trees near the cottage dwelt
a most beautiful Firefly. The light she bore with her was dazzling, yet
soft and palpitating, as the evening star, and she seemed a single flash of
fire as she shot in and out suddenly from under the screen of foliage, or
like a lamp as she perched panting upon some leaf, or hung glowing from
some bough; or like a wandering meteor as she eddied gleaming over the
summits of the loftiest trees; as she often did, for she was an ambitious
Firefly. She learned to know the Magician, and would sometimes alight and
sit shining in his hair, or trail her lustre across his book as she crept
over the pages. The Magician admired her above all things:

"What eyes she would have if she were a woman!" thought he.

Once he said aloud, "How happy you must be, you rare, beautiful, brilliant
creature!"

"I am not happy," rejoined the Firefly; "what am I, after all, but a flying
beetle with a candle in my tail? I wish I were a star."

"Very well," said the Magician, and touched her with his wand, when she
became a beautiful star in the twelfth degree of the sign Pisces.

After some nights the Magician asked her if she was content.

"I am not," replied she. "When I was a Firefly I could fly whither I would,
and come and go as I pleased. Now I must rise and set at certain times, and
shine just so long and no longer. I cannot fly at all, and only creep
slowly across the sky. In the day I cannot shine, or if I do no one sees
me. I am often darkened by rain, and mist, and cloud. Even when I shine my
brightest I am less admired than when I was a Firefly, there are so many
others like me. I see, indeed, people looking up from the earth by night
towards me, but how do I know that they are looking at me?"

"The laws of nature will have it so," returned the Magician.

"Don't talk to me of the laws of Nature," rejoined the Firefly. "I did not
make them, and I don't see why I should be compelled to obey them. Make me
something else."

"What would you be?" demanded the accommodating Magician.

"As I creep along here," replied the Star, "I see such a soft pure track of
light. It proceeds from the lamp in your study. It flows out of your window
like a river of molten silver, both cool and warm. Let me be such a lamp."

"Be it so," answered the Magician: and the star became a lovely alabaster
lamp, set in an alcove in his study. Her chaste radiance was shed over his
page as long as he continued to read. At a certain