The Buckwheat

He has wings that reach from the clouds right down to earth, and he'll break you in two before you can cry for mercy!"

"Yes, but I certainly won't bend," replied the buckwheat defiantly. "Shut up your flowers and bend your leaves," the old willow tree called. "And whatever you do, don't look up at the lightning when the cloud bursts! Even human beings don't dare do that, for in the lightning one can look into God's Heaven itself, and that sight will strike even human beings blind! So if we, who are so much less worthy than they, dared to do it, what would happen to us!"

"Now I'll certainly look straight up into Heaven itself!" nd he did so with pride and haughtiness. So vivid was the lightning that it seemed as if the whole world were on fire.

When the storm finally passed, the flowers and crops stood again in the clear, sweet air, refreshed by the rain; but the buckwheat was blasted coal-black by the lightning, and he was now a dead, useless weed on the field. Then the willow tree waved his branches in the breeze, and great drops of water fell from his green leaves just as if he was crying. "Why are you weeping?" the sparrows asked him. "Everything is so wonderful here. Look how the sun shines, see how the clouds sail across the sky. Can't you smell the fragrance of the flowers and the bushes? Why do you weep, old willow tree?"

Then the willow tree told them of the pride and the haughtiness of the buckwheat, and of the punishment that he had to suffer.

And I who tell you this story have heard it from the sparrows. One evening when I asked them for a tale, they told it to me.