The stork sat in his nest on the roof of the farm-house. He clapped with his beak, and the Mother-stork clapped with hers.
"How high up they live!" thought the Toad. "If one could only get as high as that!"
In the farm-house lived two young students; the one was a poet and the other a scientific searcher into the secrets of nature. The one sang and wrote joyously of everything that God had created, and how it was mirrored in his heart. He sang it out clearly, sweetly, richly, in well-sounding verses; while the other investigated created matter itself, and even cut it open where need was. He looked upon God's creation as a great sum in arithmetic—subtracted, multiplied, and tried to know it within and without, and to talk with understanding concerning it; and that was a very sensible thing; and he spoke joyously and cleverly of it. They were good, joyful men, those two.
"There sits a good specimen of a toad," said the naturalist. "I must have that fellow in a bottle of spirits."
"You have two of them already," replied the poet. "Let the thing sit there and enjoy its life."
"But it's so wonderfully ugly," persisted the first.
"Yes, if we could find the jewel in its head," said the poet, "I too should be for cutting it open.'
"A jewel!" cried the naturalist. "You seem to know a great deal about natural history."
"But is there not something beautiful in the popular belief that just as the toad is the ugliest of animals, it should often carry the most precious jewel in its head? Is it not just the same thing with men? What a jewel that was that Aesop had, and still more, Socrates!"
The Toad did not hear any more, nor did she understand half of what she had heard. The two friends walked on, and thus she escaped the fate of being bottled up in spirits.