Story of the Foreign Fairy Chapter 52

Children today know so much it’s unbelievable! You can't say there's anything they don't know. They thought it was an old story, and would not believe it at all, that the stork had fished them out of the well or the mill-sluice, and had given them as little children to their father and mother. But this is the only true thing.

But how did the children get to the mill sluice and well? Indeed, no one knows, but at the same time some people do. Have you ever looked carefully at the sky and those shooting stars on a starry night? You can see as if there are stars falling down and disappearing! Even the most learned people cannot explain clearly what they do not know. But if you knew, you could explain it. It was like a Christmas candle; it fell from the sky and went out. It is a "great star of the soul" from the side of God. It flies underground; when it comes into contact with our heavy air, it loses its luster. It becomes something invisible to our naked eyes, because it is much lighter than our air: it is a child, an angel, sent down from the sky, but without wings, because this little thing is going to become a human being. It flies gently in the air. The wind carried it into a flower. This may be an orchid, a dandelion, a rose, or a cherry blossom, which lies inside the flower, restoring its spirit.

Its body is so nimble that a fly can carry it away; at any rate, bees can carry it away, and bees often fly to and fro in search of honey in flowers. If the child of the air misbehaves on the road, they will never send it back because they cannot bear to do so. They brought it into the sunlight and placed it on the petals of the water lilies. From here it crawled into the water; there it slept and grew, until the stork saw it and carried it to the home of a man who longed for a lovely child. But whether this little guy is cute or not depends entirely on whether he drank clean spring water or ate mud and green floating grass. The latter will make people very unclean.

When a stork sees a child for the first time, it picks it up without choosing it. This one comes to a good family and has the most ideal parents; the other one comes to live with someone who is extremely poor and might as well stay in a mill sluice.

The little ones had no recollection of what they dreamed beneath the lily-petals. Under the water lilies, the frog used to sing to them: "Gah, gah! Croak, croak!" In human language this is equivalent to saying: "Please try it now and see if you can fall asleep and have a dream!" "They have no memory now of which flower they first lay in, or what kind of fragrance it gave out. But when they grow up, there is something about them that makes them say, "I love this flower most!" This is the flower on which they slept as children of the air.