Once upon a time there lived a gentleman who loved nothing in the world except horses. That’s all he dreamed of, how to get horses like no one else had.
Once this great horseman went to the market and met a man with a cart of cucumbers. Barin asks:
-What are you carrying there?
And man, don’t be a fool, take it and say:
“I’m bringing eggs from which you can hatch foals like no one else has ever had.”
The master asks to show them to him. The man showed. The master chose one better from these eggs and asked:
- How much is this egg? The man answers:
- Three hundred rubles!
The master takes out his wallet and counts out three hundred.
The man drove on, then turns around and says:
“Put the egg in the pot, sit on it yourself and don’t get off until you hatch it.” If anyone asks anything, then answer only one word: “Whoa!”
With that they parted and went their separate ways.
The master arrived home and immediately sat down to hatch the foal. The lady asks why he sits for so long, and the master mutters: “Whoa!” The lady was angry at such a stupid answer, but, knowing her husband well, she decided to leave him alone - let him sit, they say - and ordered food and drink to be served to him and did not say another word.
The master sat and sat on the cucumber for either three or four weeks, but he didn’t sit for anything. He completely withered away from sitting and finally couldn’t stand it - he was tired of sitting over the pot. He grabbed it, ran into the forest and in his anger threw the pot of cucumber into a pile of dead wood. And then, out of nowhere, a hare jumped out of the heap, lifted its tail, and into the forest? The master shouts after him:
- Stallion, stallion!
And the hare heard the noise and ran away even faster until he disappeared into the forest.
The master goes home, he is sad. On the way, he again meets the guy from whom he bought the cucumber for three hundred rubles. The master complains to the peasant, saying that he was about to hatch an unprecedented foal, but he, the fool, threw it away.
The man listened to the end and answered:
“This is what always happens to fools who can’t even sit a foal.”
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru