Character Index | Proverb Index
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| Character Index | Proverb Index |
Eliot/Jacobs Version
One hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the thing to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour."
Townsend version
A famished fox saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them. At last she turned away, hiding her disappointment and saying: "The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought."
L'Estrange version
There was a time, when a fox would have ventur'd as far for a bunch of grapes as for a shoulder of mutton, and it was a fox of those days, and of that palate, that stood gaping under a vine, and licking his lips at a most delicious cluster of grapes that he had spy'd out there; he fetched a hundred and a hundred leaps at it, 'till at last, when he was as weary as a dog, and found that there was no good to be done; Hang 'em (says he) they are as sowr as crabs; and so away he went, turning off the disappointment with a jest.
Moral
'Tis matter of skill and address, when a man cannot honestly compass what he would be at, to appear easy and indifferent upon all repulses and disappointments.
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Tom Simondi, All Rights Reserved