d
the vastness of the big world.

How weak and helpless she was,--scarcely more important than one of the
wild-flowers she had used to tread on when she was n't being hurried
through space by the means of--she knew not what. To be sure, she was
pretty; but then they had been pretty too, and she had stepped on them,
and they had died, and she had gone away and no one had ever known.

"Oh, dear!" she thought, "it would be the easiest thing in the world
for me to be killed (even if I _am_ pretty), and no one would know it
at all. I wonder what is going to happen? I wish I had n't come."

"Don't be afraid!" said the familiar voice, suddenly. "We promised to
take care of you. We are truth itself. Don't be afraid!"

"But I _am_ afraid," insisted Marjorie, in a petulant way, "and I 'm
getting afraider every minute. I don't know where I 'm going, nor how
I 'm being taken there, and I don't like it one bit. Who are you,
anyway?"

For a moment she received no reply; but then the voice said: "Hush!
don't speak so irreverently. You are talking to the emissaries of a
great sovereign,--his Majesty the Sun."

"Is _he_ carrying me along?" inquired Marjorie presently, with deep
respect.

"Oh, dear, no," responded the voice; "we are doing that. We are his
vassals,--you call us beams. He never condescends to leave his
place,--he could not; if he were to desert his throne for the smallest
fraction of a second, one could not imagine the amount of disaster that
would ensue. But we do his bidding, and hasten north and south and
east and west, just as he commands. It is a very magnificent thing to
be a king--"

"Of course," interrupted Marjorie; "one can wear such elegant clothes,
that shine and sparkle like everything with gold and jewels, and have
lots of servants and--"

"No, no," corrected the beam, warmly. "Where did you get such a wrong
idea of things? That is not at all where the splendor of being a king
exists. It does not lie in the mere fact of one 's being born to a
title and able to command. That would be very little if that were all.
It is not in the gold and jewels and precious stuffs that go to adorn a
king that his grandeur lies, but in the things which these things
represent. We give a king the rarest and the most costly, because it
is fitting that the king should have the best,--that he is worthy of
the best; that only the best will serve one who is so great and
glorious. They mean nothing in th