The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse: An Aesop Fable

Abstract

I had time between trains in Washington, DC, and went bumming around the station. To my surprise, I found a used book shop. I decided to plunge into their children's books and actually found four fable books! And I paid a whopping $5.25 for them all. Here is one of my finds. A check on the author led me to our collection's one other volume by her, a TH in the same format but translated into Spanish by another writer. I hope to find more in the series. Like that "La liebre y la tortuga," this is a sixteen-page pamphlet. It comes ready with an inside front-cover with blanks to be filled in indicating that the book belongs to a specific state and, e.g., school district. The booklet was to be issued to a specific student in a specific year. Nothing there is filled in in this copy. Wold's art is delightful from the start, as the town mouse sneaks out a grate on a porch to visit her cousin in the fields outside a village. In a throwback, the "pantry" in the town house is neither a room nor a refrigerator but rather a cabinet filled with all sorts of food, and the mice have a grand time inside it. The cat first appears as a shadow. This country mouse is decisive: "I would rather eat my plain corn and barley in peace, than BE a feast myself." Well told and well illustrated!