“Well,” I insisted, “mine are alive. So that’s the difference. They can become various other things, and just because an object comes into the world as a pencil or a stove, it does not have to despair of getting beyond that. A pencil might become a stick or, if all goes well, a mast, a stove, or at least a city gate.”

“You seem quite a simple-minded evening cloud to me,” said the young cloud that had expressed itself in such an unrestrained manner earlier on. An elder cloud, fearing that it might have offended me, tried to smooth things over:

“There are all kinds of countries, very different from one another. I once found myself over a small German principality, and to this day I still don’t believe it was part of Europe.”

I thanked him and said, “I see that we’re not going to have an easy time agreeing on this. With your permission, I’ll simply tell you what I have been seeing beneath me recently. That will be the best solution.”

“Please be so kind,” the elder courteously allowed on behalf of all present. So I began.

There are people in a room. I am rather high, you must know, and as a result of this they look like children to me. For that reason, I would prefer simply to say “children.” So then, there are some children in a room. Two, five, six, seven children. It would take too long to ask them their names. Moreover, it seems the children are in the midst of an animated discussion; and in the course of that, one or another of them will name names anyhow. They must already have been at it for some time, for the oldest of them (I hear them calling him Hans) is remarking as though by way of conclusion:

“No, it definitely can’t go on like that. I’ve heard that in the old days every evening—or at least on evenings when they’d been good—the parents told the children stories until they fell asleep. Does anything like that go on these days?” After a short pause, Hans answers himself. “It doesn’t happen—anywhere. For my part, and also since I’m already something of a grownup, I would be happy to make them a gift of those few miserable dragons that they trouble themselves over so; but all the same, it is only fitting that they should tell us there are such things as nixies, dwarves, princes, and monsters.”

“I have an aunt,” says a little girl, “who sometimes tells me—”