Once upon a time in the cosmic sky, there was a little star named Lumi. Lumi was not an ordinary star; she was the tiniest star of them all, and due to her small size, she was forbidden by the Entity of Stars to venture forth from her spot in the sky. Yet every night, Lumi gazed enviously down at the Earth and all its miracle-laden inhabitants. She would see children playing beneath the moonlight, animals frolicking in meadows, rivers glistening under starlight, and the beautiful flower gardens in countless backyards.
“I wish I could go to Earth, even just for one day!” she would often lament. And every night, her tears would fall like dew drops on the flowers of Earth, as she longed to meet a human friend and share with someone the joy she felt when she danced through the moonlit sky.
Yet the more she cried, the more luminous she became, the Entity of Stars watched over her and said, “If you wish so much to go to Earth, you surely may, but heed my words! A star fell from the sky once, and when it reached the earth, it broke into a million pieces. You must only descend when the moon is full, and you must return before the break of day, lest you forget your promise. When your time on Earth comes, it will be a new moon and impossible to tell the time of the darkest nights, but once again you will find your way home.”
Lumi listened.
The nights passed, and on—yes, a new moon night! Lumi hurriedly unfastened the golden chain that bound her to her spot in the sky, and down she came toward the lake where so many people were enjoying themselves in boats by candlelight. One candle was burning in the only window of an old-fashioned house where the shutters were lifted.
“That’s the place for me. I will bring love and peace to the room,” said Lumi, looking through the window with all her might. The house was very poor, but there in a little cradle lay a child, and the child’s eyes sparkled in a most peculiar manner.
“He is looking right at me! How beautiful and wise they are!” thought Lumi.
The child was a little boy of six years; but his eyes seemed to reflect the depths of the ocean, so large, so round, and brimming with tears were they. The one candle in the room burnt down away, and the left shoulder of a shirt was hardly visible. It was fully moonlight outside, but the night was oppressive and close.
“Look at the beautiful star, Emma,” said a young man, and Lumi thought that was a lovely name. “Is it not delightful to look at when one feels so sad and distressed?! The star to me seems like a light in the distance, while in reality it is a sea of profitless joy. Do you not see it seems to twinkle for me, for you, for us, now most left alone in the wide world? It must be ours!”
“Shall I blow out the wick of the candle, father?” said a young girl whom Lumi had not noticed at all before. “Then the beautiful light from the star will be much more clearly seen?”
The others might not be able to take it so, but the little star, who was on her way to Earth for the first time, found it very remarkable that they did not wish one another good night. Parents greatly ought to give some explanation to their children as to why one does not do this.
“Do our parents feel so happy with us as we feel with you, dear little sister?” the young man said with a sigh.
Emma shook her head. She had understood her brother all too well.
“I will sing a little hymn now; perhaps that will cheer you.”
And they joined his voice with all the joyous airiness of childhood, and Lumi’s light began to twinkle.
In the stillness of the room, the pilgrims’ hymn rose in sweet melody, and Lumi increased in brightness while her light filled the room. The crucifix above the cradle began to gleam and grow dim like a star.
The song came to an end. The sister kissed the infant and the two retired.
“Good night, brother!” said the little one by the dim light of the star. “Pray the Lord to give us strength to bear bread to-morrow and a nice warm doth.”
Morning came!
The dew was evaporating from the roof and ground, the day was breaking, and good little Lumi hastily sought her place in the sky; for some drops of dew had dried on her skirts, and she was grasping her golden chain while the red streaks of dawn began to spread in the east, one of which glanced up into the heavens like the tongue of a heavenly flame, and would soon consume the little star.
Yesterday, said those whose eyes were turned upwards, “Yesterday there was an increase of light among the stars, and now this morning that aspect has much diminished. A little star seems quite extinct.”
Lumi’s heart didn’t think so. She had seen the light of the sun, and radiant was the earth. The sun has such power that one leaf of the jungle was enlarged in one single day into a beautifully stretched umbrella beneath which children could play. The sun smiled down into the temple gardens, where the fountain danced gladly, while the jungle blossom opened her delicate petals. The sunshine twinkled on the boughs of the trees. Ah! It was really so lovely down on Earth, so very joyful. She would gladly remain here and forget to go home again!
“Heigh-ho! Little star! Heigh-ho! One combatant is gone, and the other will soon be removed,” said something that was greater, and down to the earth began to descend a large rainy cloud, which broke upon the wild ocean in which the vessels foundered and masts and rigging were tossed hither and thither, and crushed together, faster and faster.
“Oh! Help! I am lost!” cried one of the vessels whose bottom had been rent by jagged rocks.
“I can’t bear it!” said a bough torn by lightning, and which could still be found inside a melting glacier six months later.
All could not be communicated, yet most of it was known!
When it became evening once more, the maidens who were to deliver a “dancing espadron” at the “forest-garden” ascended the mountain, and singing as they marched along threw “wild beauties” into the garden of rocks, while in the room, the next to which happened an accident that, fearfully enough, uprooted the mouth of a tree, so that the trunks on the “tip of the icebergs,” which the maidens called “mountains” were swaying ill with the nauseating desire. It made the curtains of cambric flap.
“Samuel, Samuel!” said Emma in a whisper, not more loudly than the diddlebug that employs a stroking feather as a fan and cannot at all understand why it should flap when the air is still.
On the wall a light shone like a candle. Who could this be? A well-known face lay in the heaven near by, who had come too near and had expanded, and the form which the saints in heaven had given him.
The shipwrecked mariner raised his faint voice.
“It is for you and your sister, who is so ill, that I constantly beg for aid. It is too much for both to bear! You will soon forget the calamitous storm, and sleep, when your sister can also rest.”
And Emma appeared to do so. The old too-seven-year-old child had a turn in which she became as ill as a person of fifty; and when I have mentioned this, I have said everything.
How could the little star also forget these people, and in what manner could she repay their courtesy? So many noble existences lived on the earth; but her heart clung to these poor creatures. Ah! she must show her gratitude. She was looking down as the moon rose high in the sky, and the moon that shone brighter, luminously reflected as a polished mirror, fully in the middle of the chest of drawers in the room, which the two were lying in now.
Emma was gazing right into the full moon’s disc.
“This is the silver platter your ancestors brought home from the good black sea!” said a participant in the far-ranged expedition of trade.
“This is the slightly bent mirror of your mother!” thought Emma.
The boy awoke the other, and both of them gazed yet deeper into the polished surface, where there was nothing to see but rows and rows the same as those in affectionate legumes that we often sight. And the brave little star now presented gifts: she laid on sixty-five of the daffodil-glasses arranged in a cardboard box on the table into which the middle boarded cloth required not dipping a single time; the boxes rattled—a kind of hail fell upon the moon at the same moment, which would be repeating the brass in homage.
The recipients awoke and began to discover that human blessings had fallen into their straitened circumstances, richest yet on the most beautiful things of earth.
Twelve years later at Rosas near the coast of Catalonia, Lumi dismounts from the enveloping snowy cloud whilst sighing; cries of presage meet her as she ascends in the happiest mood imaginable without rising from the ground. A priest is to be choking himself in the church; a young English lady is just now beating out rivulets on the stairways of a convent whilst the outside streets are by no means deficient of half an icon-rainstorm with one of which a saint is to play a much-received upon the altar towards the families;” and the gamins and the apostles were not to dwell without the roofs.