fun of me.
You are now cruel as well as foolish! Go away! I will ask your advice no
more."

"I told you you would not believe me," cried the lark.

"I believe everything I am told," persisted the
caterpillar,--"everything that it is REASONABLE to believe. But to tell
me that butterflies' eggs are caterpillars, and that caterpillars leave
off crawling and get wings and become butterflies!--Lark! you do not
believe such nonsense yourself! You know it is impossible!"

"I know no such thing," said the lark. "When I hover over the
cornfields, or go up into the depths of the sky, I see so many wonderful
things that I know there must be more. O caterpillar! it is because you
CRAWL, and never get beyond your cabbage-leaf, that you call anything
IMPOSSIBLE."

"Nonsense," shouted the caterpillar, "I know what's possible and what's
impossible. Look at my long, green body, and many legs, and then talk to
me about having wings! Fool!"

"More foolish you!" cried the indignant lark, "to attempt to reason
about what you cannot understand. Do you not hear how my song swells
with rejoicing as I soar upwards to the mysterious wonder-world above?
Oh, caterpillar, what comes from thence, receive as I do,--on trust."

"What do you mean by that?" asked the caterpillar.

"ON FAITH," answered the lark.

"How am I to learn faith?" asked the caterpillar.

At that moment she felt something at her side. She looked round,--eight
or ten little green caterpillars were moving about, and had already made
a hole in the cabbage-leaf. They had broken from the butterfly's eggs!

Shame and amazement filled the green caterpillar's heart, but joy soon
followed. For as the first wonder was possible, the second might be so
too.

"Teach me your lesson, lark," she cried.

And the lark sang to her of the wonders of the earth below and of the
heaven above. And the caterpillar talked all the rest of her life of the
time when she should become a butterfly.

But no one believed her. She nevertheless had learned the lark's lesson
of faith, and when she was going into her chrysalis, she said:--

"I shall be a butterfly some day!"

But her relations thought her head was wandering, and they said, "Poor
thing!"

And when she was a butterfly, and was going to die she said:--

"I have known many wonders,--I HAVE FAITH,--I can trust even now for the
wonder that shall come next."

A CHILD'S DREAM OF A STAR

BY CHARLES DICKENS

There was once a c