Page:Fairies I have met.djvu/57

THE CLOUD THAT HAD NO LINING work to line the cloud with it, spreading it out carefully and making it nice and tidy at the edges. When the lining was finished it looked lovely, and the fairies were much pleased with it. They sat down under the cloud, feeling quite safe from the rain.

But unfortunately their satisfaction did not last long. Presently it began to rain. The fairies smiled and nodded at each other, and agreed that it was very pleasant to be safe from a wetting. Then a big heavy drop fell right through the cloud and lining and all—and another—and another, and soon the fairies were as wet and uncomfortable and cross as if the cloud had never been lined. It was really very annoying.

The truth is that the silver of the moonshine-fairies is rather thin—altogether too thin to keep the rain out, and of very little use for lining clouds with.

"It is really too bad!" cried the poor cloud-fairies, wringing the water out of their nice little grey coats. "What are we to do? Any one would have thought that such beautiful silver would keep the rain out!"

"Perhaps," said one of them who liked to be cheerful, "Mist-of-the-Morning may bring us a better kind of silver even than this."

So they decided to grumble no more till Mist-of-the-Morning came home.

Now, when Mist-of-the-Morning started out to look for silver he did not fly down to the earth at all.

"Every cloud but ours has a silver lining," he said to himself; "so the best way to find the right kind of silver will be to ask the fairies who live in the other clouds." 47