Once he said aloud;
“How happy you must be, you rare, beautiful, brilliant creature!”
“I am not happy,” rejoined the Firefly; “what am I, after all, but a flying beetle with a candle in my tail? I wish I were a star.”
“Very well,” said the Magician, and touched her with his wand, when she became a beautiful star in the twelfth degree of the sign Pisces.
After some nights the Magician asked her if she was content.
“I am not,” replied she. “When I was a Firefly I could fly whither I would, and come and go as I pleased. Now I must rise and set at certain times, and shine just so long and no longer. I cannot fly at all, and only creep slowly across the sky. In the day I cannot shine, or if I do no one sees me. I am often darkened by rain, and mist, and cloud. Even when I shine my brightest I am less admired than when I was a Firefly, there are so many others like me. I see, indeed, people looking up from the earth by night towards me, but how do I know that they are looking at me?”
“The laws of nature will have it so,” returned the Magician.
“Don’t talk to me of the laws of Nature,” rejoined the Firefly. “I did not make them, and I don’t see why I should be compelled to obey them. Make me something else.”
“What would you be?” demanded the accommodating Magician.
“As I creep along here,” replied the Star, “I see such a soft pure track of light. It proceeds from the lamp in your study. It flows out of your window like a river of molten silver, both cool and warm. Let me be such a lamp.”