Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/408

 376 and the fishes then swam into them, just as the swallows fly in to us when we open the windows; but the fishes swam right up to the little princesses, ate from their hands, and let themselves be stroked.

Outside the palace was a large garden with fiery-red and dark-blue trees; the fruits beamed like gold and the flowers like burning flames, because they continually moved their stalks and leaves to and fro. The ground itself was of the finest sand, but as blue as sulphur flames. A strange blue light shone upon everything down there. It was easier to believe that one was high up in the air, with only the blue sky above and beneath one, than that one was at the bottom of the sea.

In calm weather one could see the sun, which looked like a purple flower from the cup of which all the light streamed forth.

Each of the young princesses had her own little plot in the garden, where she might dig and plant as she pleased. One gave her flower-bed the shape of a whale, another preferred hers to resemble a little mermaid; but the youngest made hers quite round like the sun, and grew only flowers that gleamed red like the sun itself. She was a strange child, quiet and thoughtful; and when her other sisters decked themselves out with the most wonderful things which they obtained from wrecked ships, she cared only for her flowers, which were like the sun up yonder, and for a beautiful marble statue, a beautiful boy hewed out of pure white stone, which had sunk to the bottom of the sea from a wreck. She planted close by the statue a rose-colored weeping willow, which grew luxuriantly, and hung its fresh branches right over it down to the blue, sandy ground. Its shadow was violet and moved to and fro like its branches. It looked as if the top and the roots played at kissing one another.

Nothing gave her greater joy than to hear about the world above and its people. Her old grandmother had to tell her all she knew about ships and towns, about human beings and animals. What seemed to her particularly strange and beautiful was that up on the earth the flowers gave out a fragrance which they did not do at the bottom of the sea, and that the woods were green, and the fish, which were to be seen there among the branches, could sing so loudly and beautifully that it did one's heart good to hear them. It was the little birds that her grandmother used to call fishes, for otherwise the mermaids would not have understood her, as they had never seen a bird.

"When you are fifteen years old," said her grandmother, "you will be allowed to rise to the surface of the sea and sit on the rocks in the moonlight and look at the big ships which sail past; and forests and towns you shall also see."

The following year one of the sisters would be fifteen, but the others—well, each of them was a year younger than the other, so the youngest would have to wait five long years before she could venture up from the bottom of the sea and have a look at the world above. But they