At this the wealthy man laughed.  “Look here, my friend, to-day I’ll lift you to the seats of the mighty!  Here is a hundred pounds.  Guard them and use them with care.”

When the cobbler held the bag of money in his hand he imagined that it must be as much as would be coined in a hundred years.

Returning home he buried the cash in his cellar.  Alas! he buried his joy with it, for there were no more songs.  From the moment he came into possession of this wealth, the love of which is the root of all evil, his voice left him, and not only his voice, but his sleep also.  And in place of these came anxiety, suspicion, and alarms; guests which abode with him constantly.  All day he kept his eye on the cellar door.  Did a cat make a noise in the night, then for a certainty that cat was after his money.

At last, in despair, the wretched cobbler ran to the financier whom he now no longer kept awake.  “Oh, give me back my joy in life, my songs, my sleep; and take your hundred pounds again.”

XVI

THE POWER OF FABLE

(Book VIII.—­No. 4)

In the old, vain, and fickle city of Athens, an orator,[2] seeing how the light-hearted citizens were blind to certain dangers which threatened the state, presented himself before the tribune, and there sought, by the very tyranny of his forceful eloquence, to move the heart of the republic towards a sense of the common welfare.

But the people neither heard nor heeded.  Then the orator had recourse to more urgent arguments and stronger metaphors, potent enough to touch hearts of stone.  He spoke in thunders that might have raised the dead; but his words were carried away on the wind.  The beast of many heads[3] did not deign to hear the launching of these thunderbolts.  It was engrossed in something quite different.  A fight between two urchins was what the crowd found so engaging; not the orator’s warnings.

What then did the speaker do?  He tried another plan.  “Ceres,” he began, “made a voyage one day with an eel and a swallow.  After a time the three travellers were stopped by a river.  This the eel got over by swimming and the swallow by flying——­”

“Well! what about Ceres?  What did she do?” cried the crowd with one voice.

“She did what she did!” retorted the speaker in anger.  “But first she raged against you.  What!  Does it take a child’s story to open your ears, you who should be eager for any news of the peril that menaces; you, the only state in Greece that takes no heed?  You ask what Ceres did.  Why do you not ask what Philip[4] does?”

At this reproach the assembly was stirred.  A mere fable brought them open-eared to all the orator would say.

We are all Athenians in this respect.  I myself am, even as I point this moral.  I should take the utmost pleasure now in hearing “The Ass’s Skin"[5] told to me.  The world is old, they say:  so it is; but, nevertheless, it is as greedy of amusement as a child.