A little winged thing came flying down to the green light, and two voices
began crying together--the glow-worm and its mate.

"They have carried you away?"

"They have carried me away; up here I shall die!"

"I am too weak to lift you," said the one with wings; "you will stay here, and
you will die!" Then they cried yet more.

"It seems to me," thought the Jackdaw, "that as soon as the beautiful becomes
true, God does not intend it to be for us." He got up softly from among his
brothers. "I will carry you down," he said. And without more ado, he picked it
up and carried it down out of the nest, and laid it in the long grass at the
foot of the tree.

Overhead the nightingale sang, and the full moon shone; its rays struck down
on the little Jackdaw's head. For a bird that is not a nightingale to wake up
and find its head unprotected under the rays of a full moon is serious: there
and then he became moon-struck. He went back into bed; but he was no longer
the same little Jackdaw. "Oh, I wish I could sing!" he thought; and not for
hours could he get to sleep.

In the morning, when the family woke up, the beautiful and the true was gone.
The father Jackdaw thought he nmst have swallowed it in his sleep.

"If you did," said his wife "there'll be a smell of burnt feathers before
long!"