There was once a Cat who was so watchful, that a Mouse hardly dared show the tip of his whiskers for fear of being eaten alive. That Cat seemed to be everywhere at once with his claws all ready for a pounce.
At last the Mice kept so closely to their dens, that the Cat saw he would have to use his wits well to catch one.
Two goats, frisking gayly on the rocky steeps of a mountain valley, chanced to meet, one on each side of a deep chasm through which poured a mighty mountain torrent.
The fox invited the crane to dinner and served the meal on a plate. The crane could pick up nothing with his long beak, and the fox ate everything herself.
Next day the crane invited the fox and served dinner in a jug with a narrow neck.
The fox could not get her muzzle into the jug, but the crane stuck his long neck in and drank everything himself.
Once upon a time there lived a cloth merchant in a village with his wife and two children.
They were indeed quite well-off. They had a beautiful hen which laid an egg everyday.
It was not an ordinary egg, rather, a golden egg. But the man was not satisfied with what he used to get daily. He was a get rich-trice kind of a person.
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.
IT happened that a Fox caught its tail in a trap, and in struggling to release himself lost all of it but the stump.
At first he was ashamed to show himself among his fellow foxes.
But at last he determined to put a bolder face upon his misfortune, and summoned all the foxes to a general meeting to consider a proposal which he had to place before them.
The Woodman was in despair. The axe was all he possessed with which to make a living, and he had not money enough to buy a new one.
As he stood wringing his hands and weeping, the god Mercury suddenly appeared and asked what the trouble was.
The Woodman told what had happened, and straightway the kind Mercury dived into the pool.
When he came up again he held a wonderful golden axe.
The Lion and the Fox went hunting together. The Lion, on the advice of the Fox, sent a message to the Ass, proposing to make an alliance between their two families.
The Ass came to the place of meeting, overjoyed at the prospect of a royal alliance.But when he came there the Lion simply pounced on the Ass, and said to the Fox: "Here is our dinner for today.Watch you here while I go and have a nap. Woe betide you if you touch my prey."
"Away with you, vile insect!" said a Lion angrily to a Gnat that was buzzing around his head.
But the Gnat was not in the least disturbed.
"Do you think," he said spitefully to the Lion, "that I am afraid of you because they call you king?"
The next instant he flew at the Lion and stung him sharply on the nose.
The Owl always takes her sleep during the day. Then after sundown, when the rosy light fades from the sky and the shadows rise slowly through the wood, out she comes ruffling and blinking from the old hollow tree.