Two men went up a mountain trail that became very narrow. When there was only room to continue single file the first man said to the second man "I will go first, in case the path ends abruptly. That way both of us need not perish."
The second man said "Oh no you don't; being ahead of me, you may dislodge a stone that will fall on my head and kill me. I will go first!"
And so the second man went first, and, indeed, fell off when the narrow path ended abruptly. The first man turned back and found another way up the mountain.
Misplaced caution is as fatal as misplaced confidence.
A servant was given an arid piece of ground to cultivate by his cruel master.
"If you can't produce lush green food on this plot by the end of the summer I will know you are a worthless servant, and will toss you out to the pigs!" he said spitefully.
The servant tried his best, but nothing would come out of that sterile plot, no matter how many buckets of water he carried to it. The field seemed to grow only stones.
One day he was sitting under a shade tree, reviewing his troubles and wondering how to get out of them when another man joined him under the tree, who also looked worried.
"What is thy problem, friend?" asked the servant kindly.
"My garden plot will produce a goodly crop this year" said the man, "yet I know the beasts of the field and forest will come nibble it all up ere I can harvest it. This is what grieves me."
"Perhaps a stone wall would help?" offered the servant.
"Most certainly it would -- but I have neither the time nor materials to build one" replied the man.
"Let us help each other, then" said the servant briskly.
And so the servant toiled all summer on the man's garden wall, taking the stones from his own dismal plot. When the harvest was in, the man gratefully gave the servant several bushels of ripe green produce for his help.
When the servant showed his master the bushels of fine foodstuffs, and truthfully told him they were the result of that miserable piece of ground, the master was so enraged he burst his seams and collapsed, a dead man. His servant continued to harvest stones from his little plot and build stone walls for his neighbors, and did very well for himself indeed.
Help another to help yourself.
A crafty merchant told a foolish young man he had a magic pine cone that could turn stones into gold. Eager to obtain such a miraculous object, the foolish young man paid the merchant all of his carefully saved up wages for the past year, then took the pine cone home to his parents.
When they heard his story they roundly berated him as a gullible fool. His father took the pine cone from him and tossed it on a pile of stones in a cart out in the street that the father sold for paving roads.
"See!" he shouted at his son. "Nothing happens!"
Then he covered the cart with a blanket and the whole family had supper and went to bed.
That night the king's treasurer, driving a load of gold bars in a cart covered with a blanket to the treasury, stopped next to the foolish young man's house for a whet at a nearby tavern. He returned some hours later made careless by drink and accidentally took the cart with the paving stones instead of his own cart full of gold.
The next morning when the father took the blanket off what he supposed was his own cart, he was astonished to find dozens of gleaming gold bars. He rushed back into the house and congratulated his son on his wonderful actions the day before. Now they would all be rich and never lack for anything.
And so it was. The young man, who had spent the night repenting of his arrant foolishness, had vowed to never be taken in again. So he loaned out all that great wealth to those who had good surety at reasonable interest rates and continued to make money until the day he died.
As for the drunken treasurer, when he discovered he had stones instead of gold for the treasury, he quickly made up a tale about imps who had transformed the gold into stone overnight to tell to the king. The king, more of a fool than the young man who had bought the pine cone, quickly had all the gold in the treasury dumped into the river.
"There" said the king smugly to himself. "Let those accursed imps try to transform my gold into stones now!"
When one fool departs, another takes his place.
