There was no darkness in the world, but only warm, mysterious shadows; and all the leaves and spikes were edged and lined with iridescent jewels of dew.  The night was warmer than any night had ever been, the heavens by some miracle at once vaster and nearer, and spite of the great ivory-tinted moon that ruled the world, the sky was full of stars.

The little man did not shout nor sing for all his infinite gladness.  He stood for a time like one awe-stricken, and then, with a queer small cry and holding out his arms, he ran out as if he would embrace at once the whole warm round immensity of the world.  He did not follow the neat set paths that cut the garden squarely, but thrust across the beds and through the wet, tall, scented herbs, through the night stock and the nicotine and the clusters of phantom white mallow flowers and through the thickets of southern-wood and lavender, and knee-deep across a wide space of mignonette.  He came to the great hedge and he thrust his way through it, and though the thorns of the brambles scored him deeply and tore threads from his wonderful suit, and though burs and goosegrass and havers caught and clung to him, he did not care.  He did not care, for he knew it was all part of the wearing for which he had longed.  “I am glad I put on my suit,” he said; “I am glad I wore my suit.”

Beyond the hedge he came to the duck-pond, or at least to what was the duck-pond by day.  But by night it was a great bowl of silver moonshine all noisy with singing frogs, of wonderful silver moonshine twisted and clotted with strange patternings, and the little man ran down into its waters between the thin black rushes, knee-deep and waist-deep and to his shoulders, smiting the water to black and shining wavelets with either hand, swaying and shivering wavelets, amid which the stars were netted in the tangled reflections of the brooding trees upon the bank.  He waded until he swam, and so he crossed the pond and came out upon the other side, trailing, as it seemed to him, not duckweed, but very silver in long, clinging, dripping masses.  And up he went through the transfigured tangles of the willow-herb and the uncut seeding grass of the farther bank.  And so he came glad and breathless into the highroad.  “I am glad,” he said, “beyond measure, that I had clothes that fitted this occasion.”

The highroad ran straight as an arrow flies, straight into the deep blue pit of sky beneath the moon, a white and shining road between the singing nightingales, and along it he went, running now and leaping, and now walking and rejoicing, in the clothes his mother had made for him with tireless, loving hands.  The road was deep in dust, but that for him was only soft whiteness, and as he went a great dim moth came fluttering round his wet and shimmering and hastening figure.  At first he did not heed the moth, and then he waved his hands at it and made a sort of dance with it as it circled round his head.  “Soft moth!” he cried, “dear moth!  And wonderful night, wonderful night of the world!  Do you think my clothes are beautiful, dear moth?  As beautiful as your scales and all this silver vesture of the earth and sky?”