“What large teeth you have got!” “The better to——” At this moment such a terrific yell filled the field, that all its inhabitants started with terror. It was from a donkey, who had somehow got a lion’s skin, and now came in at the hedge, pursued by some men and boys with sticks and guns. When the wolf in sheep’s clothing heard the bellow of the ass in the lion’s skin, fancying that the monarch of the forest was near, he ran away as fast as his disguise would let him. When the ox heard the noise he dashed round the meadow-ditch, and with one trample of his hoof squashed the frog who had been abusing him. When the crow saw the people with guns coming, he instantly dropped the cheese out of his mouth, and took to wing. When the fox saw the cheese drop, he immediately made a jump at it (for he knew the donkey’s voice, and that his asinine bray was not a bit like his royal master’s roar), and making for the cheese, fell into a steel trap, which snapped off his tail; without which he was obliged to go into the world, pretending, forsooth, that it was the fashion not to wear tails any more; and that the fox-party were better without ’em. Meanwhile, a boy with a stick came up, and belaboured Master Donkey until he roared louder than ever. The wolf, with the sheep’s clothing draggling about his legs, could not run fast, and was detected and shot by one of the men. The blind old owl, whirring out of the hollow tree, quite amazed at the disturbance, flounced into the face of a ploughboy, who knocked her down with a pitchfork. The butcher came and quietly led off the ox and the lamb; and the farmer, finding the fox’s brush in the trap, hung it up over his mantelpiece, and always bragged that he had been in at his death. “What a farrago of old fables is this! What a dressing up in old clothes!” says the critic. (I think I see such a one—a Solomon that sits in judgment over us authors and chops up our children.) “As sure as I am just and wise, modest, learned, and religious, so surely I have read something very like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and foxes before. That wolf in sheep’s clothing?—do I not know him? That fox discoursing with the crow?—have I not previously heard of him? Yes, in Lafontaine’s fables: let us get the Dictionary and the Fable and the Biographie Universelle, article Lafontaine, and confound the impostor.”