Page:Three hundred Aesop's fables (Townshend).djvu/66

 60 and shut them up together with his own for the night. On the morrow it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding-places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly, in the hope of enticing them to stay with him, and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the wild goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd taxed them with their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them turning about said to him, "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would, in the same manner, prefer them to ourselves."

Old friends cannot with impunity be sacrificed for new ones.

THE MAN AND HIS TWO SWEETHEARTS.

man, whose hair had begun to turn grey, courted two women at the same time. One of them was young; and the other well advanced in years. The elder woman, ashamed to be courted by a man younger than herself, made a point, whenever her admirer visited her, to pull out some portion of his black hairs. The younger, on the contrary, not wishing to become the wife of an old man, was equally zealous in removing every grey hair she could find. Thus it came to pass, that between them both he very soon found that he had not a hair left on his head.

Those who seek to please everybody please nobody.