Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/344

312 thing!" "She has no feelers," some said. "How thin her waist is! Fie! she looks like a human being. How ugly she is!" said all the lady cockchafers. And yet Thumbeline was very beautiful. That is what the cockchafer who had caught her thought, but as all others said that she was ugly, he at last also believed it, and would have nothing more to do with her. She might go where she liked. They flew down with her from the tree and put her on a daisy, where she began to cry, because she was so ugly that the cockchafers would not have her, and yet she was the most beautiful being one could imagine, as delicate and tender as the loveliest rose leaf.

Poor Thumbeline lived quite alone in the great forest all through the summer. She plaited a bed with blades of grass for herself, and hung it under a large burdock leaf to protect herself from the rain. She sucked the honey from the flowers and drank the dew which she found on the leaves every morning, and in this way the summer and the autumn passed; but now came the winter — the cold, long winter. All the birds who had sung so beautifully to her Hew away, and the trees and the flowers began to wither. The large burdock leaf under which she had lived shriveled up and there was only a yellow, withered stalk left. She felt the cold terribly, for her clothes were in tatters, and she herself was so tender and small — poor Thumbeline! — that she might easily freeze to death. It began to snow, and every flake that fell on her was to her the same as a whole shovelful would be when thrown over us, for we are great, big people, and she was only an inch in height. She then wrapped herself in a dry leaf, but it did not keep her warm, and she shivered with cold.

Just outside the forest she came to a large corn-held, but the corn had been harvested long ago; only the bare, dry stubble was left on the frozen ground. It looked to her like a big forest which she had to struggle through. Oh, how she trembled with cold! Then she came to the door of a field-mouse's house. It was a little hole under the stubble, where the field-mouse lived in comfort and ease. She had the whole parlor full of corn, and had, besides, a nice kitchen and larder. Poor Thumbeline stood at the door like any poor beggar-girl and asked for a small piece of barleycorn, for she had not had any food for two days.

"Poor little creature!" said the field-mouse, who was really a kind old creature, "come inside my warm room and have some food with me." As she took a liking to Thumbeline, she said, "You may stop with me this winter, but you must keep my room neat and clean, and tell me stories, for I am very fond of them;" and Thumbeline did what the kind old field-mouse asked her, and had a very pleasant time of it.

"We shall soon have visitors," said the field-mouse; "my neighbor generally visits me once a week. He is even better off than I; he has large rooms and goes about in such a beautiful black, velvety fur coat. If only you could get him for a husband, you would be well provided