For a moment she received no reply; but then the voice said: "Hush! don't speak so irreverently. You are talking to the emissaries of a great sovereign,—his Majesty the Sun."
"Is he carrying me along?" inquired Marjorie presently, with deep respect.
"Oh, dear, no," responded the voice; "we are doing that. We are his vassals,—you call us beams. He never condescends to leave his place,—he could not; if he were to desert his throne for the smallest fraction of a second, one could not imagine the amount of disaster that would ensue. But we do his bidding, and hasten north and south and east and west, just as he commands. It is a very magnificent thing to be a king—"
"Of course," interrupted Marjorie; "one can wear such elegant clothes, that shine and sparkle like everything with gold and jewels, and have lots of servants and—"
"No, no," corrected the beam, warmly. "Where did you get such a wrong idea of things? That is not at all where the splendor of being a king exists. It does not lie in the mere fact of one 's being born to a title and able to command. That would be very little if that were all. It is not in the gold and jewels and precious stuffs that go to adorn a king that his grandeur lies, but in the things which these things represent. We give a king the rarest and the most costly, because it is fitting that the king should have the best,—that he is worthy of the best; that only the best will serve one who is so great and glorious. They mean nothing in themselves; they only describe his greatness. The things that one sees are not of importance; it is the things that they are put there to represent. Do you understand? I don't believe you do. I 'll try to make it more clear to you, like a true sunbeam. Look at one of your earth-kings, for instance. He is nothing but a man just like the rest of you; but what makes him great is that he is supposed to have more truth, more wisdom, more justice and power. If he has not these things, then he would better never have been a king; for that only places him where every one can see how unworthy he is,—makes his lacks only more conspicuous. Your word king comes from another word, könning; which comes from still another word, canning, that means ableman. If he is not really an ableman, it were better he had never worn ermine. And there, too; ermine is only a fur, you know. It is nothing in itself but fur; but you have come to think of it as an emblem of royalty because kings use it. So you see, Marjorie, a thing is not of any worth really except as it represents something that is great and noble, something true."
Marjorie was very silent for a little; she was trying to understand what the sunbeam meant, and found it rather difficult. After a while she gave it up and said,—
"Will you tell me how you are carrying me, and where we are going, and all about it?"
"Certainly," replied the beam, brightly. "You are in a sort of hammock made out of threads of sunshine. We sunbeams can weave one in less than no time, and it is no trouble at all to swing a little mortal like you way out into the clearness and the light, so that a bit of it can make its way into your dark little soul, and make you not quite so blind as you were."
"Why, I 'm not blind at all," said Marjorie, with a surprised pout. "I can see as well as anything. Did you think I couldn't?"
"I know you can't," replied the beam, calmly. "That is, you can't see any farther than the outside part of things, and that is almost worse than seeing none of them at all. But here we are nearing the court of the king. Now don't expect to see him, for that is impossible. He is altogether too radiant for you; your eyes could not bear so much glory. It would be just as if you took one of your own little moles or bats (creatures that are used to the dark) and put them in the full glare of a noonday sun. The sun would be there, but they could not see it, because their eyes would be too weak and dim. Even yourself,—have n't you often tried to look the sun full in the face? Yes; and you have had to give it up and turn your face away because it hurt your eyes. Well, his Majesty only lets the world have a glimpse of his glory. But here we are at our journey's end."