The poor little boy

Once upon a time, there lived a poor little boy and his poor mother. They lived in harsh times where most of the people were poor and were usually hungry.

The mother recognised the importance of education and tried to teach her son as many things as she could. One day, she was cleaning a pair of candle holders. She showed her son to teach him, that to clean candle holders, one could pour hot water into the candle holders to melt the residue wax which would then be easy to remove.

Another one day, he was playing in the field when he found a little puppy who was sick with ears infected with pus that was hard to remove. Out of his compassion to save the puppy, on his own accord, he poured hot water into the ear of the puppy so to melt what he thought was "ear wax". But the puppy was scalded, of course, and died soon after.

The boy cried for a while and apologised to the dead puppy.

When he was done crying, he took a deep breath and realised that the part of the cooked puppy smelled good enough to eat. It had been a while since he and his mother had proper food to eat, let alone any meat, and to bury the puppy would be to feed the corpse to the insects and worms living in the ground anyway.

(sneak.)