Some weeks afterwards he returned with a wagon to convey back the bundles of hay. There wasn't any hay, but the wagon was useful for returning to his owner that unfortunate ass--who was too fat to walk. This ought to show any one the folly of relying upon the teaching of obscure and inferior authors.[A] [Footnote A: It is to be wished our author had not laid himself open to the imputation of having perverted, if not actually invented, some of his facts, for the unworthy purpose of bringing a deserving rival into disfavour.--TRANSLATOR.] LXI. One day the king of the wrens held his court for the trial of a bear, who was at large upon his own recognizance. Being summoned to appear, the animal came with great humility into the royal presence. "What have you to say, sir," demanded the king, "in defence of your inexcusable conduct in pillaging the nests of our loyal subjects wherever you can find them?" "May it please your Majesty," replied the prisoner, with a reverential gesture, repeated at intervals, and each time at a less distance from the royal person, "I will not wound your Majesty's sensibilities by pleading a love of eggs; I will humbly confess my course of crime, warn your Majesty of its probable continuance, and beg your Majesty's gracious permission to inquire--What is your Majesty going to do about it?" The king and his ministers were very much struck with this respectful speech, with the ingenuity of the final inquiry, and with the bear's paw. It was the paw, however, which made the most lasting impression. Always give ear to the flattery of your powerful inferiors: it will cheer you in your decline. LXII. A philosopher looking up from the pages of the Zend-Avesta, upon which he had been centring his soul, beheld a pig violently assailing a cauldron of cold slops. "Heaven bless us!" said the sage; "for unalloyed delight give me a good honest article of Sensuality. So soon as my 'Essay upon the Correlation of Mind-forces' shall have brought me fame and fortune, I hope to abjure the higher faculties, devoting the remainder of my life to the cultivation of the propensities." "Allah be praised!" soliloquized the pig, "there is nothing so godlike as Intellect, and nothing so ecstatic as intellectual pursuits. I must hasten to perform this gross material function, that I may retire to my wallow and resign my soul to philosophical meditation." This tale has one moral if you are a philosopher, and another if you are a pig. LXIII. "Awful dark--isn't it?" said an owl, one night, looking in upon the roosting hens in a poultry-house; "don't see how I am to find my way back to my hollow tree." "There is no necessity," replied the cock; "you can roost there, alongside the door, and go home in the morning."