Once upon a time, there was a small village. At the center of this village was a well. The well had been there for years, and every villager drank from it, because there was no other source of water nearby.
One day, a bottle maker moved into the village, and set up a shop to sell his wares, with a shingle over his door saying `bottles’. The villagers were curious, and one by one, every villager stopped by. They each asked the bottler, “What good are bottles?” and to each of them the bottler replied, “They are good for holding water.”
“But,” the villagers responded, “We do not need bottles to hold water. We drink it from the bucket in the well.”
“You shouldn’t drink water from a bucket,” the bottler said. “You’re liable to get sick.”
“We have drunk water from this bucket for many generations,” the villagers said, “and it has done us no harm.”
So the bottler sold no bottles. Then one morning, when the villagers awoke, they found that the shingle over the bottler’s door read `water’. Curious, they visited him one by one. In the bottler’s shop, all his bottles were filled with water. Each villager asked him, “Why would we buy your water, when we can drink water from the well for free?”
And to each, the bottler replied, “Because the well is poisoned.”
The villagers said, “We have drunk water from this well for many generations, and it has done us no harm.”
The next day, the villagers went about their business, each of them stopping now and then to drink water from the well. By evening, everyone in the village was sick except for the bottler.
“How is it that you are not sick?” they asked the bottler.
“Because I do not drink water from the well, for it is poisoned, as I told you. Now surely you believe me.”
After that, the villagers bought their water from the bottler, and much of the money the poor villagers had went to the bottler, until one day he had no more bottles of water left to sell. When he had no more water to sell, the bottler took down the shingle that said water' and replaced the shingle that said bottles.’
The villagers asked him, “What good are empty bottles?”
The bottler replied, “You will need to go out and find clean water. And when you do, you will need bottles to carry it in.”
So the villagers spent the very last of their money buying all of the bottler’s bottles. The next day, the bottler moved to a new village with a clean well.