"Then have the goodness to hold your tongue."
And the tom-cat inquired: "Can you raise your back, or purr, or throw out sparks?"
"No."
"Then you have no business to have any opinion at all, when rational people are talking."
The duckling sat in a corner very much out of spirits, when in came the fresh air and the sunshine, which gave him such a strange longing to swim on the water, that he could not help saying so to the hen.
"What's this whim?" said she. "That comes of being idle. If you could either lay eggs or purr, you would not indulge in such fancies."
"But it is so delightful to swim about on the water!" observed the duckling, "and to feel it close over one's head when one dives down to the bottom."
"A great pleasure, indeed!" quoth the hen. "You must be crazy, surely! Only ask the cat—for he is the wisest creature I know—how he would like to swim on the water, or to dive under it. To say nothing of myself, just ask our old mistress, who is wiser than anybody in the world, whether she'd relish swimming and feeling the waters close above her head."
"You can't understand me!" said the duckling.