On a delightful sunny day, a small fluffy cloud drifted through the vast blue sky. This cloud was known as Fluffy, a name very much befitting it. However, Fluffy was not just any ordinary cloud; it was a little cloud who was still pondering what it wanted to be when it grew up. Being small, it had a whole lot of options to choose from!
As Fluffy floated along, it gazed eagerly down at the people in the park below. The children were enjoying a good laugh, and some were even pointing up towards Fluffy, perhaps admiring its shape. Fluffy felt fairly flattered and thought, “I must try and look my very best for them.”
But what cloud shape should it take?
As Fluffy looked more closely, a little girl playing with a kite cried out: “Oh! Mamma! Look at that funny face up in the sky!” Fluffy was delighted! There was no shape nicer for a cloud to take, so it quickly tried hard to poke out into lips and a nose. So busy was it trying that by the time it had finished, the little girl had lost sight of the face and began to gaze at a galloping horse instead. Now this seemed much more fun, so Fluffy hurriedly made four prongs to his edges, and two sharp prongs to his head, and then stood still with excitement. But this shape was so much disliked by the tiny boy who had first pointed out Fluffy’s face, that he turned his back sulkily upon it.
Fluffy felt a little offended. “Maybe,” thought it, “I am not clever, but anyhow I will show those children what is the right way to look at me.” So it proceeded to put itself into its own proper shape—Fluffy. But the children took no notice, and meanwhile, unnoticed by them, there came a curious wind out of the east which blew hard. Little Fluffy had never known such winds before. It bent him down almost on to the tip of one point, and turned him all sorts of odd shapes, and piled some bits upon the top which was not at all in Fluffy’s way of growing. Then it did a most absurd thing of all, for it took hold of half the cloud and flung it miles away over the hills. Fluffy was very angry. It felt half ruined. However, fortunately for it, the sun began to shine as hard possible, and Ben the gardener looked up and saw Fluffy, and said to his wife, “It will be fine to-morrow.” So Fluffy began to feel happy again, for the sun put it in good humour with the wind, because it makes happy hours in the day, and this was one of them. It put on fresh edges and lifted itself up into the sky till it was as wide and long—only not so thick, of course—as a thinking man’s mind. And would have stayed on, but that the parts which the wind had blown away came drifting back, and Fluffy had to spread out all its little arms and legs again to take them in.
Now clouds generally like to be nice and close as soon as they can, they like to keep their little ones together. Once when it had been doing its best to do so, a stranger large cloud that happened to be just passing said, “I never saw such a little nasty cloud, with bits from parts unknown.”
Now Fluffy wanted to see that large nasty stranger cloud as much as possible, but it could not help feeling rather sorry for poor Fluffy.
“I have never been right to myself all what I’ve been,” said Fluffy, “and didn’t become ‘unput together’ till this afternoon.”
After many experiences, Fluffy became aware that it can try to know many things at once, and, by the help of the sun and wind combine, in some manner, in itself, all that it has seen. This answered Fluffy of the advice which he had received, if we use the saying of W. Weirdle’s wise bear.
“This,” thought Fluffy, “is a very simple answer and I like it best.”
“Yes, yes,” groaned the wind, “but that bear; and that’s how we all feel very stupid sometimes for being lectured at by that bear. One thing, however, I shall tell you, do not stray any more from what you are.”
This consideration put Fluffy much in mind, he its grandfather were lost in the blue mist of the long might ago when the earth and the sky were a torrent a little while back. Since which period the earth had broken and withered little eddies around, till at last the long chill rains about been washed away—not to make sits of the many layers of rubbish, broken stones, eh? Clouds, however, are so mild, they need feel all, wasted as far as they with might have been in haste as a whirlwind.
“I shall go home again this afternoon,” said Fluffy. Fluffy turned and drifted back over the spot: towards the coming evening it guided back, and when standing still down at its home, it would. And being turned with the sun to the tips of a joint some whites, it thought, beside those bright dirty-dirty whites into the colours of a sheet of plain covering he would climb till hoary spirits like itself should makes them look of the tremulous earth on which they fell. But this indeed has nothing to do with little Fluffy; we only mentioned him for justification’s substance.
Ever since he has regularly managed to mend himself before he gets to his place near nightly there, where he fine rest and meditation. And now mind often passes by and tells the world what it calls, “Characters.”