At last a message came from my Lady Spring that now they might expect her any day.
The only person who saw nothing of what was going on was the sparrow. The whole day he lay there in the swallow's nest, only flying out for a quarter of an hour to take a little bit of food. He hadn't the least idea that it was now going to be summer again. He had grown quite silly, and imagined that he was the swallow.
But one day the swallow came back.
"Chee! chee!" he peeped; "is everything in order to receive us?"
This is what he wished first of all to see about, and so he flew all day long over cornfield and meadow.
"There are not many gnats here yet, but they may still come," he said in the evening when he came home.
Then he peeped into the starlings' box to say "How-do" to his neighbours; but it chanced that at the moment there was no one at home, so he got ready to go to bed.
