The dandelions looked grieved for a moment, but answered brightly:  “Why, don’t you know?  It must be because you live so far away—­there by the fence—­that you don’t know we are here to pin the grass down until it grows old enough to know it must not wander off like the crickets, or to blow away like the floss in your own pods.  Young grass is very foolish,—­I think I heard the farmer call it green the other day, but we don’t like the expression ourselves,—­and it would be apt to do flighty things if we did n’t pin it down where it belongs.  When we have taught it its lesson, we can go to sleep.  We always stay until the last minute, and then we slip on our white nightcaps,—­so fluffy and light and soft they are,—­and lo! some day we are gone, no one knows where but the wind; and he carries us off in his arms, for we are too tired to walk; and then we rest until the next year, when we are bright and early at our task again.”

Then the milkweed and the mullein-stalk bowed very gravely and respectfully to the little dandelions, and said,—­

“Yes, we see.  Even such wee things as you have your duties, and we are sorry you are so weary.”

So the milkweed whispered to the breeze that the dandelions were too warm, and begged it to help them; but the breeze murmured very gently,—­

“I don’t know what is the matter with me, dear milkweed, but I am so faint, so faint, I think I shall die.”

And sure enough, the next day the little breeze had died, and then they knew how they missed him, even though he had been so weak for the last few days; for the sun glared down fiercely, and the meadow thought it was angry, and was so frightened it grew feverish and parched with very dread.

“We wish our parasols were larger,” sighed the toadstools; “but they are so small that, try as we may, we cannot get them to cast a large shadow, and now the breeze has died we have no messenger.  If only one knew how to get word to the clouds!”

But the clouds had done such steady duty through the spring that they thought they were entitled to a holiday, and had gone to the mountain-tops, where they were resting calmly, feeling very grand among such an assembly of crowned heads.

Meanwhile the meadow grew browner and browner, and its pretty dress was being scorched so that by and by no one would have recognized it for the gay thing it had been a week ago.  And still the sun glared angrily down, and the little breeze was dead.

Then the grasses laid down their tiny spears, and the dandelions bent their heads, and the locusts and the crickets and the grasshoppers called feebly,—­

“Oh, little brook, cannot you get out of your bed and come this way?”

“Our hearts are broken,” cried the daisies.

“We shall die,” wailed the ragged-sailors.  Then they all waited for the brook to reply; but she was silent, and call as they would they could get no answer.