rk, the bull said:

"You are quite welcome, I am sure. I did no more than my duty."

"I take a different view of it, very naturally," replied the man, "and
you may keep your polite acknowledgments of my gratitude until you
receive it. I did not require your services."

"You don't mean to say," answered the bull, "that you did not wish to
cross that fence!"

"I mean to say," was the rejoinder, "that I wished to cross it by my
method, solely to avoid crossing it by yours."

_Fabula docet_ that while the end is everything, the means is
something.

XVIII.

An hippopotamus meeting an open alligator, said to him:

"My forked friend, you may as well collapse. You are not sufficiently
comprehensive to embrace me. I am myself no tyro at smiling, when in
the humour."

"I really had no expectation of taking you in," replied the other. "I
have a habit of extending my hospitality impartially to all, and about
seven feet wide."

"You remind me," said the hippopotamus, "of a certain zebra who was
not vicious at all; he merely kicked the breath out of everything that
passed behind him, but did not induce things to pass behind him."

"It is quite immaterial what I remind you of," was the reply.

The lesson conveyed by this fable is a very beautiful one.

XIX.

A man was plucking a living goose, when his victim addressed him thus:

"Suppose _you_ were a goose; do you think you would relish this sort
of thing?"

"Well, suppose I were," answered the man; "do you think _you_ would
like to pluck me?"

"Indeed I would!" was the emphatic, natural, but injudicious reply.

"Just so," concluded her tormentor; "that's the way _I_ feel about the
matter."

XX.

A traveller perishing of thirst in a desert, debated with his camel
whether they should continue their journey, or turn back to an oasis
they had passed some days before. The traveller favoured the latter
plan.

"I am decidedly opposed to any such waste of time," said the animal;
"I don't care for oases myself."

"I should not care for them either," retorted the man, with some
temper, "if, like you, I carried a number of assorted water-tanks
inside. But as you will not submit to go back, and I shall not consent
to go forward, we can only remain where we are."

"But," objected the camel, "that will be certain death to you!"

"Not quite," was the quiet answer, "it involves only the loss of my
camel."

So saying, he assassinated the beas