When the boy was grown, a peddler's donkey started to eat his mother's cabbages, and so he beat it and drove it out.
The king, not believing that so old a woman could have so young a son, demanded to know where she had gotten him, and hearing the story, knew who the child was.
When the army life did not kill him, though he was sent on the most dangerous missions, and he proved a good soldier, he was enrolled in the king's bodyguard and saved him from an assassin.
The mischievous princess was up and about while the rest of the castle slept in the heat of the day and found that the message was to kill the bearer of it.
Folklorist Stith Thompson mentions in his seminal work The Folktale that the tale of the boy predestined to marry a princess can be found in the literary history of India, such is its antiquity.