De Olifant en de Slak

One day in the middle of the wood, the elephant meets the snail, just as it begins to rain. The snail asks the elephant if he would like to come inside. The elephant accepts the invitation although the snail’s house is a little on the cramped side. “Don’t you have any windows?” asks the elephant. “If I want to see anything, I always go outside,” says the snail. The elephant nods, but the snails house is just a tiny bit too small for that. The walls crack, and shattered into a thousand pieces. There they stand: the shell-less snail and the elephant in the pouring rain. The elephant is speechless: what has he done?! I don’t usually have this problem when I nod, he says feebly, but then sees how the hapless snail is pathetically trying to gather up the pieces of his house and asks if he can help with gluing it back together. The snail looks up and sadly shakes his head. No, you go on your way, Elephant, he says and continues collecting all the fragments of his shell. Piece by piece, the snail slowly glues his house back together, but no matter how many different ways he tries, he cannot make it fit together as it should. A hole in the roof remains. Tired out, the poor snail crawls back into his house and falls asleep. Then, in the middle of the night, he wakes up and sees that the hole in his roof affords a view of a breath-taking beautiful star-filled sky. And to think, he sighs contentedly to himself, that I used to not even have a chink!