hasten to the hen when she calls to them. Just like an orphan I sit here, utterly
alone, and know not what filial affection means."
"Poor thing!" says the Dove, "I pity you from my heart. As for me, though I
know such things often occur, I should die outright it my dovelets did not love
me. But tell me, have you already brought up your little ones? When did you
find time to build a nest? I never saw you doing anything of the kind: you were
always flying and fluttering about."
"No, indeed!" says the Cuckoo. "Pretty nonsense it would have been if I had
spent such fine days in sitting on a nest! That would, indeed, have been the
highest pitch of stupidity! I always laid my eggs in the nests of other birds."
"Then how can you expect your little ones to care for you?" says the
Turtle-dove.
The Peasant and the Horse
A Peasant was sowing oats one day. Seeing the work go on, a young
Horse began to reason about it, grumbling to himself:
"A pretty piece of work, this, for which he brings such a quantity of oats here!
And yet they are all the time saying that men are wiser than we are. Can
anything possibly be more foolish or ridiculous than to plough up a whole field
like this in order to scatter one's oats over it afterward to no purpose. Had he
given them to me, or to the bay there, or had he even thought fit to fling them to
the fowls, it would have been more like business. Or even if he had hoarded
them up, I should have recognized avarice in that. But to fling them uselessly
away—why, that is sheer stupidity!"
Meanwhile time passed; and in the autumn the oats were garnered, and the
Peasant fed this very Horse upon them all the winter.
There can be no doubt, Reader, that you do not approve of the opinions of the
Horse. But from the oldest times to our own days has not man been equally
audacious in criticising the designs of a Providence of whose means or ends he
sees and knows nothing?