Krilof and His Fables/The Ape

A Peasant at the dawn of day went toiling over his bit of ground behind his plough. So hard did our peasant toil that the sweat poured off him like hail. Our Moujik was a thorough workman, and therefore everybody who went past called out to him, "Well done! Good luck to you!"

This made an Ape jealous. Praise is tempting: how can one help longing for it? So the Ape took it into his head to work, got hold of a log, and just did plague himself over it. The Ape's mouth becomes full of trouble. Now he lifts up the log, and now embraces it, first this way, then that; ​now he drags it along, now he rolls it about. The sweat runs off the poor creature in a stream. At last, groaning and gasping, he can scarcely draw his breath.

And yet, in spite of all this, he does not hear a soul give him an atom of praise. And no wonder, my dear! You take a world of pains, but what you do is utterly useless.

[This fablе is suspiciously like one of Sumarokof's, called "The Ploughman and the Monkey," in which the man gets praised, while the monkey, who is toiling away with a stone, gets nothing but a scolding, and cannot make out why.]