He sleeps; but meantime the water goes on running in torrents. And see! harm is here now in full force. The millstone stands still; the mill will not work. Our Miller bestirs himself, groans, troubles himself, and thinks how he can keep the waters back. While he is here on the dam, examining the leak, he observes his fowls coming to drink at the river.
"You stupid, good-for-nothing birds!" he cries. "I don't know where I'm to get water, even when you are out of the question; and here you come and drink the little that remains."
So he begins pelting them with faggots. he do himself by this? What good did Without a fowl left, or a drop of water, he went back home.
I have sometimes remarked that there are many proprietors of this kind—and this little fable was composed as a present for them—who do not grudge thousands scent on follies, but who think that they maintain domestic economy by collecting their candle-ends, and are ready to quarrel with their servants about them. With such economy, is it strange that houses rapidly fall utterly to pieces?
[It is said that Krilof's own ideas of economy were, for the most part, of the very kind he satirizes here. "Returning from a party with me one evening," says his friend Gniedich, "Krilof wouldn't pay what I did for a good carriage, saying it was wasting money. So he walked half
