At last the she-bear rose up and coming to the wailing lioness said, “Good Gossip, just one word with you.  All those little ones that have passed between your teeth, had they neither fathers nor mothers?”

“To be sure they had.”

“Then if that be so, and as none have come to mourn their dead in cries which would split our heads:  if so many mothers have borne their loss silently, why cannot you be silent also?”

“I?  I be silent?  Unhappy I?  Ah!  I have lost my son!  There is nought for me but to drag out a miserable old age.”

“But pray tell me what obliges you to do so.”

“Alas!  Destiny.  It is Destiny that hates me.”

[Illustration:  Why cannot you be silent also?]

Those are the words that are for ever in the mouths of us all.

Unhappy human kind, let this address itself to you.  I hear nothing but the echoing murmur of trifling complaints.  Whoever, in like case, believes himself the hated of the gods, let him consider Hecuba,[13] and he will render thanks for their clemency.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 13:  Hecuba was the wife of Priam, King of Troy.  When that city fell Hecuba was chosen by Ulysses as part of his share in the spoils.  She was changed into a dog for avenging the death of her son whose eyes had been put out by the King of Thracia, and she finally ended her life by casting herself into the sea.]

XXXIII

THE RABBITS

(Book X.—­No. 15)

When I have noticed how man acts at times, and how, in a thousand ways, he comports himself just as the lower animals do, I have often said to myself that the lord of these lower orders has no fewer faults than his subjects.

Nature has allowed every living thing a drop or two from the fount at which the spirits of all creatures imbibe.

I will prove what I say.

If at the hour when night has scarcely passed and day hardly begun I climb into a tree, on the edge of some wood, and, like a new Jupiter from the heights of Olympus, I send a shot at some unsuspecting rabbit, then the whole colony of rabbits, who were enjoying their thyme-scented meal with open eyes and listening ears upon the heath, immediately scamper away.  The report sends them all to seek refuge in their subterranean city.

But their great fright is soon over; the danger quickly forgotten.  Again I see the rabbits more light-hearted than ever coming close under my death-dealing hand.

Does not this give us a picture of mankind?  Dispersed by some storm, men no sooner reach a haven than they are ready again to risk the same winds and the same distress.  True rabbits, they run again into the death-dealing hands of fortune.

Let us add to this example another of a more ordinary kind.

When strange dogs pass through any spot beyond their customary route there is a grand to-do.  I leave you to picture it.  All the dogs of the district with one idea in their heads join forces, barking and biting, to chase the intruder beyond the bounds of their territory.