Summary
Highlights
A city mouse visits his friend, a country mouse, who lives in a cozy, small, but warm nest. The country mouse prepares a simple dinner of garden food. Meanwhile, the city mouse boasts about the amazing city life, his twenty-room house, and exotic foods like Chinese food, urging the country mouse to visit.
That night, the country mouse dreams of living in the city, eating at fancy restaurants, saying fancy things, buying fancy hats, and trying Chinese food. Enchanted by the dream, she decides she wants to live in the city too.
The next morning, the country mouse agrees to visit the city mouse. Upon arriving, she is amazed by the enormous twenty-room house. However, the city mouse reveals their actual living space is a basement with many other mouse families, not one of the grand rooms upstairs.
The city mouse leads her upstairs for dinner, where a feast of delicious foods, including Chinese food, awaits. Just as they begin to eat, a cat with sharp teeth and claws crashes onto the table, chasing them off. They hide in a hole, trapped, until the cat leaves.
After the cat leaves, they return to find all the food gone, eaten by the human residents. The country mouse, disillusioned, immediately packs her bag. She declares she wants to go home to the country, realizing the city life isn't as wonderful as it seemed and asks for help to call a taxi.
The fable concludes with the moral: sometimes other people's lives are not as great as they make you believe.