It is never safe to be wiser than one's friends

John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911)

1894

Illustration for "The Jackal and the Pea-hen" in Tales of the Punjab: Told by the People, facing p.196.

This is a fable worthy of Aesop, in which the boastful pea-hen, who hah buried some plum-stones after eating the fruit, taunts the jackal whose similarly buried meat-bone has, of course, not yielded any harvest. The two creatures had once been friends, but this is too much for the jackal, and he gobbles her up in a fit of peevish rage (and hunger).

Scanned image and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

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