Æsop's Fables (V. S. Vernon-Jones)/The Nightingale and the Swallow

by Aesop

THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE SWALLOW

A SWALLOW, conversing with a Nightingale, advised her to quit the leafy coverts where she made her home, and to come and live with men, like herself, and nest under the shelter of their roofs. But the Nightingale replied, “Time was when I too, like yourself, lived among men: but the memory of the cruel wrongs I then suffered makes them hateful to me, and never again will I approach their dwellings.”

The scene of past sufferings revives painful memories.