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“Do you stick it up there with a pin?”

This question seemed to strike her as very amusing, and she laughed. And when she laughed it sounded like church bells far, far off, or the voice of the Brook.

“Oh, no,” she said as soon as she could speak. “Do I look as if I could be stuck up there by a pin?”

“No-o-o, but what do you do? Just float around–or swim?”

“Well, that’s the way you Earth people would put it–but we have another word for it.”

“What is the word?”

She shook her head.

“That I can’t tell you, for you’d never understand it, but it’s a very pretty word.”

Marmaduke sighed.

“I’d like to know it,” he said, “but I suppose I can’t.”

And the Star Lady answered,–

“Not now, perhaps some day.”

“Do you do anything else besides hunting for little lost stars?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, coming a trifle nearer his bed, “sometimes we find little stars on earth that have never been in the sky, and they shine so very brightly that we take them up there, too.”

“What kind of stars?”

“Would you like to see them?”

“You bet I would,” Marmaduke started to say, then stopped. That sounded rather rude. Still she didn’t reprove him; she didn’t seem to mind it a bit. There was something very homelike about her, for all she was so radiant and bright.

“I understand perfectly,” she assured him, “but we must be off before daylight.” Then she turned to the bureau.

“Take the Little Blue Lamp with you, then you’ll seem like a star, too.”

Now long ago Marmaduke had made another trip to the skies, to see The Old Man in the Moon, but that journey was never like this. This was so much more beautiful.

He didn’t feel as if he were walking or riding, just rising in the air with one hand clasped in the fingers of the Star Lady, the other around the little lamp.

Marmaduke wondered if all the people would look up and see his little light.

“Perhaps they can see just the light and not me,” he said to himself, “and that would be just right.”

They rose up over the trees, then over the brook, and he saw himself shining in the brook. It looked as if his twin were lying there in the water, and he laughed out loud–that is he thought he did. But he found he wasn’t making any sound. Instead of words, sparkles seemed to come from his mouth, like the twinkles of a star.

He asked the Star Lady about that. It was very funny, but now that they were getting up in the clouds he couldn’t hear his own voice and she couldn’t hear it, either, but they understood each other just the same.

“When a star twinkles, it is laughing,” she explained, and it all seemed very clear to him.

Now they passed through great clouds. When they rose above them he looked down. They seemed like white islands in a clear blue sea. And the sky was the sea. It wasn’t like water, but just as cool, and the earth, and the towns, and the trees lay like places buried at the bottom of the ocean.

He tried to step on a cloud, and he couldn’t feel anything at all under him, yet it didn’t give way–he could sit down on it. He did lie down for a little while, it felt so soft and nice, but the Star Lady made him get up.

“We must hurry, for way over there I see the Sun. He’s stirring in his sleep, and when he gets up and washes his face–“

“Does he wash his face?” interrupted Marmaduke, “just like real people?”

“Yes, he rubs cloud lather all over it, and then he dips his face in the bowl of the ocean.”

“How does he dry it?”

“Oh, the morning wind does that,” she replied, smiling at such a parade of questions, “but let’s go before he starts to wash up, for I must show you all the star fields. It’s only a few steps up.”