Mouse-Maid Made Mouse

A holy hermit, performing his ritual ablutions by a river, caught a baby mouse that fell from a hawk's talons into his very hand. Moved by compassion, he used his spiritual power to transform her into a human girl and raised her as his own daughter, since his wife had always longed for a child.

When the girl reached the age for marriage, her devoted father, wanting only the very best for her, decided to offer her to the most powerful being in existence, and summoned the sun himself as a potential husband. But the girl found the sun too hot and overwhelming, and asked for someone even greater.

The sun named the cloud as his own superior, since even he could be hidden by it. The girl rejected the cloud too, as too cold and dark, so the holy man asked the cloud who was greater still, and was told the wind. When the wind proved too restless and unsettled for her taste, she asked for someone greater than him too, and the wind named the mountain, immovable and firm.

The mountain, however, proved too rough and stiff for the girl's liking, and when the holy man asked the mountain who exceeded even his own strength, the mountain gave a surprising answer: the mouse, who alone could burrow through and undermine even a mountain's solid mass.

The moment the holy man summoned a mouse and presented him to his daughter, something in her responded instantly and completely -- a recognition of "my own kind" that no amount of grandeur in the sun, cloud, wind, or mountain had been able to produce. She asked her father to change her back into a mouse so she could live authentically with her own kind, and he granted her wish.