"And did they get safe home again?"
"Quite," said the cuckoo. "It's so silly of you, Griselda, to have all these ideas still about far and near, and big and little, and long and short, after all I've taught you and all you've seen."
"I'm very sorry," said Griselda humbly; "but you see, cuckoo, I can't help it. I suppose I'm made so."
"Perhaps," said the cuckoo, meditatively.
He was silent for a minute. Then he spoke again. "Look over there, Griselda," he said. "There's the short cut."
Griselda looked. Far, far over the sea, in the silent distance, she saw a tiny speck of light. It was very tiny; but yet the strange thing was that, far away as it appeared, and minute as it was, it seemed to throw off a thread of light to Griselda's very feet—right across the great sheet of faintly gleaming water. And as Griselda looked, the thread seemed to widen and grow, becoming at the same time brighter and clearer, till at last it lay before her like a path of glowing light.
"Am I to walk along there?" she said softly to the cuckoo.
"No," he replied; "wait."
Griselda waited, looking still, and presently in the middle of the shining streak she saw
something slowly moving—something from which the light came, for the nearer it got to her the shorter grew the glowing path, and behind the moving object the sea looked no brighter than before it had appeared.