Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/82

 like the sea. Red and yellow flowers grew amongst the ruins, and the hedges were covered with wild hops and blooming convolvulus. In the evening the moon rose round and full, and the hay stacks in the meadows filled the air with their sweet scent. These were scenes never to be forgotten. “It is lovely here also in autumn,” said the little maiden; and then the scene changed. The sky appeared higher and more beautifully blue, while the forest glowed with colours of red, green, and gold. The hounds were off to the chase, large flocks of wild birds flew screaming over the Huns’ graves, where the blackberry bushes twined round the old ruins. The dark-blue sea was dotted with white sails, and in the barns sat old women, maidens, and children, picking hops into a large tub. The young ones sang songs, and the old ones told Fairy tales of wizards and witches. There could be nothing more pleasant than all this. “Again,” said the maiden, “it is beautiful here in winter.” Then in a moment all the trees were covered with hoar-frost, so that they looked like white coral. The snow crackled beneath the feet as if every one had on new boots, and one shooting star after another fell from the sky. In warm rooms there could be seen the Christmas trees decked out with presents, and lighted up amid festivities and joy. In the country farm-houses could be heard the sound of the violin, and there were games for apples, so that even the poorest child could say, “It is beautiful in winter.” And beautiful indeed were all the scenes which the maiden showed to the little boy, and always around them floated the fragrance of the elder-blossom, and ever above them waved the red flag with the white cross under which the old seaman had sailed. The boy who had become a youth, and who had gone as a sailor out into the wide world, and sailed to warm countries where the coffee grew, and to whom the little girl had given an elder-blossom from her bosom for a keepsake, when she took leave of him, placed the flower in his hymn-book, and when he opened it in foreign lands, he always turned to the spot where this flower of remembrance lay, and the more he looked at it, the fresher it appeared. He could, as it were, breathe the homelike fragrance of the woods, and see the little girl looking at him from between the petals of the flower with her clear blue eyes, and hear her whispering, “It is beautiful here at home in spring and summer, in autumn and in winter,” while hundreds of these home scenes passed through his memory. Many years had passed, and he was now an old man seated with his old wife under an elder-tree in full blossom. They were holding each other’s hands just as the great-grandfather and grandmother had done, and spoke, as they did, of olden times and the golden wedding. The little maiden with the blue eyes and with the elder-blossoms in her hair sat in the tree and nodded to them and said, “To-day is the golden wedding.” And then she took two flowers out of her wreath and kissed them, and they shone first like silver and then like gold; and as she placed them on the heads of the old people each flower became a golden crown. And there they sat like a king and queen under the sweetly-scented tree, which still looked like an elder-bush. Then he related to his old wife the story of the Elder-tree mother, just as he had heard it told when he was a little boy, and they