There was once a cottager and his wife who kept a most wonderful goose. Every morning, without fail, the bird settled into her nest of straw and laid a single egg of pure, shining gold.
At first the couple could scarcely believe their fortune. They carried the egg to market, sold it for a fine price, and returned home with more coin than they had ever held in their lives. The next morning brought another egg, and the morning after that another still, until the little cottage grew warm with comforts it had never known.
But wealth, once tasted, has a way of sharpening the appetite rather than satisfying it. The more the couple gathered, the more impatient they became. One golden egg a day, they grumbled, was a slow and miserly trickle. Surely, they reasoned, a bird that could lay such treasure must be lined with gold from beak to tail.
“Think of it,” said the husband. “If we open her up, we shall have all the gold at once, and need never wait upon a single morning again.”
His wife, greedy as he, agreed. And so, that very evening, they took the goose and killed her, and cut her open with trembling, hopeful hands.
Inside they found nothing at all. She was, in every part, exactly as any other goose — flesh and feather and bone, and not one speck of gold. There would be no more golden eggs now, not one, for the bird that had laid them lay lifeless upon the table.
The couple sat in the ruins of their fortune and wept, but the weeping mended nothing. In grasping for everything at once, they had thrown away the steady blessing they already possessed.
Those who have plenty yet want more often lose the little they are given.