Grandville, whose pencil rivals the author's pen, has fallen into the
same error. In his illustration to the fable we see the Ant dressed like
a busy housewife. On her threshold, beside her full sacks of wheat, she
disdainfully turns her back upon the would-be borrower, who holds out
her claw--pardon, her hand. With a wide coachman's hat, a guitar under
her arm, and a skirt wrapped about her knees by the gale, there stands
the second personage of the fable, the perfect portrait of a
grasshopper. Grandville knew no more than La Fontaine of the true
Cigale; he has beautifully expressed the general confusion.

But La Fontaine, in this abbreviated history, is only the echo of
another fabulist. The legend of the Cigale and the cold welcome of the
Ant is as old as selfishness: as old as the world. The children of
Athens, going to school with their baskets of rush-work stuffed with
figs and olives, were already repeating the story under their breath, as
a lesson to be repeated to the teacher. "In winter," they used to say,
"the Ants were putting their damp food to dry in the sun. There came a
starving Cigale to beg from them. She begged for a few grains. The
greedy misers replied: 'You sang in the summer, now dance in the
winter.'" This, although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine's
story, and is contrary to the facts.

Yet the story comes to us from Greece, which is, like the South of
France, the home of the olive-tree and the Cigale. Was Æsop really its
author, as tradition would have it? It is doubtful, and by no means a
matter of importance; at all events, the author was a Greek, and a
compatriot of the Cigale, which must have been perfectly familiar to
him. There is not a single peasant in my village so blind as to be
unaware of the total absence of Cigales in winter; and every tiller of
the soil, every gardener, is familiar with the first phase of the