The Cock and the Pearl

A cock was once strutting up and down the farmyard among the hens, when suddenly he saw something shining in the straw. ‘Ho! Ho!’ said he, ‘That’s for me!’, and soon rooted it out from beneath the straw. What did it turn out to be but a pearl that by some chance had been lost in the yard? ‘You may be a treasure to men that prize you, but for me I would rather have a single barleycorn than a peck of pearls’, said the cock.

Moral: Precious things are for those that can prize them.

(Aesop, The Cock and The Pearl).

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