Chapter 35
There was once a man who owned a horse and an ass. Whenever he took trips, he tended to spare the horse and put all the burden on the ass’s back. Since the ass had been ailing for some time, he asked the horse one day to relieve him of part of his load while on a trip.
“If you take a fair portion of the load,” he said, “I’ll soon get well again. But if you refuse to help me, this weight will kill me.”
The horse, however, told the ass to get on with it and to stop troubling him with his complaints. The ass jogged on in silence, but he was soon overcome by the weight of his burden and dropped dead in his tracks, just as he had predicted. Consequently, the master came up, untied the load from the dead ass, put it on the horse’s back, and made him carry the ass’s carcass in addition.
“That’s what I get for my bad disposition!” the horse groaned. “By refusing to pull my own weight, I now have to carry all of it along with some dead weight in the bargain.”
Laziness always begets an added burden.
