Have you ever seen a stag with its graceful, branching horns?
There is a fable told of a stag who went to a pool to drink, and seeing
himself reflected in the water, he said: "Dear me, how beautiful are my
horns; what a nice, graceful appearance they give to me! My legs are
quite slender, and not at all beautiful, but my horns are handsome."
When the hunters came, however, the stag found that his slender legs
were very useful, for by means of them he could run away from his
enemies, and if it had not been that his horns caught in the branches of
a tree and held him fast, he might have escaped.
You see how foolish it was of the stag to =boast= about his fine horns;
and we are just as foolish when =we= boast of anything that we have, or
of anything we can do.
Boasting often leads to untruth, as in (Story Lesson 11) "The Three
Feathers". It is always vulgar to pretend that we are better than our
neighbours, and people who boast generally try to make one believe that
they =are= cleverer or richer or better than somebody else. Let us be
like the modest violet, who hides her beauty, rather than be boastful
and foolish, as the stag was.
(Blackboard.)
It is Foolish and Vulgar to Boast.