“What are you going to do with them?” politely asked the bear.
“Do you have to wear them all the time?” quacked the goose.
“Oh, no, he is going to lend them to the tortoise sometimes,” snickered the monkey. The fox, who had almost tied himself into a knot in his efforts to throw a proper shadow, did not take the trouble to notice them.
“One tail is enough for me,” screamed the peacock, as he spread his shimmering fan and danced until he got so pigeon-toed he had to stop.
“My grandmother—who was nine hundred if she was a day—told me it wasn’t any fun to be better than anybody else,” said the parrot, snapping his bill. “One got so dreadfully lonely.”
But the fox only turned his head first to one side and then to the other in his struggle to find out how he looked. He strained and tugged until his tongue hung out and water dripped from his jaws, he tried so hard to move his stiff tails that his muscles cracked, and all the time he kept backing out, out, until he stood on the very tip edge of the high bank. But he was so busy looking for his shadow that he never thought about anything else, and suddenly the dirt crumbled under his feet and without a moment’s warning he tumbled backward into the river with such a mighty splash and splutter that all the animals got a shower.
When he hit the water he struck out with all four of his feet, for he was a good swimmer, but the tails of gold were like iron weights upon his back, and he only churned the water into foam as he kicked and snorted. Then with one great struggle that sent the ripples flying in every direction, he shot down like a torpedo to the very bottom of the deep river. And he never came up again! The animals shrieked and ran to the river bank.
The stork, who had been standing on one leg all the morning, took down his other in a hurry and hopped over into the rushes, where he stretched his long neck as far as ever he could and peeped into the muddy stream, the monkey wrapped his tail around a bush to keep from falling as he screwed up one eye and tried in vain to see what had become of the fox, Luxuriant-Thick-Mud-Master toppled off the bank in his fright and made another splash, a fish, not knowing what to make of so much noise, jumped out in the grass and turned a somersault, the owl snapped both his glassy eyes, but saw nothing, the bullfrog dived down as far as he could and came up coughing and choking, but the fox, golden tails and all, was gone forever.
“He made a plunge where the stream was deep
And saw too late his blunder,