ABSTRACT
One day some peasants were having a conversation with their master,and they were talking about sheep and cheese, when one of thepeasants said that he had wanted to bring a present of cheese, but the mice had eaten it all up. So the master, who was rich, fat, and haughty, called him an ass and told him that it wasn’t possible for the mice to have eaten all the cheese. All the others who were there said that the master was right and the peasant, wrong. What more could the poor man say? Well, one thing led to the next, and after a while, the master said that he had taken good care to rub his ploughshares with oil to keep them from rusting but that the mice had eaten off all the points. So now the peasant who had spoken about the mice and the cheese said, “But master, how’s it possible that the mice can eat the points of your plowshare and not my cheese?”
