This tale shows the folly of eating everything you happen to fancy. Consider, moreover, the danger of such a course to your neighbour's wife.
LXXIX.
"I should like to climb up you, if you don't mind," cried an ivy to a young oak.
"Oh, certainly; come along," was the cheerful assent.
So she started up, and finding she could grow faster than he, she wound round and round him until she had passed up all the line she had. The oak, however, continued to grow, and as she could not disengage her coils, she was just lifted out by the root. So that ends the oak-and-ivy business, and removes a powerful temptation from the path of the young writer.
LXXX.
A merchant of Cairo gave a grand feast. In the midst of the revelry, the great doors of the dining-hall were pushed open from the outside, and the guests were surprised and grieved by the advent of a crocodile of a tun's girth, and as long as the moral law.
"Thought I 'd look in," said he, simply, but not without a certain grave dignity.
"But," cried the host, from the top of the table, "I did not invite any saurians."
"No—I know yer didn't; it's the old thing, it is: never no wacancies for saurians—saurians should orter keep theirselves to theirselves—no saurians need apply. I got it all by 'eart, I tell yer. But don't give yerself no distress; I didn't come to beg; thank 'eaven I ain't drove to that yet—leastwise I ain't done it. But I thought as 'ow yer'd need a dish to throw slops and broken wittles in it; which I fetched along this 'ere."