Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/330

 covering with perspiration the august visages of emperors as well as the dusty muzzles of the wayside stone-breakers—his companions of the morning.

But a cloud came between the earth and him, and the cloud said:

"Halt, my dear fellow; you can't come this way!"

"By the moon, that's too much! A cloud—a poor little misty, bodiless cloud—calls me familiarly, 'my dear fellow,' and bars my way! Clouds, it is plain, are more powerful than I. If I do not become a cloud, I shall burst with jealousy."

"Don't burst for so trifling a cause," said the angel, always on the watch. "Be a cloud, since you prefer to be so."

Proudly the new cloud planted himself between the earth and the resplendent planet.

Never, in the records of memory, did so much rain fall. The transformed stone-breaker took pleasure in launching rain and hail upon the earth, and that in such a terrible fashion that the uprooted trees found nothing left but mud in which to hold on to the ground. Under his aquatic reign of several hours, streams became floods, floods became torrents, the seas were confounded with each other, and dreadful waterspouts whirled in every direction, wringing and destroying whatever was above the surface of the waters.

A rock, however, made head against the force of the hurricane. In spite of all, it remained unmoved. On its granite sides the waves broke in frothy showers, the waterspouts sank at its feet, and the thunder made it laugh every time it burst against its unyielding flanks.

"I am at the end of my powers!" said the cloud; "this rock defies me, masters me, and fills me with envy."

"Take its place!" said the angel, "and let us see whether, at last, you are satisfied."

The transformed cloud did not yet feel at his ease. Immovable, inaccessible, insensible to the burning caresses of the sun and to the booming of the thunder, he believed himself to be the master of the world. But at his feet a sharp hammering sound attracted his attention. He stooped and beheld a wretched being covered with rags, thin and bald, as he had been in the time of his deepest poverty, who, with a heavy hammer in his hand, was engaged in chipping off pieces of the granite for the purpose of mending the neighbouring road.

"What is the meaning of this?" cried the haughty rock; "a poor wretch—wretched amongst the most wretched—