Once upon a time there lived a man who wanted to please his friend and show him the greatest hospitality he could. He invited him to his house for dinner, setting a magnificent table. When he and his friend had had a good lunch and sat down to rest before dinner, the owner said:
- Maybe we should drink a little wine in the evening to disperse the rigidity of our thinking and stimulate the acuity of our feelings?
His guest happily agreed. The owner had only one bottle of wine in the cellar, although it was very good and expensive. He told his guest about this and sent his son for wine.
His son suffered from severe squint, which is why he saw all objects doubled. After some time, he returned from the basement empty-handed and said:
- Father, in our basement there is not one bottle, but two. Which one should I bring you for dinner?
Ashamed that the guest might think that he did not want to put everything he had on the table, and fearing that he would guess about the boy’s squint, the father could not find anything better than to say:
- If there are two bottles there, break one and bring us the other one here.
The boy, of course, hit one bottle with a stone, imagined that he had broken both, and burst into tears. And the owner and guest were left without wine in the evening.
The guest thought that the owner's son was an idiot, while he simply suffered from squint. And the poor boy sat huddled in the corner of the closet, crying bitterly and inconsolably because he had broken two of his father’s bottles with one blow.
The real reason for the destruction of the bottle was the owner’s pride in his own hospitality. After all, all this happened solely because the owner was afraid that if he admitted to the guest that his son suffered from squint and saw objects in double quantities, he would not believe him and would think that this was an empty excuse not to put a second bottle of wine on the table.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru