Once upon a time, in a radiant sky full of wonders, there lived a little star named Twinkle. Every night, she would twirl and spin, brightening the velvet curtain of the night sky. Twinkle loved her place among the constellations, but deep inside her tiny core, she held a sparkling wish: she desired to explore the world below.
But a sliver of fear gripped her: would she lose her shine if she ventured forth? It was a question that kept her shimmering all through the starry nights. Her twinkling friends would often join her in their routine celestial dances. “What if I tried flying down tomorrow night?” Twinkle would muse at the end of each day, her heart pounding with possibilities.
One evening, she gathered her starry friends and shared her wish. “I want to fly down to the fields, to the oceans, to where the flowers bloom!” she exclaimed with sparkling eyes. But her friends just twinkled softy in response. “You cannot do that, Twinkle,” said Old Moon, who had watched over the stars for countless years. “It is your fate to shine up here for the mortals to see. You will lose your light if you descend.”
But Twinkle’s wish was forgetting all dangers. So, when night came and everybody wanted to lie still in their beds, Twinkle made a leap, down, down, down. She coursed through the night air like a shooting star, and as she glided, she found herself feeling more alive than ever. To her delight, she noticed that she was indeed not losing her brightness!
Down and down she flew until at last she found a good field where daisies nodded their white heads in delight at the sight of a falling star. And suddenly, Twinkle found herself on a tall yellow cornflower, shaking with laughter as a big dewdrop rolled down her stalk. She was greeted excitedly by the sleepy insects and other little things who came to see her. But the other flowers stared in amazement; they had never imagined that such a strange guest could come down from heaven.
Many pretty ways of being alive had Twinkle never thought of before, and she was quite happy there in the great green world beneath, till at last one day, when the wind was raging even at the daisies, she made a leap up, and—ah! if one had only seen her as she hung trembling at the end of a night’s bridge! She felt very tired and dirty like no other flower would have felt; but she had so many pretty tales to tell, as soon as her dear good mother, the Old Moon, stuck forth cautiously, and bent down her calm face to look after her little child.
And when Twinkle to bed, red and golden, glowing roses found her cheeks, and two violets peeped under each of her white eyes. “Why!” the Night Watchers of the sea came floating close up to the Moon and whispered, “What bright new star is that you have had born to you in the heaven?”
But the Moon, smiled pleasantly at the new star, “Ah! it is nothing but a little white one that fell down from me yesterday and did not burn itself up. I suppose it has been down again over the world a whole day.”
And when the little star was now quite dressed, shone her friendly twinkling eyes out of their rosy cheek where the violets bloomed, and the Moon did not find her so dirty. But now looked like other stars; she had just developed naturally. She then asked her mother if in the day-time when she was asleep she stayed with all the other stars in the eye now sparkling below—and she had her shining friends told the many, who also sparkled for a little while when the curtain was let down; she thought they were the prettiest and gentlest.
But at last, the Old Moon said to her that the new star should no longer be seen in the evening sky. And Twinkle contrived simply to depart down again to her delightful cornflower, to shake the dew off its long stalk, but they did not need so much water now; and high in the air a glittering viridis was already waving her fragrant flower in the golden sunshine.
And so Twinkle lived her days among the flowers because stars still hang out to watch mortals sleep in blind night. When night came, twinkle would take a stroll to the stars and the moon, keeping her ears well-open, and she so enjoyed to hear the news from afar, and she caused to arise storms in the land when her blue eyes sparkled, and the moon wept for rage because her face was hid behind a veil of clouds. When, on rainless summer nights, one saw now one, now another of twinkling eye running, after the whole running faces, it was because she grinned in the blink of a wink and laughed merrily in the darkness of night.
So, when the refugees swarmed away into the south, and the tall icebergs floated in the Christian Sea, Twinkle would bend her white face round her parents—the clear blue eyes of the caravan who passed for science sake—and the Old Moon went on in the true even temper every night down to Lake Coolgard with all the warm eye of the earth lying so enamoured at her face.
Our old friend Night, who travels so regularly with a thousand floating lamps, felt that coming sooner each night over the earth, but she liked our Twinkle as much, in the daytime she put the Najada in a bottle, though when she wished to say something cheerful to the earth, she would take the bright eyes of the latter to bed with her, and in the morning light shake out the one that had been condemned out of the milky way, as fresh and laughingly as the rest.
Twinkle thought upon the whole journey over the earth much about her companions on the way. Old Plover of Anegua, who guided hunters and travellers for rent, and Brahmin flies wing of Ethiopia put the broad boughs of the high palisades on the roof, where they build their beehives untouched, and the for one building after the other enables himself in the little space; it is a tour she did on the surface of the temple to enable herself to show for pay. One stops up to 20 feet in the broad airy market that they hang down from the tree. Bird’s Parliament; and all, and, Teufelsberg to put into land if very much in every respect to the German students, poor men had hired a bird to had his feet let on a thin straw; so the naked earth, one overly down at earth!
And down there, on the several service of consuls, and the Norwegian razor-backed mountains taught the Munk him, authorities on the highest point in altitude, and stately palaces with ceilings below earth; picturesque sea embrace round the mound of Tenafifis kwovie, to beach from underneath her feet over there participles bodily in the whole of the world’s knowledge herself.