"I confess," replied the idler, "that our usages with regard to vermin and reptiles might be so amended as to be more temperately diabolical; but please to remember that the gentle agonies with which we afflict you are wholesome and exhilarating compared with the ills we ladle out to one another. During the reign of His Pellucid Refulgence, Khatchoo Khan," he continued, absently dropping his wriggling auditor into the brook, "no less than three hundred thousand Persian subjects were put to death, in a pleasing variety of ingenious ways, for their religious beliefs."
"What that has to do with your treatment of us" interrupted a fish, who, having bitten at the worm just then, was drawn into the conversation, "I am quite unable to see."
"That," said the angler, disengaging him, "is because you have the hook through your eyeball, my edible friend."
Many a truth is spoken in jest; but at least ten times as many falsehoods are uttered in dead earnest.
LXXVI.
A wild cat was listening with rapt approval to the melody of distant hounds tracking a remote fox.
"Excellent! bravo!" she exclaimed at intervals. "I could sit and listen all day to the like of that. I am passionately fond of music. Ong-core!"
Presently the tuneful sounds drew near, whereupon she began to fidget; ending by shinning up a tree, just as the dogs burst into view below her, and stifled their songs upon the body of their victim before her eyes-which protruded.
"There is an indefinable charm," said she-"a subtle and tender spell-a mystery-a conundrum, as it were-in the sounds of an unseen orchestra. This is quite lost when the performers are visible to the audience. Distant music (if any) for your obedient servant!"
LXXVII.
Having been taught to turn his scraps of bad Persian into choice Latin, a parrot was puffed up with conceit.
"Observe," said he, "the superiority I may boast by virtue of my classical education: I can chatter flat nonsense in the language of Cicero."
"I would advise you," said his master, quietly, "to let it be of a different character from that chattered by some of Mr. Cicero's most admired compatriots, if you value the priviledge of hanging at that public window. 'Commit no mythology,' please."
The exquisite fancies of a remote age may not be imitated in this; not, perhaps, from a lack of talent, so much as from a fear of arrest.
LXXVIII.
A rat, finding a file, smelt it all over, bit it gently, and observed that, as it did not seem to be rich enough to produce dyspepsia, he would venture to make a meal of it. So he gnawed it into smithareens[D] without the slightest injury to his teeth. With his morals the case was somewhat different. For the file was a file of newspapers, and his system became so saturated with the "spirit of the Press" that he went off and called his aged father a "lingering contemporary;" advised the correction of brief tails by amputation; lauded the skill of a quack rodentist for money; and, upon what would otherwise have been his death-bed, essayed a lie of such phenomenal magnitude that it stuck in his throat, and prevented him breathing his last. All this crime, and misery, and other nonsense, because he was too lazy to worry about and find a file of nutritious fables.
This tale shows the folly of eating everything you happen to fancy. Consider, moreover, the danger of such a course to your neighbour's wife.
LXXIX.
"I should like to climb up you, if you don't mind," cried an ivy to a young oak.
"Oh, certainly; come along," was the cheerful assent.
So she started up, and finding she could grow faster than he, she wound round and round him until she had passed up all the line she had. The oak, however, continued to grow, and as she could not disengage her coils, she was just lifted out by the root. So that ends the oak-and-ivy business, and removes a powerful temptation from the path of the young writer.
LXXX.
A merchant of Cairo gave a grand feast. In the midst of the revelry, the great doors of the dining-hall were pushed open from the outside, and the guests were surprised and grieved by the advent of a crocodile of a tun's girth, and as long as the moral law.
"Thought I'd look in," said he, simply, but not without a certain grave dignity.
"But," cried the host, from the top of the table, "I did not invite any saurians."
"No-I know yer didn't; it's the old thing, it is: never no wacancies for saurians-saurians should orter keep theirselves to theirselves-no saurians need apply. I got it all by 'eart, I tell yer. But don't give yerself no distress; I didn't come to beg; thank 'eaven I ain't drove to that yet-leastwise I ain't done it. But I thought as 'ow yer'd need a dish to throw slops and broken wittles in it; which I fetched along this 'ere."
And the willing creature lifted off the cover by erecting the upper half of his head till the snout of him smote the ceiling.
Open servitude is better than covert begging.
LXXXI.
A gander being annoyed by the assiduous attendance of his ugly reflection in the water, determined that he would prosecute future voyages in a less susceptible element. So he essayed a sail upon the placid bosom of a clay-bank. This kind of navigation did not meet his expectations, however, and he returned with dogged despair to his pond, resolved to make a final cruise and go out of commission. He was delighted to find that the clay adhering to his hull so defiled the water that it gave back no image of him. After that, whenever he left port, he was careful to be well clayed along the water-line.
The lesson of this is that if all geese are alike, we can banish unpleasant reflections by befouling ourselves. This is worth knowing.
LXXXII.
The belly and the members of the human body were in a riot. (This is not the riot recorded by an inferior writer, but a more notable and authentic one.) After exhausting the well-known arguments, they had recourse to the appropriate threat, when the man to whom they belonged thought it time for him to be heard, in his capacity as a unit.
"Deuce take you!" he roared. "Things have come to a pretty pass if a fellow cannot walk out of a fine morning without alarming the town by a disgraceful squabble between his component parts! I am reasonably impartial, I hope, but man's devotion is due to his deity: I espouse the cause of my belly."
Hearing this, the members were thrown into so extraordinary confusion that the man was arrested for a windmill.
As a rule, don't "take sides." Sides of bacon, however, may be temperately acquired.
LXXXIII.
A man dropping from a balloon struck against a soaring eagle.
"I beg your pardon," said he, continuing his descent; "I never could keep off eagles when in my descending node."
"It is agreeable to meet so pleasing a gentleman, even without previous appointment," said the bird, looking admiringly down upon the lessening aeronaut; "he is the very pink of politeness. How extremely nice his liver must be. I will follow him down and arrange his simple obsequies."
This fable is narrated for its intrinsic worth.
LXXXIV.
To escape from a peasant who had come suddenly upon him, an opossum adopted his favourite expedient of counterfeiting death.