The milkmaid and her pail

Other variants include Bidpai's "The Poorman and the Flask of Oil",[3] "The Barber's Tale of his Fifth Brother" from The 1001 Nights[4] and the Jewish story of "The Dervish and the Honey Jar".

[6] In a Castilian form it is told under the title "Of what happened to a woman called Truhana" in Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor (1335), illustrating the lesson that you should 'Confine your thoughts to what is real'.

[8] The charm of La Fontaine's poetic form apart, however, it differs little from the version recorded in his source, Bonaventure des Périers' Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis (1558).

[11] Titled there "The country maid and her milk pail", it is prefaced with the sentiment that 'when men suffer their imagination to amuse them with the prospect of distant and uncertain improvements of their condition, they frequently sustain real losses by their inattention to those affairs in which they are immediately concerned'.

The story is briefly told and ends with the pail being dislodged when the girl scornfully tosses her head in rejection of all the young men at the dance she was to attend, wearing a new dress to be bought with the proceeds of her commercial activities.

The moral on which Taylor ends his poem is 'Reckon not your chickens before they are hatched', where a later collection has 'Count not...'[13] The proverb fits the story and its lesson so well that one is tempted to speculate that it developed out of some earlier oral version of the fable, but the earliest recorded instance of it is in Thomas Howell's New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets (1570).

[14] The idiom used by La Fontaine in the course of his long conclusion is 'to build castles in Spain', of which he gives a few examples that make it clear that the meaning he intends is 'to dream of the impossible'.

Avoiding that may well be what Bonaventure des Périers intended in telling his story too, but in the English versions the moral to be drawn is that to bring a plan to completion more than dreaming is required.

[17] Jean-Honoré Fragonard also depicts a fall in his picture of the fable (1770),[18] although in this case the girl has tumbled forward and the smoke of her dreams spills from the pitcher at the same time as the milk.

[22] The Spanish Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida painted his "The Milkmaid" in 1890 and portrays a pensive girl seated on a flowering bank with her bucket overturned beside her.

[26] The most celebrated statue of this subject is the bronze figure that the Russian artist Pavel Sokolov (1765–1831) made for the pleasure grounds planned by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia at his palace of Tsarskoye Selo.