So the flowers prayed to the sun from whom they have their beautiful colours, and the sun made them like jewels--jewels of the rose and the violet, of the lily and the daffodil, the sunflower, the pink and carnation. Perhaps they were not just the same flowers as those, for they grew in America, but they had all their colours and many more. "That is an improvement certainly," said the Humming-bird, when he had looked at them. "You are much more beautiful now, but you remain the same all day long. It is very different with the sky. Every morning and evening when the sun rises and sets, she has quite a special beauty, and it is only then that she can be said to be refulgent. If it were so with you, then I might take you, but I do not care for flowers who have no sunrise or sunset." So the flowers prayed to the sun again, and he made them as much more beautiful when he rose and set at morning and evening as the sky is then in the east and west. And when the Humming-bird saw that they were really refulgent, he took all their colours, and, for a little while, the flowers were quite pale, and only got bright again by degrees. But they never flashed and sparkled like jewels any more, and there was never another flower sunrise or another flower sunset. The Humming-bird kept all that for himself; he never gave any of it back to the flowers. It was not very generous of him. I _think_ he was going to be punished for it, but, somehow or other, it was forgotten. Punishments do get forgotten, sometimes--almost as often, perhaps, as rewards. Those are just a few of the beautiful Humming-birds that there are in the world--in that new world that Columbus discovered--but, as you know, there are more than four hundred different kinds, and numbers of them are just as beautiful--some perhaps even more beautiful--than those I have told you about. And you may be sure that they know exactly what to do with their beauty, how to raise up their crests and fan out their tails and ruffle out their gorgets and tippets in the way to make them look most magnificent, and give the greatest possible pleasure to their wives, who are all of them hermits--poor plain Humming-birds--just as the Birds of Paradise do for _their_ wives, who are hermits too.