swarms with rascals, and no sensible man can imagine them capable of reformation.
Caress a rascal as you will,
He was and is a rascal still:
All salve- and sweating-treatments fail
To take the kink from doggy's tail.
Yet roguery can be defeated; for by its nature it is stupid.
Since scamp and sneak and snake
So often undertake
A plan that does not thrive,
The world wags on, alive.
Having made provision for security, in the realization that
A man to thrive
Must keep alive,
one faces the necessity of having money. The Panchatantra, being very wise, never falls into the vulgar error of supposing money to be important. Money must be there, in reasonable amount, because it is unimportant, and what wise man permits things unimportant to occupy his mind? Time and again the Panchatantra insists on the misery of poverty, with greatest detail in the story of "Gold's Gloom" in the second book, never perhaps with more point than in the stanza:
A beggar to the graveyard hied
And there "Friend corpse, arise," he cried;
"One moment lift my heavy weight
Of poverty; for I of late
