At this moment something happened. A boy pressed his face against the pane, and stared at the toys. Crack!—a stone hit the glass, and the boy ran away. The wind and the rain swooped in together, upsetting the theatre, and knocking the dolls about. The master hastened to close the shutter.
The little Swiss man had fallen outside.
In the morning a porter passing by kicked the tiny bit of wood toward the parapet, and the next comer sent it spinning into the river.
"Pride goes before a fall," said the St.Bernard dog.
"Why did he feel so superior to the rest of us?" inquired the goose.
"It was all in the grain of the wood," said the leading monkey.
Below Geneva the Rhone joins the Arve, and the two rivers remain distinct for a long while—the Rhone like a green ribbon, and the Arve whitened by glacier torrents. Here a poor boy was fishing. What he caught was the little Swiss man, bobbing along on the stream, and he took this prize to the stone cottage, his home.
"I am glad to be out of the water," thought our wooden hero. "All the same, I wish I was back in the shop window. Ah! I did not know gratitude, as the Edelweiss said."