One sunny day, bright and happy, an old lady, who is called by the children in the hayfield, “the Queen of the Hay,” stepped out on her balcony. This was because her eyes were quite weary from looking up so long, as you can imagine, and because she had such a great deal still to see. It was, in fact, the very day when the hay was carried at last into the barn.
For this reason, therefore, so much company was going on in Nature’s giddy harvest-field, and there was such a darkness and heat in the barn beneath, where the hot hay lay.
Old Mother Earth went on looking with her true milk-white eyes upon her children, and wished to sit down and rest herself for a time up there on the balcony. She left her little lap-dogs to roll and tumble about in front of her, and everybody jumped around joyously, for it was really a splendid world-day.
But who is it now that is coming so quickly? That is the merry little wind. He blows himself quite round and very free; he lifts two pine-cones from the earth, and swings round them, till one is as ripe as the other. Four little mushrooms he tosses up into the air, and they stay there for some time just like India-rubber balls. And it is he that plays such wild tricks with the flowers. They grow upon the meadow not far from the barn, and were in the act of making themselves tidy. But Winnie the Wind is coming on, and how he tosses the old rags to the right and to the left; and there he hangs on the smooth white profiles of such as danced most wildly, and did not see when he blew round them in an instant. “How the wind does play with us!” said the flowers; “but we don’t like such wild tricks, and are terribly frightened of him.”
Winnie the Wind moved more slowly now. “Don’t you like to have me play with you?” asked he. And then he took hold of the lily with his fine little fingers, and she quivered from her head to the very tip of her leaf; they could see it.
“Permanently thou bringest us joy unto the heart,” said all the flowers around. Flowers, indeed, we should be without thee, dear wind! Have thou the goodness to play a little with us, and show to the lily how to dance.”
And there he took the lily by her smooth stem, and showed in this manner what a good dance the flowers might have, and how lovely they might wave here when Winnie the Wind touched them, as he now did behind her.
The flowers caressed the wind now, and were no longer at all scared of him. It was so excessively picturesque there on the barn roof, around the comfortable old mother, who had not the least inclination to sleep.