Orion in particular was making the most of his bright belt
and golden sword. But the moon was only a poor thin crescent.
There was just one great, jagged, black and gray cloud in the sky,
with a steep side to it like a precipice; and the moon was against
this side, and looked as if she had tumbled off the top of the
cloud-hill, and broken herself in rolling down the precipice.
She did not seem comfortable, for she was looking down into the
deep pit waiting for her. At least that was what Diamond thought
as he stood for a moment staring at her. But he was quite wrong,
for the moon was not afraid, and there was no pit she was going
down into, for there were no sides to it, and a pit without sides
to it is not a pit at all. Diamond, however, had not been out so late
before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him!--
just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much
as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him
wrong on the subject. I have seen this world--only sometimes,
just now and then, you know--look as strange as ever I saw Fairyland.
But I confess that I have not yet seen Fairyland at its best.
I am always going to see it so some time. But if you had been out
in the face and not at the back of the North Wind, on a cold rather
frosty night, and in your night-gown, you would have felt it all
quite as strange as Diamond did. He cried a little, just a little,
he was so disappointed to lose the lady: of course, you, little man,
wouldn't have done that! But for my part, I don't mind people
crying so much as I mind what they cry about, and how they cry--
whether they cry quietly like ladies and gentlemen, or go shrieking
like vulgar emperors, or ill-natured cooks; for all emperors are
not gentlemen, and all cooks are not ladies--nor all queens and
princesses for that matter, either.