For a long time, the residents of Shilda could not get enough of their town hall and sat in it from morning to night. Luckily for them, it never rained until the fall, and therefore the hole in the roof did not prevent them from making many important decisions.
But then the gentle summer passed, and the sun often began to hide its cheerful face behind gray clouds - winter was approaching, harsh and unmerciful, and more and more often it began to sprinkle in the Jester’s Chamber.
The Schildburgers did not like this, and they decided that since a person under an umbrella does not get wet, then they will not get wet if they repair their roof. They re-tiled the roof, believing that once in the summer they were basking in the sun, as their mother had told them to do.
Because they are lazy, even in winter they need to sit near the stove so that their hands and feet do not freeze.
But they repaired the roof and went back to the ward. So what would you think? The town hall was as dark as before.
Again the Schildburgers sat with torches on their heads in the dark town hall and held council. Finally it was the turn of one Schildburger, who never considered himself a complete fool, to say: so as not to offend his modesty, I will not mention his name.
Well, this Schildburger stood up and said that it would be best if they did as his godfather advised. With the permission of the high assembly, he immediately left the chambers to go call his godfather.
While he was groping his way along the wall (the light on his head had long gone out!), he noticed a strip of light in one place: the wall must have been poorly caulked here. Here he took a deep breath, remembered his past wisdom, which, like everyone else, he had abandoned, quickly returned to the room and began:
- Well, neighbors, now allow me to say a word.
And when he was allowed, he continued:
“I’ll say this: for example, some kind of habit will develop in me and will displace what I got from nature. An amazing thing is that bad habits especially quickly supplant natural ones and themselves, as it were, become second nature to a person. So it is with us. After all, until now we were people with intelligence and understood what was what. And now we have adopted clownish habits, and they have become so to our liking that they are successfully banishing those written down from the family. People are quite reasonable, we have now become jesters and do not want to part with our buffoonery for any benefits. We are in such trouble and we just can’t understand what our mistake is, why are we still sitting in the dark? And no one guessed that we forgot to make windows at our town hall. You can’t make yourself look like buffoons right away. This is very rude. This only suits real fools.
The Schildburgers got scared here—how did they make a mistake? It turned out as if they were completely offended by God! They were ashamed to even look at each other. That’s why they immediately, without any meetings and
delays began to break through the walls of the town hall, and not a single one was found who would refuse a separate window, about which they could later say: “Here it is, my window, and only the light that is in it.”
Very soon the town hall was ready, all that was missing was the internal structure, and we will talk about that later.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru