want to leave him.  When the weather improved, he took them all out to pasture again; but no sooner had they got near the hills than the Wild Goats broke away from the flock and scampered off.  The Goatherd was very much disgusted at this, and roundly abused them for their ingratitude.  “Rascals!” he cried, “to run away like that after the way I’ve treated you!” Hearing this, one of them turned round and said, “Oh, yes, you treated us all right—­too well, in fact; it was just that that put us on our guard.  If you treat newcomers like ourselves so much better than your own flock, it’s more than likely that, if another lot of strange goats joined yours, we should then be neglected in favour of the last comers.”

THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE SWALLOW

A Swallow, conversing with a Nightingale, advised her to quit the leafy coverts where she made her home, and to come and live with men, like herself, and nest under the shelter of their roofs.  But the Nightingale replied, “Time was when I too, like yourself, lived among men:  but the memory of the cruel wrongs I then suffered makes them hateful to me, and never again will I approach their dwellings.”

    The scene of past sufferings revives painful memories.

THE TRAVELLER AND FORTUNE

A Traveller, exhausted with fatigue after a long journey, sank down at the very brink of a deep well and presently fell asleep.  He was within an ace of falling in, when Dame Fortune appeared to him and touched him on the shoulder, cautioning him to move further away.  “Wake up, good sir, I pray you,” she said; “had you fallen into the well, the blame would have been thrown not on your own folly but on me, Fortune.”

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration:  The hare and the tortoise]

[Illustration:  The Moon and her mother]

[Illustration:  The Fir-tree and the Bramble]

[Illustration:  The Crab and his mother]

[Illustration:  The quack Frog]

[Illustration:  The shipwrecked man and the sea]

[Illustration:  The blackamoor]

[Illustration:  The two pots]

[Illustration:  Venus and the cat]

[Illustration:  The travellers and the Plane-tree]

[Illustration:  The trees and the axe]

[Illustration:  The lion, Jupiter, and the Elephant]

[Illustration:  The gnat and the lion]