'"For, believe me," said she, "the desires of the ambitious are never to be satiated but when their mouths are stuffed with the dirt of their graves. Sobriety and temperance are the only things that truly enrich people. I must tell thee, poor silly cat, that they who travel to satisfy their ambition have no knowledge of the good things they possess, nor are they truly thankful to Heaven for what they enjoy, who are not contented with their fortune." 'The poor starved cat, however, had conceived so fair an idea of the king's table, that the old woman's good morals and judicious remonstrances entered in at one ear and went out at the other; in short, she departed the next day with the fat puss to go to the king's house; but, alas! before she got thither her destiny had laid a snare for her. For, being a house of good cheer, it was so haunted with cats that the servants had, just at this time, orders to kill all the cats that came near it, by reason of a great robbery committed the night before in the king's larder by several grimalkins. The old woman's cat, however, pushed on by hunger, entered the house, and no sooner saw a dish of meat unobserved by the cooks, but she made a seizure of it, and was doing what for many years she had not done before, that is, heartily filling her belly; but as she was enjoying herself under the dresser-board, and feeding heartily upon her stolen morsels, one of the testy officers of the kitchen, missing his breakfast, and seeing where the poor cat was solacing herself with it, threw his knife at her with such an unlucky hand that it struck her full in the breast. However, as it has been the providence of Nature to give this creature nine lives instead of one, poor puss made a shift to crawl away, after she had for some time shammed dead; but in her flight, observing the blood come streaming from her wound--"Well," said she, "let me but escape this accident, and if ever I quit my old home and my own mice for all the rarities in the king's kitchen, may I lose all my nine lives at once!"' The moral of the story is, that it is better to be contented with what one has than to travel in search of what ambition prompts us to seek for.