“I cannot stay, I am seeking a lost friend,” answered the cloud, and it scudded past them, leaving them to roll over and over, and tumble about, and change their shapes, and divide and separate, and play a thousand pranks. For many hundred miles the wind blew the little cloud, then it said, “Now I am tired and shall take you no further, but soon the west wind will come and it will take you on; good-bye.” And at once the wind stopped blowing and dropped to rest on the earth; and the cloud stood still in the sky and looked all around. “I shall never find it,” it sighed. “It will be dead before I come.” Presently the sun went down and the moon rose, then the west wind began to blow gently and moved the cloud slowly along. “Which way should I go, where is it?” entreated the cloud. “I know; I will take you straight to it,” said the west wind. “The north wind has told me. I blew by the tree to-day; it was drooping, but when I told it that you had risen to the sky and were seeking it, it revived and tried to lift its branches. They have planted it in a great garden, and there are railings round it and no one may touch it; and there is one gardener who has nothing to do but to attend to it, and people come from far and near to look at it because it is so rare, and they have only found one or two others like it, but it longs to be back in the desert, stooping over you and seeing its face in your water.” “Make haste, then,” cried the cloud, “lest before I reach it I fall to pieces with joy at the thought of seeing it.” “How foolish you are!” said the wind. “Why should you give yourself up for a tree? You might dance about in the sky for long yet, and then you might drop into the sea and mix with the waves and rise again with them to the sky, but if you fall about the tree you will go straight into the dark earth, and perhaps you will always remain there, for at the roots of the tree they have made a deep hole and the sun cannot draw you up through the earth under the branches.” [Illustration: “Have you come at last?” the cried; “then we need never be parted again.”] “Then that will be what I long for,” cried the cloud. “For then I can lie in the dark where no one may see me, but I shall be close to my tree, and I can touch its roots and feed them, and when the raindrops fall from its branches they will run down to me and tell me how they look.” “You are foolish,” said the wind again; “but you shall have what you want.” The wind blew the cloud low down near the earth till it found itself over a big garden, in which there were all sorts of trees and shrubs, and such soft green grass as the cloud had never seen before. And there in the middle of the grass, in a bed of earth to itself, with a railing round it so that no one could injure it, was the tree which the cloud had come so far to seek. Its leaves were falling off, its branches were drooping, and its buds dropped before they opened, and the poor tree looked as if it were dying.