28 FAVOURITE FABLES.

FABLE: XO

THE VAIN JACKDAW.

A certain Jackdaw was so proud and ambitious that,
not contented to live within his own sphere, he picked up the
feathers which fell from the Peacocks, stuck them among his
own, and very confidently introduced himself into an assembly
of those beautiful birds. They soon found him out, stripped
him of his borrowed plumes, and falling upon him with their
sharp bills, punished him as his presumption deserved.

Upon this, full of grief and affliction, he returned to
his old companions, and would have flocked with them
again; but they, knowing his late life and conversation,
industriously avoided him, and refused to admit him into
their company; and one of them, at the same time, gave him
this serious reproof: ‘If, friend, you could have been con-
tented with your station, and had not disdained the rank
in which nature had placed you, you had not been used so
scurvily by those amongst whom you introduced yourself, nor
suffered the notorious slight which we now think ourselves
obliged to put upon you.”’