youngest one sat up and watched. Now he had seen something beautiful.
Was it going to come true? Its light was like the song of the
nightingale in the leaves overhead: it glowed, and throbbed, and grew
strong, flooding the whole place where it lay.

Soon, in the silence, he heard a little wail of grief: "Why have they
carried me away here," sighed the glow-worm, "out of the tender grass
that loves the ground?"

The littlest Jackdaw listened with all his heart. Now something at last
was going to become true, without scratching his legs and making him
feel as though crumbs were in his bed.

A little winged thing came flying down to the green light, and two
voices began crying together--the glow-worm and its mate.

"They have carried you away?"

"They have carried me away; up here I shall die!"

"I am too weak to lift you," said the one with wings; "you will stay
here, and you will die!" Then they cried yet more.

"It seems to me," thought the Jackdaw, "that as soon as the beautiful
becomes true, God does not intend it to be for us." He got up softly
from among his brothers. "I will carry you down," he said. And without
more ado, he picked it up and carried it down out of the nest, and laid
it in the long grass at the foot of the tree.

Overhead the nightingale sang, and the full moon shone; its rays struck
down on the little Jackdaw's head. For a bird that is not a nightingale
to wake up and find its head unprotected under the rays of a full moon
is serious: there and then he became moon-struck. He went back into bed;
but he was no longer the same little Jackdaw. "Oh, I wish I could sing!"
he thought; and not for hours could he get to sleep.

In the morning, when the family woke up, the beautiful and the true was
gone. The father Jackdaw thought he must have swallowed it in his sleep.

"If you did," said his wife "there'll be a smell of burnt feathers
before long!"

But the littlest Jackdaw said, "It came true, and went away, because it
was never intended for us."

Now some days after this the old Jack-daw again came carrying something
that shone like an evening star--a little spike of gold with a burning
emerald set in the end of it. "And what do you think of that?" said he
to his wife.

"I daren't come near it," she answered, "for fear it should burn me!"

That night the little Jackdaw lay awake, while all the others slept,
waiting to hear the green stone break out into sorrow, and to see if its
winged