WHEN you look out across the water at night, after the sun has set and the moon has risen high enough to become bright, then you see a long, glimmering moon-path reaching away into the distance. There it lies, stretching from the moon to the earth, and from the earth to the moon, as bright as silver and gold, and as straight and smooth as a turnpike road.
There is nothing in all this world that was not made for some reason and for some use--not even the moon-path--but always you must find for yourself the use of a thing and why it was made.
So it is with the moon-path as with everything else. Thousands and thousands of people have seen that long, level stretch of brightness, and have looked out at it, and have thought it was beautiful, but there are very, very few who have ever really found out what is its use.
It looks like a path, and that is what it really is, for if you only know how to do so, you may walk upon it just as easily as you may walk upon a barn floor. All you need to do is to make a beginning, and there you are. After that it is smooth enough walking, and you may skip and play and romp as you choose. Then you may come and go whenever you have a mind to, and if you will take my word for it, it is the most beautiful and wonderful road that a body can travel betwixt here and the land that so few folk ever go to and come back again.
For the moon-path leads straight to the moon. That was why it was built--that a body might go from the brown earth to the moon, and maybe back again.
But why, you may ask, should anybody want to go to the moon? That I will tell you. The reason is that behind the moon there lies the most wonderful, beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten garden that the mind can think of. In it live little children who play and romp, and laugh and sing, and are as merry and happy as the little white lambs in the green meadow in springtime. There they never have trouble and worry; they never dispute nor quarrel; they never are sorry and never cry.
Aye, aye;--that beautiful garden. One time I myself saw it--though in a dream--dim and indistinct, as one might see such a beautiful place through a piece of crooked glass. In it was the little boy whom I loved the best of all. He did not see me, but I saw him, and I think I was looking into the garden out of one of the moon-windows. I was glad to see him, for he had gone out along the moon-path, and he had not come back again.
Perhaps you do not understand what I mean, but maybe you will after you have read this story. For it is all about a little girl who went to the garden behind the moon and lived amid all the beautiful things. Also it is about a little boy who paid a visit to the moon-house, where the Man-in-the-moon lives, and how he too went out the back door into the moon-garden.
It was the Moon-Angel who told the story to me, and now I shall tell it to you just as nearly as I can remember it.