Page:The grandmother; a story of country life in Bohemia.pdf/215

209 them beautiful stories and merry songs. The mother, indeed, found no pleasure either in the stories or in the songs; she preferred to remain in her sitting room and read books from the castle library, and when Grandmother said: "Tell us something from those histories," the mother complied with her request; but the children were not half so interested as when she told them about the life in Vienna; and when the spinners said: "How beautiful it must be in such a city," not desiring, however, to see it, the children thought: "Oh, that we were grown up, so that we could go there, too."

All, except the mother, liked best to listen when Grandmother told stories about princesses with golden stars upon their foreheads, about knights and princes turned by enchantment into dogs and lions, or even into stones, about nuts, in whose shells were folded whole wardrobes of magnificent garments, about golden castles and seas, at whose bottom lived water nymphs. The mother never suspected, while she combed Barunka's hair, that the child, buried in deep reverie, and gazing out of the window, saw upon the bare hillside and the snow-covered valley, a garden of paradise, a palace of costly stones, birds of brilliant plumage, ladies, whose hair of pure gold, came down to their feet; that the frozen river changed for her into a blue, billowy sea, upon whose waves nymphs sailed in pearly shells, Sultan, who lay snoring stretched upon the floor, never dreamed of the honor the boys gave him when they looked upon him as an enchanted prince. How pleasant it was in the room as soon as it was dusk! Vorsa closed the