of your feasting, but you know that your diet is not always so choice,
and you are sometimes forced to eat what nothing would induce me to
touch. As for alighting on the heads of kings and emperors, you know
very well that whether you pitch on the head of an emperor or of an ass
(and it is as often on the one as the other), you are shaken off from
both with impatience. And, then, the 'altars of the gods,' indeed!
There and everywhere else you are looked upon as nothing but a
nuisance. In the winter, too, while I feed at my ease on the fruit of
my toil, what more common than to see your friends dying with cold,
hunger, and fatigue? I lose my time now in talking to you. Chattering
will fill neither my bin nor my cupboard."



The Frog Who Wished to Be as Big as an Ox

An Ox, grazing in a meadow, chanced to set his foot on a young Frog and
crushed him to death. His brothers and sisters, who were playing near,
at once ran to tell their mother what had happened.

"The monster that did it, mother, was such a size!" said they.

The mother, who was a vain old thing, thought that she could easily
make herself as large.

"Was it as big as this?" she asked, blowing and puffing herself out.

"Oh, much bigger than that," replied the young Frogs.

"As this, then?" cried she, puffing and blowing again with all her