The Doctrine of This Fable is according to Reason and Nature. People that
are not Allow’d to be Sharers with their Companions in Good Fortune, will
hardly ever agree to be Sharers in Bad. An Open, and an Honest Candor of
Mind carries a Body Safe and Dry through all Ways and Weathers: Whereas
in shifting and Shuffling, a Man puts himself off his Guard; and the same
Rule that serves him at One time, will not serve him at Another; Men are
willing enough to have Partners in Loss, but not in Profit; and ’tis not
the Traveller alone that cries _[I] have found a Purse of Gold_, and
then Changes his Note upon _Hue and Cry_, and says _[WE] shall be hang’d
for’t_; but ’tis the Course of All People of _Intrigue_, to give Every
thing two Faces, and to Deal with the World, as the Spark did with the
Oracle. The Bird shall be Dead or Living, which himself Pleases.
To Emprove the Moral yet a little farther, we have a Thousand
Disappointments in the Ordinary Course of Life, to Answer This in the
Fable. Many a Man finds this Purse of Gold in a Mistress, in a Bottle,
in an Office, and in All other the vain Satisfactions of this World:
And what’s the End on’t at last, but when he has Compass’d his Longing,
Gratify’d his Appetite, or, as he fancies, made his Fortune perhaps: He
grows presently Sick of his Purchase; His _Conscience_ is the _Hue_ and
_Cry_ That pursues him, and when he reckons upon it that he has gotten a
_Booty_, he has only caught a _Tartar_. The _Bag of Money_ burnt the Poor
Fellow’s Fingers in the very Taking of it up.