The One-Eyed Doe / The Stag With One Eye
The One-Eyed Doe (Joseph Jacobs's Version)
A Doe had had the misfortune to lose one of her eyes, and could not see any one approaching her on that side. So to avoid any danger she always used to feed on a high cliff near the sea, with her sound eye looking towards the land. By this means she could see whenever the hunters approached her on land, and often escaped by this means. But the hunters found out that she was blind of one eye, and hiring a boat rowed under the cliff where she used to feed and shot her from the sea. “Ah,” cried she with her dying voice,
“You cannot escape your fate.”
(From the book The Fables of Aesop: Selected, Told Anew, and Their History Traced by Joseph Jacobs, done into pictures by Richard Heighway — Public Domain)
The One-Eyed Doe (George Fyler Townsend's Version)
A Doe blind in one eye was accustomed to graze as near to the edge of the cliff as she possibly could, in the hope of securing her greater safety. She turned her sound eye towards the land that she might get the earliest tidings of the approach of hunter or hound, and her injured eye towards the sea, from whence she entertained no anticipation of danger. Some boatmen sailing by saw her, and taking a successful aim, mortally wounded her. Yielding up her last breath, she gasped forth this lament: “O wretched creature that I am! to take such precaution against the land, and after all to find this seashore, to which I had come for safety, so much more perilous.”
(From the book Three Hundred Æsop’s Fables Literally Translated from the Greek by the Rev. George Fyler Townsend, M.A. — Public Domain)
The Stag With One Eye (V. S. Vernon Jones's Version)
A Stag, blind of one eye, was grazing close to the sea-shore and kept his sound eye turned towards the land, so as to be able to perceive the approach of the hounds, while the blind eye he turned towards the sea, never suspecting that any danger would threaten him from that quarter. As it fell out, however, some sailors, coasting along the shore, spied him and shot an arrow at him, by which he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, he said to himself, "Wretch that I am! I bethought me of the dangers of the land, whence none assailed me: but I feared no peril from the sea, yet thence has come my ruin."
Misfortune often assails us from an unexpected quarter.
(From the book Aesop's Fables: A New Translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton and illustrations by Arthur Rackham — Public Domain)
Title Here (Milo Winter's Version)
(From the book The Æsop for Children, with pictures by Milo Winter — Public Domain)
Title Here (J. H. Stickney's Version)
(From the book Æsop’s Fables: A Version for Young Readers by J. H. Stickney, illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull — Public Domain)
Title Here (Samuel Croxall's Version)
(From the book Æsop's Fables, Embellished with One Hundred and Eleven Emblematical Devices. Translator: Samuel Croxall — Public Domain)
Title Here (Thomas Bewick's Version)
(From the book The Fables of Æsop, and Others, with designs on wood by Thomas Bewick — Public Domain)
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