Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/187

Rh which it was. Then, one day, as she sat looking at the old woman's sunbonnet with the painted flowers, she noticed that the prettiest of them all was a rose. The old crone had forgotten to take it off her bonnet when she buried the rose-trees in the ground. But that is the way when you don't keep your wits about you!

"What! are there no roses here?" cried Gerda, as she ran among the flower beds, looking and searching, but there were none to be found.

She then sat down and cried, but her hot tears happened to fall just where a rose-tree had sunk into the ground, and when the warm tears moistened the soil the tree shot up suddenly in full bloom, just as when it had disappeared. Gerda embraced it, kissed the roses, and thought of the lovely roses at home, and then of little Kay.

"Oh, how I have been losing my time!" said the little girl. "Why, I was going to find Kay! Do you know where he is?" she asked the roses. "Do you think he is dead, and lost to us?" "He is not dead," said the roses. "We have been under the ground, where all the dead are, but Kay was not there!"

"Thank you," said little Gerda, and she went to the other flowers and looked into their cups and asked: "Do you know where little Kay is?"

Hut all the flowers were standing in the sunshine, dreaming the fairy tale of their own lives. Gerda heard many — very many — of these stories, but none of the flowers knew anything about Kay.

And what did the orange-lily say?

"Do you hear the drum? Rat! Tat! There are only two sounds — always Rat! Tat! Listen to the women's funeral dirge! Listen to the priest's cry! The Hindoo woman is standing in her long red robe on the funeral pile, the flames are enveloping her and her husband's dead body; but the Hindoo woman is thinking of the living being in the circle around her, of him whose eyes burn hotter than the flames, and the fire which penetrates sooner to her heart than the flames which will soon burn her body to ashes. Can the flames of the heart die in the flames of the funeral pile?" "I cannot understand it all!" said little Gerda. "That is the story of my life," said the orange-lily.

What does the convolvulus say? "Over the narrow mountain path looms an old castle; the ivy is climbing, leaf by leaf, up along the old red walls and around the balcony, on which stands a beautiful girl; she bends over the balustrade and looks down the road. No rose is fresher than she; no apple-blossom carried away from the tree by the wind could float more gracefully than she. How her magnificent silk robe rustles! She murmurs: "Will he not come?" "Is it Kay you mean?" asked little Gerda. "I am only thinking about the fairy tale of my life, my dream," answered the convolvulus.