastened by his experience with the thieves does he revert to the using the simpler and more standard address: "lord." 2. Milk-feeding = khīrapaka. This is a poetic way of saying "young and unweaned"–the "milk" here being the regurgitated food with which the mother heron feeds her young. Also–in the conventions of Indian literature–the reference to milk suggests that the heron is white. The Commentary has a fanciful way of explaining this term, saying that it refers to a special type of heron so sensitive that, when fed milk mixed with water, it drinks just the milk. - --> - - - -