After Rain, a little bee was struggling out of a flower, shaking its head at the wet leaves and murmuring: “Oh dear! dear! dear! what a dreadful world this is! I wish I had never been born a bee but had been made a butterfly–an ogling butterfly they are, but oh, much nicer than a bee I see, for they can flit about this garden when it is clean and dry. But as for me, I get into the unsavoury flowers, and what is worse I can never be at rest. There is not a single petal of a single flower but what a bee has to search all over for his breakfast and his dinner; and after all, there’s nothing but honey to have in this dreadful world, even when one don’t drown in the sucking of it!”
Overhead a little bird was chirruping with all its might, heaving and throbbing, stretching out and drawing in its little body, trembling, almost struggling almost bursting with whining, “Too wet! too wet! oh I shall never, never dry! oh I’m so tired travelling on but I must do it; but oh dear, dear! this dreadful shower will never cease to fall as I just wish would turn my little body into a vessel to catch the rain water that’s swamping everything. I say, do think how nice it would be if all the puddles and fishponds and ditches this shower has made was all so many vessels into which we my tumble to cadge a little rain-water. Oh dear! that’s an idea worth a whole meadow of wet leaves and crawful honey!”
Just then a quiet voice among the daisies observed, “No, I don’t think you would wish–for how you would tire yourself moving your legs by the dozen in all that dirty ditch water, and rain water that was muddy enough to kill a cow.” “Who speaks?” chirr’d the bird and, “What kind of a bee are you, fellow?” buzzed the insect. “It is I the fairy Ella.” “Oh! Ella the Unknown! what a pleasure to hear your voice buzzing!” “No! no! chirping!” said the bird. “Ella the Unknown indeed! A consorting bee! Oh dear oh dear! But say, you who are so much more learned than us, have you discovered no remedy against these incessant rains that degrade us into walking sponges?”
Ella the Fairy murmured a few minutes in deep thought, and then said, “A bridge, a rainbow bridge, half way over the streams that cover the ground.”
Thus speaking, she quickly wound herself into her silken purple clouds, that twined around her petal shaped. Her little heart throbbed in unison to as drizzling showers that still continued to fall, and she began dragging along her heavy purple array of flowing water-bloated clouds that gave her the appearance of a long half-naked worm. But old father horizon, strewing him with shards of red and orange and blue and green that were purified by fire, got ready the wonderful rainbow by means of which Ella the Fairy will fling over all these dilapidated gardens, and through the heart of every rainy tree, the long bridge to connect the lands and promote for ever friendship and unity. What is more, on the very rare occasions that Ella’s children may chance to do a little mischief and rupture one of the rainbow boards, or on the warmer mornings of autumn or in the tremulous noontides of the month of May such bridges will disappear, or even neglect her duty entirely, “Oh yes, we have seen some of the raindrops at least, a little behind the clouds.” But said the fowl, without troubling itself at all about the heavy rain, “Is it long?”