The child is essentially conservative. Custom and traditions become indestructible once they are confided to the archives of his memory. We owe to him the celebrity of the Cicada, whose woes he stammered in his first attempts at recitation. He preserves for us the glaring absurdities that are part and parcel of the fable: the Cicada will always be hungry when the cold comes, though there are no Cicadæ left in the winter; she will always beg for the alms of a few grains of wheat, a food quite out of keeping with her delicate sucker; the supplicant is supposed to hunt for Flies and grubs, she who never eats! Whom are we to hold responsible for these curious blunders? La Fontaine, [2] who charms us in most of his fables with his exquisite delicacy of observation, is very ill-inspired in this case. He knows thoroughly his common subjects, the Fox, the Wolf, the Cat, the Goat, the Crow, the Rat, the Weasel and many others, whose sayings and doings he describes to us with delightful precision of detail. They are local characters, neighbours, housemates of his. Their public and private life is spent under his eyes; but, where Jack Rabbit gambols, the Cicada is an entire stranger: La Fontaine never heard of her, never saw her. To him the famous singer is undoubtedly a Grasshopper. Grandville, [3] whose drawings have the same delicious spice of malice as the text itself, falls into the same error. In his illustration, we see the Ant arrayed like an industrious housewife. Standing on her threshold, beside great sacks of wheat, she turns a contemptuous back on the borrower, who is holding out her foot, I beg pardon, her hand. The second figure wears a great cartwheel hat, with a guitar under her arm and her skirt plastered to her legs by the wind, and is the perfect picture of a Grasshopper. Grandville no more than La Fontaine suspected the real appearance of the Cicada; he reproduced magnificently the general mistake. For the rest, La Fontaine, in his poor little story, only echoes another fabulist. The legend of the Cicada’s sorry welcome by the Ant is as old as selfishness, that is to say, as old as the world. The children of Athens, going to school with their esparto-grass baskets crammed with figs and olives, were already mumbling it as a piece for recitation: “In winter,” said they, “the Ants dry their wet provisions in the sun. Up comes a hungry Cicada begging. She asks for a few grains. The greedy hoarders reply, ‘You used to sing in summer; now dance in winter.’” [4] This, although a little more baldly put, is precisely La Fontaine’s theme and is contrary to all sound knowledge.