"Be it as you wish!" said the angel.
And the little stone-breaker sparkled in the highest heavens, radiant, flaming. He took pleasure in scorching trees, withering their leaves, and parching up springs; in covering with perspiration the august visages of emperors as well as the dusty muzzles of the wayside stone-breakers—his companions of the morning.
"THE LITTLE STONE-BREAKER SPARKLED IN THE HEAVENS."
But a cloud came between the earth and him, and the cloud said:
"Halt, my dear fellow; you can't come this way!"
"By the moon, that's too much! A cloud—a poor little misty, bodiless cloud—calls me familiarly, 'my dear fellow,' and bars my way! Clouds, it is plain, are more powerful than I. If I do not become a cloud, I shall burst with jealousy."
"Don't burst for so trifling a cause," said the angel, always on the watch. "Be a cloud, since you prefer to be so."
Proudly the new cloud planted himself between the earth and the resplendent planet.
Never, in the records of memory, did so much rain fall. The transformed stone-breaker took pleasure in launching rain and hail upon the earth, and that in such a terrible fashion that the uprooted trees found nothing left but mud in which to hold on to the ground. Under his aquatic reign of several hours, streams became floods, floods became torrents, the seas were confounded with each other, and dreadful waterspouts whirled in every direction, wringing and destroying whatever was above the surface of the waters.