Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/330

 I wish to say something about hares. I have really overtaken more than one hare, when I have been seated on the engine in front of a railway train. I often do so. One can then so easily judge of one’s own swiftness. Not long ago, I crushed the hind legs of a young hare. He had been running a long time before the engine; he had no idea that I was travelling there. At last he had to stop in his career, and the engine ran over his hind legs, and crushed them; for I sat upon it. I left him lying there, and rode on farther. I call that conquering him; but I do not want the prize.”

“It really seems to me,” thought the wild rose, though she did not express her opinion aloud—it is not in her nature to do so,—though it would have been quite as well if she had; “it certainly seems to me that the sunbeam ought to have had the honour of receiving the first prize. The sunbeam flies in a few minutes along the immeasurable path from the sun to us. It arrives in such strength that all nature awakes to loveliness and beauty; we roses blush and exhale fragrance in its presence. Our worshipful judges don’t appear to have noticed this at all. Were I the sunbeam, I would give each one of them a sun-stroke; but that would only make them mad, and they are mad enough already. I only hope,” continued the rose, “that peace may reign in the wood. It is glorious to bloom, to be fragrant, and to live; to live in story and in song. The sunbeam will outlive us all.”

“What is the first prize?” asked the earthworm, who had overslept the time, and only now came up.

“It contains a free admission to a cabbage-garden,” replied the mule. “I proposed that as one of the prizes. The hare most decidedly must have it; and I, as an active and thoughtful member of the committee, took especial care that the prize should be one of advantage to him; so now he is provided for. The snail can now sit on the fence, and lick up moss and sunshine. He has also been appointed one of the first judges of swiftness in racing. It is worth much to know that one of the members is a man of talent in the thing men call a ‘committee.’ I must say I expect much in the future; we have already made such a good beginning.”

 

“ a dreadful story!” exclaimed a hen who did not live in that part of the town where the circumstance happened, “it so frightened me that I did not dare to go to sleep in the hen-house all night, and it is not very pleasant to stand so long on the ladder.” And then she began to relate to the other hens who were on the roosting perch above, the story she had heard, till even the cock let his comb droop, it was so dreadful.