«O tamer of foes, when three years had passed, I bore this child who dispels your sorrow. O Paurava, at his birth a voice once spoke to me from the sky: 'He will become the performer of a hundred horse-sacrifices.' Indeed, people who return from another village, out of love set their sons upon their laps, smell their heads, and joyfully greet them. The twice-born, even in the Vedas, at the birth-rite of sons, utter this sacred formula — and it is known to you as well: 'You arise from every limb of mine, you are born from my heart; you are my very self, called only by the name of ‘son’; live then a hundred autumns. My well-being depends upon you, and through you the line's continuation is inexhaustible; therefore, my child, live happily for me a hundred autumns.' This one, born of your own limbs, is another man from a man; as one sees one's own reflection in a clear lake, behold in him my second self — you yourself. As the fire of the ahavaniya is carried forth from the garhapatya fire, so this one is born from you; though you are one, you have, as it were, become two. O king, it was you, pursuing a deer in the chase, carried along by the hunt, who came upon me, a maiden, in my father's hermitage. Urvashi, Purvachitti, Sahajanya, Menaka, Vishvachi, and Ghritachi — these are the six finest of the apsaras. Among them, the lovely apsara named Menaka, born from the essence of Brahma, descended from heaven to earth and bore me by Vishvamitra. That apsara Menaka bore me on the ridge of the Himalayas and, faithless, abandoned me like another's child, and departed. What evil deed did I commit in a former birth, that I was abandoned by my kin in childhood, and now by you? Though forsaken by you, I will go to the hermitage; but this child, born of your own self, you have no right to reject.»