Hi Enya, Mark, and Cindy,
Here is my fairy tale. It was good that I did one too. Now I realize how hard it is to write a fairy tale. But I bet you can write one anyway. It just may take some time. The words broken into syllables and in blue are important and you should look them up. We will review them in class. I will also ask you to tell me the moral of this story.
The Story of the Loyal Cat and Dog
Once upon a time, there was an old dog who had served his mast-er very well for years. He had guarded his master's house and protected the family from thieves. He had, everyone agreed, been the most of loyal of dogs. But now he was getting old, tired, and slow. Mostly, he liked to sleep by the fire and remember the days of his youth, when his bark was feared as much as his bite.
The dog’s best friend was the family cat, who had been a first-rate mouse catcher for many years. But she, too, was getting old and tired. Sometimes, mice would walk right by her nose without the cat even waking up from her dreams.
The dog and the cat both believed that all their de-vo-tion had earned them food and shelter for the rest of their days, even if they didn’t work so hard anymore. And when their master’s first wife was alive, their future was, indeed, safe. But then the first wife died suddenly, after she choked on a peach pit, and their master took a new and much younger wife.
The new wife didn’t much care about the dog and cat’s years of loy-al-ty. She just knew that the dog and cat slept and ate a lot. One night the dog and cat heard the woman suggesting to her husband that they put the dog and cat into a sack and throw them in the river. The husband didn’t want to do it. He kept saying that the dog and cat had been loyal and worked hard for many years. But his wife convinced him that they could get new and younger pets that would be of better service.
Fearing for their lives, the dog and cat packed up some beef scraps and fish bones and planned to leave the house they had known for their entire lives. However, the night before they were getting ready to run away, a pair of robbers tried to climb in the front window. When the cat and dog saw them, they, at first, thought they would do nothing to warn the husband and wife.
But old habits are hard to break. The loyal dog and cat couldn’t just let the robbers take their master’s goods. So the dog bit the leg of one robber, who started howl-ing. Meanwhile the cat jumped up and dug her claws deep into the hands of the second robber, who screamed in pain. Within minutes, the master of the house was out of bed and yelling at the robbers to get out of his house. Only when the robbers started to run out the door did the cat and dog let go of them. But their efforts had taken all their energy and they both lay on the floor ex-haus-ted and breathing hard.
When the master of the house, saw the two of them lying there out of breath and pant-ing, he felt very bad, and he said to his wife, “Never again, tell me to treat my old friends with such meanness and disrespect. If it were not for them, we could have lost what little we have. From now on, you must treas-ure them, as I do. If you don’t agree to care for them, you should go back to your family and live in your old house. I don’t want someone so un-grate-ful living in mine. “ The wife, sensing her husband meant what he said, agreed, and from that day on the cat and the dog were well treated and much petted by both husband and wife, who understood the value of the loyalty they had shown.