primrose, and sugar of the violet, and butter of the buttercup; he
shook dewdrops from the cowslip into the cup of a harebell; spread
out a large lime-leaf, set his little breakfast upon it, and feasted
daintily. Sometimes he invited a humming-bee, oftener a gay
butterfly, to partake his feast; but his favourite guest was the
blue dragon-fly. The bee murmured a good deal, in a solemn tone,
about his riches; but the Child thought that if he were a bee, heaps
of treasure would not make him gay and happy; and that it must be
much more delightful and glorious to float about in the free and
fresh breezes of spring, and to hum joyously in the web of the
sunbeams, than, with heavy feet and heavy heart, to stow the silver
wax and the golden honey into cells.

To this the Butterfly assented; and he told how once on a time, he
too had been greedy and sordid; how he had thought of nothing but
eating, and had never once turned his eyes upwards to the blue
heavens. At length, however, a complete change had come over him;
and instead of crawling spiritless about the dirty earth, half
dreaming, he all at once awaked as out of a deep sleep. And now he
would rise into the air;--and it was his greatest joy sometimes to
play with the light, and to reflect the heavens in the bright eyes
of his wings; sometimes to listen to the soft language of the
flowers, and catch their secrets. Such talk delighted the Child,
and his breakfast was the sweeter to him, and the sunshine on leaf
and flower seemed to him more bright and cheering.

But when the Bee had flown off to beg from flower to flower, and the
Butterfly had fluttered away to his playfellows, the Dragon-fly
still remained, poised on a blade of grass. Her slender and
burnished body, more brightly and deeply blue than the deep blue