The Eagle

                                                 

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen.  The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, believing that he was a barnyard chicken.  He scratched the earth for worms and insects.  He clucked and cackled.  And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old.  One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky.  It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor.  “He belongs to the sky.  We belong to the earth– we’ are all chickens.”
So the eagle lived and he died a chicken, for that’s what he chose to believe he was.