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"The others can do so much and so well," said Æsop, "that there's nothing left for me to do." "Will you be honest and faithful if I buy you?" "I shall be that whether you buy me or not." "Will you promise not to run away?"

"Did you ever hear," answered Æsop, “of a bird in a cage that promised to stay in it?"

Xanthus was so much pleased with the answers that he bought Æsop.

Some time afterward, Xanthus, wishing to give a dinner to some of his friends, ordered Æsop to furnish the finest feast that money could buy.

The first course Esop supplied was of tongues cooked in many ways, and the second of tongues and the third and the fourth. Then Xanthus called sharply to

sop:

"Did I not tell you, sirrah, to provide the choicest dainties that money could procure?"

"And what excels the tongue?" replied Esop. "It is the great channel of learning and philosophy. By this noble organ everything wise and good is accomplished."

The company applauded Æsop's wit, and good humor was restored.

"Well," said Xanthus to the guests, "pray do me the favor of dining with me again to-morrow. And if this is your best," continued he turning to Æsop, "pray, to-morrow let us have some of the worst meat you can find."

The next day, when dinner-time came, the guests were assembled. Great was their astonishment and great the anger of Xanthus at finding that again nothing but tongue was put upon the table.

"How, sir," said Xanthus, "should tongues be the best of meat one day, and the worst another?" "What," replied Æsop, "can be worse than the tongue? What wickedness is there under the sun that it has not a part in? Treasons, violence, injustice, and fraud are debated and resolved upon by the tongue. It is the ruin of empires, of cities, and of private friendships."

At another time Xanthus very foolishly bet with a scholar that he could drink the sea dry. Alarmed, he consulted Æsop.

"To perform your wager," said Esop, "you know is impossible, but I will show you how to evade it."

They accordingly met the scholar, and went with him and a great number of people to the seashore, where Æsop had provided a table with several large glasses upon it, and men who stood around with ladles with which to fill the glasses.

Xanthus, instructed by Esop, gravely took his seat at the table. The beholders looked on with astonishment, thinking that he must surely have lost his senses.

"My agreement," said he, turning to the scholar, "is to drink up the sea. I said nothing of the rivers and streams that are everywhere flowing into it. Stop up these, and I will proceed to fulfill my engagement."

It is said that at one time when Xanthus started out on a long journey, he ordered his servants to get all his things together and put them up into bundles so that they could carry them.

When everything had been neatly tied up, Esop went to his master and begged for the lightest bundle. Wishing to please his favorite slave, the master told Æsop to choose for himself the one he preferred to carry. Looking them all over, he picked up the basket of bread and started off with it on the journey. The other servants laughed at his foolishness, for that basket was the heaviest of all.

When dinner-time came, Æsop was very tired, for he had had a difficult time to carry his load for the last few hours. When they had rested, however, they took bread from the basket, each taking an equal share. Half the bread was eaten at this one meal, and when supper-time came the rest of it disappeared.

For the whole remainder of the journey, which ran far into the night and was over rough roads, up and down hills, Esop had nothing to carry, while the loads of the other servants grew heavier and heavier with every step.

The people of the neighborhood in which Æsop was a slave one day observed him attentively looking over some poultry in a pen that was near the roadside; and those idlers, who spent more time in prying into other people's affairs than in adjusting their own, asked why he bestowed his attention on those animals.

"I am surprised," replied Esop, "to see how mankind imitate this foolish animal."

"In what?" asked the neighbors.

"Why, in crowing so well and scratching so poorly," rejoined sop.

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