ey
clapped their hands in ecstacy and terror. "Ah! ah! what a battle will
there be!"

The Strong Man went into his own hills and gathered there many great
rocks and trunks of trees. It was strange to see him erect upon a peak
of the mountains and hurling these things at the moon. He kept the air
full of them.

"Fat moon, come closer," he shouted. "Come closer, and let it be my
knife against your knife. Oh, to think that we are obliged to tolerate
such an old, fat, stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing moon. You are ugly as
death, while I--Oh, moon, you stole my beloved, and it was nothing, but
when you stole my beloved and laughed at me, it became another matter.
And yet you are so ugly, so fat, so stupid, so lazy, so
good-for-nothing. Ah, I shall go mad! Come closer, moon, and let me
examine your round, grey skull with this club."

And he always kept the air full of great missiles.

The moon merely laughed, and said: "Why should I come closer?"

Wildly did the Strong Man pile rock upon rock. He builded him a tower
that was the father of all towers. It made the mountains to appear to be
babes. Upon the summit of it he swung his great club and flourished his
knife.

The little men in the valley far below beheld a great storm, and at the
end of it they said: "Look, the moon is dead." The cry went to and fro
on the earth: "The moon is dead!"

The Strong Man went to the home of the moon. She, the sought one, lay
upon a cloud, and her little foot dangled over the side of it. The
Strong Man took this little foot in his two hands and kissed it. "Ah,
beloved!" he moaned, "I would rather this little foot was upon my dead
neck than that moon should ever have the privilege of seeing it."

She leaned over the edge of the cloud and gazed at him. "How dusty you
are. Why do you puff so? Veritably, you are an ordinary person. Why did
I ever find you interesting?"

The Strong Man flung his knife into the air and turned back toward the
earth. "If the young philosopher had been at my elbow," he reflected,
bitterly, "I would doubtless have gone at the matter in another way.
What does my strength avail me in this contest?"

The battered moon, limping homeward, replied to the Strong Man from the
Hills: "Aye, surely. My weakness is in this thing as strong as your
strength. I am victor with ugliness, my age, my stoutness, my laziness,
my good-for-nothingness. Woman is woman. Men are equal in everything
save good fortune. I envy you not."