wings for the first time, and I am rather awkward with them. I could not get out of your way in time."

"What kind of bird are you?" asked the lark, when he had recovered from the shaking he had got. "I never met you before." "I am not a bird at all," said Leo; "I am a boy." "That is ridiculous," said the lark. "I know boys very well, for I build my nest in the grass. Indeed I know them to my cost, for they robbed me and my wife of a fine family of eggs the other day. You certainly are like a boy, but boys do not fly about in the air."

"I ought to know best," said Leo, rather insulted.

"I know a bird when I see him," said the lark; "and I can tell you you are a bird. You are probably some new species, and have not yet got accustomed to yourself. I often hear men talking in the fields, and I know there are a great many queer discoveries going on now-a-days. You are one of them, I dare say, and that is why neither I nor yourself know you."

"Perhaps it is," said Leo, who was beginning to get bewildered. "I dare say they will call you the boy-bird,"" said the lark, "from your likeness to a boy."

"That would do very well," said Leo, "as well as the blackbird or the blue-bird or the humming-bird."

"Of course you can sing ?" said the lark.

"Oh, yes!" said Leo; "I can sing nursery rhymes."

"What kind of a note is that ?" asked the lark.

you," and Leo began to sing with all his might

"Where are you going, Old Woman? says I,

Where are you going, you're going so high?
To sweep the cobwebs off the sky,

And I will be with you by-and-by.”

"Let me hear

"Very good,” said the lark. "Yours is a peculiar voice for a bird. The boy likeness shows itself there also. But who was the Old Woman ?”

"I don't know, really," said Leo; "I never thought of that before. I wonder who she was.'

“I know,” said the lark, after a moment's reflection. the moon."

"She was

"But the moon is a world !" said Leo: "a beautiful silver world." "You're wrong," said the lark. Look at her well the next time you see her, and you'll find she's an old woman. People down on the earth spy up through telescopes, and think they see a great deal, but if they flew as high as a lark does they would know more about things."

“I wish it was night," said Leo, "and I'd fly right up to her and find out for myself."

"By the way, where do you intend to build your nest ?" asked the lark. "As you are a new species, I am curious to know."

"I think I shall make it in one of those golden islands," replied Leo. "At all events I shall fly over and see what they are like."

"Good-bye, then," said the lark. "We may meet again; and I

shall be glad to introduce you to the other birds. I am going to tell everyone I meet about you."

And then the lark suddenly broke out into a perfect rage of singing and flew away.

"That is all nonsense about my being a bird, I am sure," said Leo, as he went flying across the sky; "however, I shall know better after a while."

Just then he lit upon the largest and most magnificent of the islands, the one on which he had seen the village with the long street, the gardens, the castle with the three towers, and the church. He perched upon a lovely gold strand round which the blue sky sea flowed, and when he found that he could stand on his feet for the present he took off his wings, feeling rather anxious to assure himself that he really was not a bird after all. He folded up the wings very tightly, and squeezed them together and tried to put them in his pocket; but to his great surprise and vexation they melted away between his fingers into something like smoke-and they were gone.

"That is very provoking," said Leo. "I wish I had kept them on. However, perhaps, some other way of getting along will turn up for me by the time I want to leave this place. It seems pretty solid under foot for the present."

He had hardly gone a few steps towards the street with the goldthatched houses and the gardens, when he saw a whole troop of little soft, fluffy-looking children, made of white cloud, coming running very fast down through the cloud fields to meet him. They crowded round Leo and pushed him about and rubbed themselves against him, and when they pressed on him very hard he found to his amazement that he broke them in pieces and passed through them. They joined their pieces together again on the other side of him and came back as if nothing had happened.

"What can you be made of?" said a little cloud girl, hovering off from Leo and looking at him wonderingly. "You are so hard and stiff. Do you never melt at all ?”

"Never," said Leo; "I should be very sorry if I did." "How very strange !" said all the children.

"And what do you play at ?" asked the little cloud girl;

that makes half our fun."

" for

"Why, I play at ball, and tops, and I am learning cricket," said Leo. "We never heard of those games," said the little girl; "but come along with us now, and we will show you what we play at."

They all began to run up the field, and Leo ran after them, and they all went through a gate, which melted away to let them pass and built itself up again afterwards. Then they were in the village street, and Leo was quite astonished to see how very small the houses were although they showed so plainly at a distance.

"How in the world do you get into these houses ?" asked Leo. "You are taller than they are, and the doors are so small."

"That is part of our fun," said the little cloud girl. "Come in and have some breakfast."

"They all stooped their heads and went in as easily as possible;

but when it came to be Leo's turn, he looked in at the door in dismay, and cried:

"Oh, please, don't ask me to go in. You don't know how difficult it would be to me. Besides, I am so hard I should break down the house. I shall just sit on the doorstep here and you can hand something out to me."

"That will not do at all," said the cloud children from within. "Come in! come in! and never mind about the house. What is the good of a house unless you can break it as often as you please ?"

After this invitation Leo did not hesitate any longer. He put his foot on the threshold and walked boldly forward, carrying away the whole upper wall of the house on his head. He went into a parlour where all the cloud children were sitting at a long table, with their heads in the upper storey, the ceiling being pushed out of the way for the time. When Leo sat down, his head stayed upstairs like the others, and by-and-by the fragments that remained of the ceiling retreated up to the roof and allowed the children to see each other. The eatables on the table were of course made of cloud, and they melted down the children's throats as fast as they were raised to their lips. Leo found them very unsatisfying indeed, for he never felt as if he had got a mouthful of anything. He was very glad when the breakfast was over and the children proposed to take him all over the house. Then they went running about pushing aside cloud walls and rolling away cloud staircases, which seemed to be the only way they had of going over the house. They broke it all to pieces and trod on it, and then they floated off laughing and left the house to build itself up again as soon as it pleased.

The children next danced into the garden, and began to play a most curious game with the flowers, changing themselves into rosebushes and clumps of lilies, and then back again into children. "This is the way we amuse ourselves," said the little cloud girl, "and you may look on at us as you don't know how to melt. How awfully stupid it must be to be always the same thing!"

While Leo was watching them, he also saw people of all kinds going up and down the street, old people and young people in every kind of strange dress, and they had all the same rolling or floating manner of walking, and he noticed that when two met full in the face they did not step aside and pass as other people would do, but they rolled right into one another and sometimes they never got disentangled again. A man and a woman would stumble against each other, melt into one another, and become an elephant or a camel; then the camel or the elephant would roll on, and without going much further would swallow a few men, and perhaps before he got to the end of the street he would meet a waggon, which would tumble through him and break him up into a couple of asses, or dogs, or a flock of pigeons.

It happened that, just as Leo stared at all these things, a lumbering cloud-waggon came rolling along, and the mischief-loving cloudchildren hustled Leo into it, drawing the cloud-curtains round him, and shoving the waggon on its way. Leo was quite in the dark now,

and could not see anything, only felt himself tumbling about in soft, fluffy darkness, while the silvery laughter of the summer cloud-children rang like musical bells in his ears.

By-and-by the laughter ceased, and Leo saw and heard nothing more. He was floating, floating away somewhere, till his head became dizzy; and then, all at once, the wrappings parted from around him, and he perceived that the children, and the village, and the fields and gardens, had all completely disappeared.

He was sitting on a desert island of cloud, all alone.

CHAPTER VII.

BAD-WEATHER COUNTRY.

THE sky looked cold and gray all around him, the sun had disappeared, the beautiful golden islands were gone, and in their place were large, dark tracts of cloud, like deserts and wildernesses. Leo had scarcely time to feel vexed at this change when he felt a sudden blow on his back, and was lifted up by a squall of wind and spun across the sky, as if he had been a flash of lightning. He was flung with far greater violence than when he had been carried on the Moment's back or shot from the censer. He was dashed not only across the sky, but through and through the clouds at the other side of the horizon, so far that he made a great hole, which seemed a mile deep; and when he, at last, ceased moving, he found himself struggling to swim in a great sea, where everything was dark round the shores.

66

Well, well!" thought Leo, "it seems the weather has changed. Now I am going to see where the rain and the storm come from! That blow the wind gave me was pretty well as a beginning. A sturdy chap he must be, wherever he has puffed to. I wish he had spoken to me!"

His eyes began to get accustomed to this new region, and after a time he perceived that the shores were not all blank, dark mounds, as he at first supposed, but were covered with groups of people who were coming and going, plunging into the water, and hurrying over the verge of the distant hills. Leo made great efforts to reach the shores, as the water felt cold, and he was anxious to know what these people could be about.

When he touched the shore he found that it was hard as iron and icy cold; it seemed to be altogether a mass of ice. The people were men with large beards hanging with icicles, and women wrapped in long dark cloaks and streaming veils, and they were busy making up large balls of ice and snow and flinging them down into the dark lake where they melted away and disappeared immediately. Dark, heavy-looking children were also engaged in the same employment, and sometimes they quarrelled and pelted each other with the balls of ice. Leo made his way to where they were, and sat down among

them, and asked them questions about who they might be, and what they were doing.

"This is Bad-Weather Country," they said. "We are the children of the bad weather, and we are sending rains and floods and torrents down upon the earth."

"Oh, are you, indeed ?" said Leo. "So I may thank you for the dreadful wet days, when one can only sit staring out of the nurserywindow, and must not dare to take a step out of doors."

"Just so," said the children.

"Oh, I say!" shouted Leo, "stop that fellow over there! Hallo !” "What do you mean ?" said the children.

"Why there's a fellow tumbled into the lake after his ball," cried Leo. "Oh, I declare, he's vanished! He's drowned!"

The children laughed, a pattering, chilly kind of laugh, that sounded like rain falling on window panes.

"Oh, you stupid!" they said. "Don't you know that is part of his business."

"No, I don't," said Leo. "Nobody has any business to drown himself, I know."

The children laughed still more loudly. "We don't know anything about drowning here," they said. "It is only on earth that such silly things happen."

"Then what has become of the chap?" asked Leo.

"Oh, he's only gone down below to superintend some of the works," said the children.

"Indeed!" said Leo.

"Yes, to be sure."

"And will he ever come back?" “Of course he will come back.

creature we ever came across.

Why, you are the most ignorant

"Don't be so hard upon a fellow!" said Leo. here, you know. I came up from the earth."

"I am a stranger

"Oh, that accounts for it. Well, do you see those people over there in the distance who are constantly coming over the hills and scattering themselves on the shores? Those are some of our folks who have gone down through the lake, and have come up again with their business done. Do you see them ?"

Leo looked, and as his eyes had got accustomed to the foggy twilight of the place he saw distinctly all that was going on around him. The people on the shores-men, women, and children-were continually flinging themselves into the lake, and disappearing, and at the same time figures as if made of mist were constantly arriving over hills of mist away behind in the clouds, and coming down to the shores, becoming more solid every moment, till they at last appeared just the same as the others who were at work.

"And are those really the same chaps who plunged into the lake ?" asked Leo; "and where have they been, and what have they been doing? Oh, but I'm sure you are joking. I really can't believe it, you know !"

"We will show you whether we are joking or not," said the chil