The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs

2-3 min read
9 pages

The goose that laid the golden eggs, Aesop's fable to read aloud. One gold egg a day is not fast enough for the man who owns her.

A man and his wife kept a goose, an ordinary grey goose in an ordinary yard, and one morning they found in her nest an egg of solid gold.

They could not believe it, and they took it to the town and sold it, and came home better off than they had ever been in their lives.

The next morning there was another one.

And the morning after that, and the morning after that. One gold egg a day, every day, and within a year the yard had a new fence and the house had a new roof and there was money in a box under the bed.

But a day is a long time to wait when you have got used to it. The man began going out to the nest before dawn, and standing there, and looking at the goose.

«There must be a great lump of gold inside her,» he said to his wife. «All of it, together. Why should we take one egg a day out of a goose who is full of it?»

His wife said that they had enough. He said that nobody has enough.

So he took the goose and cut her open, and inside there was exactly what is inside a goose, and no gold at all.

He stood in the yard for a long while with the thing in his hands. Then he went in, and there was no egg the next morning, or the morning after, or ever again.

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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.

Where «The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs» comes from and who wrote it down

The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs

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