Character Index | Proverb Index
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| Character Index | Proverb Index |
A Doe had had the misfortune to lose one of her eyes, and could not see any one approaching her on that side. So to avoid any danger she always used to feed on a high cliff near the sea, with her sound eye looking towards the land. By this means she could see whenever the hunters approached her on land, and often escaped by this means. But the hunters found out that she was blind of one eye, and hiring a boat rowed under the cliff where she used to feed and shot her from the sea. "Ah," cried she with her dying voice, "You cannot escape your fate."
Townsend version
A doe blind in one eye was accustomed to graze as near to the edge of the cliff as she possibly could, in the hope of securing her greater safety. She turned her sound eye towards the land that she might get the earliest tidings of the approach of hunter or hound, and her injured eye towards the sea, from whence she entertained no anticipation of danger. Some boatmen sailing by saw her, and taking a successful aim, mortally wounded her. Yielding up her last breath, she gasped forth this lament: "O wretched creature that I am! to take such precaution against the land, and after all to find this seashore, to which I had come for safety, so much more perilous."
L'Estrange version (A Stag With One Eye)
A one-eyed-stag that was affraid of the huntsmen at land, kept a watch that way with t'other eye, and fed with his blind side still toward an arm of the sea, where he thought there was no danger. In this prospect of security, he was struck with an arrow from a boat, and so ended his days with this lamentation: Here am I destroy'd, says he, where I reckon'd my self to be safe on the one hand; and no evil has befal'n me, where I most dreaded it, on the other.
Moral
We are lyable to many unlucky accidents that no care or foresight can prevent: but we are to provide however the best we can against them, and leave the rest to providence.
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Tom Simondi, All Rights Reserved