The Swan, the Pike, and the Crab.
A Swan, a Crab, and a Pike once undertook to draw a load, and all three yoked themselves to it together. They strain away as if they would burst, but the load makes no way. Its weight would have seemed but a light one for them. But the Swan wings its way into the clouds, the Crab crawls backwards, and the Pike flops into the water. Which of them was in the right, and which in the wrong, it is not for us to decide. But the load remains there to the present day.
["From the very commencement of the alliance between France and England for the protection of Turkey," says Mr. Sutherland Edwards, in his "Russians at Home," "Russia asserted—the wish being, of course, father to the assertion—that such a union could never lead to any practical result. In illustration of this idea, a swan, a crab, and a pike, each in its own way a water-animal, were represented in the act of drawing a load—or rather of attempting to do so, for the load remained stationary. Beneath the engraving was printed the fable (by Krilof) from which the idea was taken."]
