FABLES

Fable /ˈfābəl/ - is a literary genre, a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral. Examples: Animal Farm by George Orwell Aesop's Fables ---------------------------------------------------------- The Ants & the Grasshopper One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat. "What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?" "I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone." The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust. "Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work. ---------------------------------------------------------- ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’. A hare was making fun of a tortoise for moving so slowly. The tortoise, tiring of the hare’s gibes about how slow he was on his feet, eventually challenged the hare to a race. ‘I’ll race you, hare,’ he said; ‘and I bet I’ll win the race.’ The hare agreed to this challenge, and a fox was found who set the course of the race and to judge who had won at the end. When the race started, the hare bounded off in front, making good progress. He was so far ahead of the tortoise that he decided he could afford to stop and have a rest. The tortoise was so far behind that a little rest wouldn’t hurt! However, the hare fell fast asleep, and as he lay sleeping, the tortoise continued to plod along at his slow pace. In time, he reached the finish-line and won the race. When the hare woke up, he was annoyed at himself for falling asleep. So he ran off towards the finish-line as fast as his legs would carry him, but it was too late, as the tortoise had already won. ---------------------------------------------------------- The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’. A man and his wife owned a goose which laid a golden egg every day. They considered themselves very lucky to possess such a rare bird, and they began to wonder just how much gold the goose must have inside it. So they cut open the goose, killing it. However, to their disappointment, they discovered that the inside of the bird was like any other goose and was not made of gold. In killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, they had deprived themselves of a regular source of gold. The moral of ‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ is fairly obviously that greed is bad: if the man and his wife had not been motivated by avarice, or greed for more gold, they would not have cut open the goose and thus they would not have deprived themselves of a smaller, though regular and steady and reliable, source of income from their special bird.