Aesop’s Fables : The Ailing Deer



The Ailing Deer

Let us enjoy reading this one of Aesop’s Fables of The Ailing Deer .

A sick stag was lying in a corner, helpless and weak.

He was glad he had collected enough grass to last him through his period of illness.

But suddenly, to his dismay, he saw that some friends who had come to see him were helping themselves to the food.

"Please go away," he said. "My illness will not kill me but your greed certainly could."

Moral: Thoughtless friends are more harmful than enemies.




The short story is a literary genre. It is usually fictional, narrative prose and tends to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction. These stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point. The history of this kind of stories dates back to the oral story-telling traditions. Modern trend in them emerged as their own genre in the early 19th century. They tend to be less complex than novels. Usually, a short story will focus on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of characters and covers a short period of time.

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