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[Illustration: THE WOLF, THE FOX, AND THE APE

(See page 153)]




Æsop’s Fables

    A Version for
    Young Readers

    _By_
    J. H. Stickney

    Illustrated by
    Charles Livingston Bull

    Ginn and Company

    Boston—New York—Chicago—London
    Atlanta—Dallas—Columbus—San Francisco

[Illustration]




    COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY GINN AND COMPANY
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
    321.11


    THE Athenæum Press
    GINN AND COMPANY·PROPRIETORS·BOSTON·U.S.A.




PREFACE


THE good fortune which has attended the earlier edition of this book
is a proof that there is less occasion now than formerly to plead the
cause of fables for use in elementary schools. And yet their value
is still too little recognized. The homely wisdom, which the fables
represent so aptly, was a more common possession of intelligent people
of a generation or two ago than it is at the present time. It had
then a better chance of being passed on by natural tradition than
is now the case among the less homogeneous parentage of our school
children. And there has never been a greater need than now for the
kind of seed-sowing for character that is afforded by this means. As
in the troubled times in Greece in Æsop’s day, twenty-five centuries
ago, moral teaching to be salutary must be largely shorn of didactic
implications and veiled with wit and satire. This insures its most
vital working wherever its teaching is pertinent. To be whipped,
warned, sh