This is how Star Square got its name.
It was surrounded by tall houses and covered with a glass top, somewhat like a huge circus.
In the middle of the glass top, so high that it took your breath away, was the largest lamp in the world.
It was a tremendous round glass ball hung on heavy cables with an iron band around it that made it look like the planet Saturn.
The light it cast was so beautiful and so unlike anything else in the world that people had named the wonderful lamp "Star".
And that is how the square came to be known as Star Square.
No other light was needed in the square, nor in the houses, nor in any of the nearby streets.
The Star lit every nook and cranny in every house, and the people who lived there never used lamps or candles.
The driver was looking over the carriages and over the tops of the coachmen's hats.
"What can you see?
What's going on there?" the doctor asked anxiously, peering over his driver's back.
But Doctor Caspar was short and couldn't see a thing, especially since he was nearsighted and had lost his spectacles.
The driver told him all he saw.
And this is what he saw.
There was great excitement in the square.
People were running to and fro across the round space.
It seemed as if the whole place were spinning like a merry-go-round.
People rushed about to get a better view of what was happening above.
The great lamp was as bright as the sun. It blinded them.
People threw back their heads and shielded their eyes with their hands.
"There he is!
There he is!" they cried.
"There!
Over there!"
"Where?
Where?"
"Higher up!"
"Tibul!
Tibul!"
Hundreds of fingers pointed to the left.
They were pointing at a very ordinary-looking house.
All the windows on all six floors of the house had been thrown wide open.
Heads stuck out of every window.
The heads looked very colourful: some had on tasselled nightcaps, some had on pink bonnets with red curls sticking out, some had on kerchiefs. Higher up, in the rooms where poor young poets, artists and actors lived, there were happy-looking beardless faces lost in clouds of tobacco smoke and lovely young women whose golden hair lay like a cloud on their shoulders.
The house, with its open windows and brightly-coloured heads poking out, was just like a large cage of goldfinches.
The owners of all these heads were trying to see something very important that was happening on the roof.
This was just as impossible as trying to see your own ears without a mirror.
These people who wanted to see the roof of their own house used the crowd below as a mirror.
Those on the ground could see everything, they were shouting and waving their arms. Some were overjoyed, others were terribly angry.
A tiny figure was moving along the roof.
It was slowly and carefully climbing down the steep incline.
The iron roofing clattered under its feet.
The little figure waved its cape for balance, just as a tight rope-walker in the circus uses a yellow Chinese umbrella.
It was Tibul the Acrobat.
The people shouted:
"Bravo, Tibul!
Bravo, Tibul!"
"Hang on!
Remember how you walked a rope at the fair!"
"He won't fall down!