According to the moral of the Aesop fable The Milkmaid and The Pail, what should you never count before they're hatched?
The milkmaid and her pail of her commercial activities. A different version was versified by Jefferys Taylor as "The Milkmaid" in his "Aesop in Rhyme" (1820). As in Bonaventure des Périers' telling, the bulk of the poem is given over to the long reckoning of prices. It ends with the maid toppling her pail by superciliously tossing her head in rejection of her former humble circumstances. The moral on which Taylor ends his poem is 'Reckon not your chickens before they are hatched’, where a later collection has 'Count not...' The proverb fits the story and its lesson so well that one is tempted to
The milkmaid and her pail The milkmaid and her pail The Milkmaid and Her Pail is a folktale of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1430 about interrupted daydreams of wealth and fame. Ancient tales of this type exist in the East but Western variants are not found before the Middle Ages. It was only in the 18th century that the story about the daydreaming milkmaid began to be attributed to Aesop, although it was included in none of the main collections, and it does not appear in the Perry Index. There is a theme common to the many different stories of this type that involves poor persons daydreaming