in them; Socrates, we read, having amused himself
during the last days of his life with turning
into verse some of Aesop's "myths" as he called
them. Think of Socrates conning these fables
in prison four hundred years before Christ, and
then think of a more familiar picture in our own
day--a gaunt, dark-faced, black-haired boy
poring over a book as he lay by the fireside in a
little Western farmhouse; for you remember that
Abraham Lincoln's literary models were "Aesop's
Fables," "The Pilgrim's Progress" and the
Bible. Perhaps he read the fable of the Fig
Tree, Olive, Vine, and Bramble from the ninth
chapter of Judges, or that of the Thistle and
Cedar from the fourteenth chapter of II Kings
and noted that teaching by story-telling was
still well in vogue six hundred years after Aesop.

In later times the fables that had been carried
from mouth to mouth for centuries began to
be written down: by Phaedrus in Latin and
Babrius in Greek; also, in the fourteenth century,
by a Greek monk named Planudes. But do
not suppose they had their birth or flourished
in Greece alone. At the very time that Aesop
was telling them at the court of Croesus, or in
Delphi, Corinth, or Athens,--far, far away in
India the Buddhist priests were telling fables in
the Sanskrit language to the common people, the
blind, the ignorant and the outcast. Sanskrit,