kith and
kin of Flim the Goose told him the what and the which of this?"

"Never has the such of this which been put here this way to me by
anybody."

Flim the Goose held up his fingers and said, "I don't talk to you with
my fingers crossed."

And so Fire the Goat began to explain to Flim the Goose all about the
show, the hippodrome, the mastodonic cyclopean spectacle which was
passing on the east sky in front of the sun coming up.

"People say they are shadows," began Fire the Goat. "That is a name, a
word, a little cough and a couple of syllables.

"For some people shadows are comic and only to laugh at. For some
other people shadows are like a mouth and its breath. The breath comes
out and it is nothing. It is like air and nobody can make it into a
package and carry it away. It will not melt like gold nor can you
shovel it like cinders. So to these people it means nothing.

"And then there are other people," Fire the Goat went on. "There are
other people who understand shadows. The fire-born understand. The
fire-born know where shadows come from and why they are.

"Long ago, when the Makers of the World were done making the round
earth, the time came when they were ready to make the animals to put
on the earth. They were not sure how to make the animals. They did not
know what shape animals they wanted.

"And so they practised. They did not make real animals at first. They
made only shapes of animals. And these shapes were shadows, shadows
like these you and I, Fire the Goat and Flim the Goose, are looking at
this morning across the booming rollers on the east sky where the sun
is coming up.

"The shadow horse over there on the east sky with his mouth open, his
ears laid back, and his front legs thrown in a curve like harvest
sickles, that shadow horse was one they made long ago when they were
practising to make a real horse. That shadow horse was a mistake and
they threw him away. Never will you see two shadow horses alike. All
shadow horses on the sky are different. Each one is a mistake, a
shadow horse thrown away because he was not good enough to be a real
horse.

"That elephant with no head on his neck, stumbling so grand on six
legs--and that grand camel with two humps, one bigger than the
other--and those cows with horns in front and behind--they are all
mistakes, they were all thrown away because they were not made good
enough to be real elephants, real cows, real camels. They were made
just fo