The Hundreth Dove

Imagine this, being bossed around and always being told what to do and when to do it. That is what life was like for the fowler named Hugh in the short story The Hundredth Dove written by Jane Yolen. The fowler is told to go out and get 100 doves for the king because the king was getting married. The fowler thought of how great he would look if he went out and brought back exactly 100 doves for the king. So, he worked as hard as he could to get those 100 doves and his work paid off because he caught those 100 doves and brought them to the king. The main point of this story is to always try your hardest and stay on task, so you can always attempt on doing the right thing.
Talking about the lesson of the story should make you think back to your past when you were assigned to do something and you did it no problem, or back to a time when you were battling to either do the right thing, or the wrong thing. It is always the best choice to do the right thing, even if it is something you don’t really want to do, you will feel way better afterwards. After you do something good you won’t ever want to do something bad again because the feeling from knowing you did something good makes you feel so great about yourself you will always want to have that feeling. Why would you want to do the bad thing if you will just feel scared, mad, and sad afterwards? When you could feel happy and great from doing the right thing. In the story Hugh chooses to do the right thing and brings the 100 birds to the king instead of letting the 100th bird go like it was trying to tell him. He took the right path and felt good after it because he knows what he did was right.
Along with the lesson comes a very good theme. The theme of the story is man vs. himself because the main character, Hugh has to decide whether he wants to let the bird go and get what he is promised from it, or take that bird back to the king with all the other 99 birds. He ends up choosing the right path and bringing back all the 100. His conscience was telling him to let that bird go because he could get stuff from the bird, but his mind was telling him you know the king told you to bring back 100 birds and this is your 100th bird so why would you let it go? He listened to his mind and brought the bird to the king and felt very good about himself because he knows what he did was right.
After hearing about the author’s lesson and theme from the story it was very hard not to focus on the author’s style of writing. The author really has a great writing style. She is very good at having a good lesson put into a good story which makes it very entertaining. If you read a good entertaining book that has a good lesson it is super hard not to learn from it. If you are ever debating on whether you want to do something think of the positives and negatives for each choice. It will help you choose which choice you should make, and it should help you approach to making the right decision and not the wrong one. If it is hard for you to decide what to do sometimes you can even ask a friend or a family member to help to see which they think is right so you can get some positive feedback. But, you should also know that if you would like to feel better in the end the right choice is always and always will be the right way to go.
So, in conclusion this was a great story that had a great lesson. One of the best. People need to always things through a couple of times before they do something. Think about the stuff that we could have if people always thought stuff through and always made the right decisions like even world peace? People would always be doing the right thing and nothing could go wrong. Although, we are human and we do make mistakes, but all people do is look at the mistakes we make and the accomplishments we have. Look at those first. But, what would life be like if we had world peace?