Then one day there really was a wolf, but when the boy shouted they didn't believe him.

This line comes from the fable commonly known as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” traditionally attributed to Aesop. In the story, a shepherd boy repeatedly amuses himself by raising false alarms that a wolf is attacking the flock. The villagers rush to help, only to discover each time that he has lied. Eventually a wolf truly appears; the boy cries out again, but his earlier deceptions have destroyed his credibility, so no one responds in time. The fable circulated for centuries in oral and written collections, often used in moral instruction about honesty and the social consequences of repeated falsehoods.

The sentence captures the fable’s turning point: when a real danger arrives, the boy’s words no longer carry weight. Its central idea is that trust is a form of social capital—easy to squander, difficult to regain. Repeated lying doesn’t merely make others skeptical of a particular claim; it can make them discount the speaker altogether, even when the truth is finally told. The line also implies a communal cost: the villagers’ disbelief is understandable self-protection after being manipulated, yet it leaves the community vulnerable when genuine threats arise. The fable thus links personal integrity to collective safety.

1) “But one day a wolf really did come, and when the boy cried out, no one believed him.”
2) “Then a wolf came indeed; and though the boy shouted, the villagers thought he was joking.”
3) “At last the wolf appeared for real, but the boy’s cries brought no help, for they did not believe him.”