The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

5-7 min read
13 pages

The city mouse and the country mouse, Aesop's fable to read aloud. One has plain food and quiet; the other has cake and footsteps in the dark.

A mouse lived in a bank at the edge of a barley field. She had a store of grain, a bed of dry moss, and a door that nobody in the world had ever used except herself.

Her cousin came out from the city to visit. He arrived in the evening, shook the dust of the road off his coat, and looked round her home with his head tipped to one side.

For supper she gave him barley, a piece of dry root, and two blackberries she had been keeping since the week before. They ate outside on the step, where you could hear the wind moving in the barley and nothing else at all.

«This is very good of you,» said the city mouse carefully. «Do you eat like this every day?» «Yes,» said the country mouse. «Then come and see how I eat,» he said.

So she went back with him, a long way, to a tall house in a street of tall houses, and down through a crack behind the wall into a room so large that she could not see the far end of it.

The table above them had been laid for a party and then left. There was cake on it, and cheese, and a pear cut into pieces, and cream standing in a jug, and crumbs of things she had no name for at all.

«Start with the cake,» said the city mouse. She started with the cake. It was the best thing she had ever eaten in her life, and she said so with her mouth full, and he looked pleased.

Then there were footsteps on the boards outside the door, and the city mouse said «run» very quietly, and they ran, and the crack behind the wall was suddenly a very long way off.

They sat in the dark inside the wall while something heavy walked about the room, back and forth, and stopped, and walked again. «What is that?» she whispered. «The dog,» he said. «He comes through twice an evening. You get used to it.»

When it went quiet they climbed back up. She had got as far as the cream when a door opened somewhere and a cat came through it — not hurrying, the way cats come into rooms that belong to them.

They spent a good deal of that night behind the wall. In between they went back up for the cake, and it was still the best cake in the world, and she noticed, somewhere around the third time, that she had stopped tasting it.

In the morning she thanked him and said she was going home. «But the food,» said the city mouse, who could not understand it. «It's wonderful food,» she said. «I just can't hear anything while I'm eating it.»

She walked back to the barley field and slept all afternoon with her door standing open, and for supper she had barley and a dry root, and she ate every bit of it sitting perfectly still.

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Text source: Fable by Aesop (6th century BC), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

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