"How can I help grieving, unhappy one that I am?" replied the Cuckoo: "thou shalt thyself be the judge. This spring my love was a happy one, and, after a while, I became a mother. But my offspring utterly refused even to recognize me. Was it such a return that I expected from them? And how can I help being envious when I see how ducklings crowd around their mother--how chickens hasten to the hen when she calls to them. Just like an orphan I sit here, utterly alone, and know not what filial affection means." "Poor thing!" says the Dove, "I pity you from my heart. As for me, though I know such things often occur, I should die outright it my dovelets did not love me. But tell me, have you already brought up your little ones? When did you find time to build a nest? I never saw you doing anything of the kind: you were always flying and fluttering about." "No, indeed!" says the Cuckoo. "Pretty nonsense it would have been if I had spent such fine days in sitting on a nest! That would, indeed, have been the highest pitch of stupidity! I always laid my eggs in the nests of other birds." "Then how can you expect your little ones to care for you?" says the Turtle-dove. The Peasant and the Horse A Peasant was sowing oats one day. Seeing the work go on, a young Horse began to reason about it, grumbling to himself: "A pretty piece of work, this, for which he brings such a quantity of oats here! And yet they are all the time saying that men are wiser than we are. Can anything possibly be more foolish or ridiculous than to plough up a whole field like this in order to scatter one's oats over it afterward to no purpose. Had he given them to me, or to the bay there, or had he even thought fit to fling them to the fowls, it would have been more like business. Or even if he had hoarded them up, I should have recognized avarice in that. But to fling them uselessly away--why, that is sheer stupidity!" Meanwhile time passed; and in the autumn the oats were garnered, and the Peasant fed this very Horse upon them all the winter. There can be no doubt, Reader, that you do not approve of the opinions of the Horse. But from the oldest times to our own days has not man been equally audacious in criticising the designs of a Providence of whose means or ends he sees and knows nothing? The Wolf and the Cat A Wolf ran out of the forest into a village--not to pay a visit, but to save its life; for it trembled for its skin. The huntsmen and a pack of hounds were after it. It would fain have rushed in through the first gateway; but there was this unfortunate circumstance against the scheme that all the gateways were closed. The Wolf sees a Cat on a partition fence, and says pleadingly, "Vaska, my friend, tell me quickly, which of the moujiks here is the kindest, so that I may hide myself from my evil foes? Listen to the cry of the dogs and the terrible sound of the horns? All that noise is actually made in chase of me!"