had a son. The
father of the husband lived with his son and daughter-in-law happily
for many years. But when he grew very old, he became very feeble. Every
time he ate at the table, he always broke a plate, because his hands
trembled so. The old man's awkwardness soon made his son angry, and
one day he made a wooden plate for his father to eat out of. The poor
old man had to eat all his food from this wooden plate.

When the grandson noticed what his father had done, he took some
tools and went down under the house. There he took a piece of board
and began to carve it. When his father saw him and said to him,
"What are you doing, son?" the boy replied to him, "Father, I am
making wooden plates for you and my mother when you are old."

As the son uttered these words, tears gushed from the father's
eyes. From that time on, the old man was always allowed to eat at
the table with the rest of the family, nor was he made to eat from
a wooden plate.

MORAL: Do unto others as you want them to do unto you.

Notes.

A Pampango variant of these stories, entitled "The Old Man, his Son,
and his Grandson," and narrated by Eutiquiano Garcia of Mexico,
Pampanga, has been printed by H. E. Fansler (p. 100). Mr. Garcia
says that he heard the story told by his father at a gathering
of a number of old story-tellers at his home during the Christmas
vacation in 1908. The tale has every appearance of having long been
naturalized in the Islands, if not of being native. It is brief,
and may be reprinted here:--

In olden times, when men lived to be two or three hundred years old,
there dwelt a very poor family near a big forest. The household had but
three members,--a grandfather, a father, and a son. The grandfather
was an old man of one hundred and twenty-five years. He was so old,
that the help of his housemates was needed to feed him. Many a time,
and especially after meals, he related to his son and his grandson his
brave deeds while serving in the king's army, the responsible positions
he filled after leaving a soldier's life; and he told entertaining
stories of hundreds of years gone by. The father was not satisfied
with the arrangement, however, and planned to get rid of the old man.

One day he said to his son, "At present I am receiving a peso daily,
but half of it is spent to feed your worthless grandfather. We do
not get any real benefit from him. To-morrow let us bind him and take
him to the woods, and leave him there