III.

And he began again to beat him, but Anadan said: “Have pity on me, and I will groom thy horses.” But Arkirie said: “No, my son, thou hast acted towards me like a man who, leading an ass on the road, tied it with a loose rope. The ass broke the rope and ran away. On his way he met the wolf, and the wolf said unto him: ‘Happy journey unto thee, ass!’ And the ass replied: ‘Unhappy it will be, for the man tied me up with a rotten rope, so that I broke it and ran away, and he did not tie me with a good rope.’” And Arkirie continued to beat him until he died (M. Gaster, Jrnl. Royal Asiatic Society, 1900, p. 309).

A larger number of animal fables are found in the other versions of Ahikar, thus in the Armenian (Story of Ahikar, edited by Rendel Harris Conybeare, etc., second edition, Cambridge, 1913, p. 51), and in the Slavonic (ibid. pp. 21 and 22).