Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Robert Burns drove a plough through a field mouse’s nest. He could see that the mouse had worked hard to build the nest, and he had destroyed all that work in an instant. As an apology, he wrote the poem titled, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, With The Plough,” containing the following stanza:
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”
