LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

took off all his clothes, and the swindlers behaved as if they were handing him each piece of the new suit. They put their hands about his waist and pretended to tie some thing securely. The Emperor turned and twisted himself in front of the glass.

      “Heaven! How well it fits? How beautifully it sets,” said everyone. “The pattern! The colours! It is indeed a noble costume!”

      “They are waiting, outside, with the canopy, Your Majesty,” said the chief master of the ceremonies[10].

      “Very well, I am ready,” said the Emperor; “doesn’t it set well?”

      Once more he turned about in front of the glass.

      “Yes, of course, Your Majesty,” said everybody reverently.

      So the Emperor walked in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and everybody in the streets and at the windows said:

      “Lord! How splendid the Emperor’s new clothes are. What a lovely coat! How beautiful!”

      Nobody wanted to be stupid or incompetent. None of the Emperor’s costumes had such a success.

      “But he is naked!” suddenly said a little child.

      “Really. Listen to the innocent child”, said its father.

      And one whispered to the other the child’s words:

      “That little boy says that the Emperor is naked!”

      “The Emperor is naked!” the whole crowd was shouting at last; and the Emperor’s shuddered. It seemed to him they were right.

      “But all the same,” he thought to himself, “I must go through with the procession”.

      So he held himself more proudly than before. And the procession went on.

      The Princess On The Pea

      Once upon a time there was a Prince, and he wanted to marry a Princess; but she must be a real Princess. So he traveled all the world over to find one, but everywhere there was some obstacle. There were Princesses enough, but he was not quite certain whether they were real proper princesses. There was always something not perfectly correct. So he came back home and was very sad. He wanted to find a real princess.

      One evening there was a terrible storm. It lightened and thundered and the rain poured down. It was quite fearful. There came a knock at the town gate and the old King went off to open it.

      It was a gracious Princess. She was standing outside. But what a figure she was with the rain and bad weather! The water ran all down her hair and her clothes and in at the toes of her shoes and out at the heels. She said she was a real Princess.

      “Ah, we’ll check it”, thought the old Queen to herself.

      But she didn’t say anything. She went into the bedroom, took all the clothes off the bed and laid one dried pea on the bottom of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on top of the pea, and then twenty eiderdowns on top of the mattresses. There the Princess was sleeping that night.

      In the morning they ask her how she was sleeping.

      “Oh, dreadfully badly,” said the Princess; “I hardly closed my eyes the whole night! There was something terrible in my bed! There was something hard I lay on. It’s quite dreadful”.

      Then everybody could see that this was a real Princess. She felt the pea through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eiderdowns. Nobody could have such a tender skin but a real Princess.

      So the Prince married her. Now he knew that he had a real Princess.

      They put the pea in the treasure chamber, where everyone can see it nowadays.

      The Little Mermaid

      Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the cornflowers, and as clear as the clearest glass. But it is very deep, deeper than any anchor-cable can reach. Down there live the sea people.

      Now you must not think that there is only a white sandy bottom there. No, no: there the most extraordinary trees and plants grow, which have stems and leaves. They stir at the slightest movement of the water. All the fish, big and little, flit among the branches, like the birds in the air up here.

      In the deepest place of all lies the sea king’s palace. The walls are of coral, and the tall windows are of the clearest amber. But the roof is of mussel-shells. They open and shut themselves as the water moves. It all looks beautiful, for in every shell lie shining pearls. A single one of these pearls can be the principal ornament in a Queen’s crown.

      The sea King is a widower for many years. His old mother kept house for him. She was a clever woman, and proud of her rank. She was fond of the little sea Princesses, her grandchildren. There were six of them, beautiful children, but the youngest was the prettiest of them all. Her skin was as bright and pure as a rose-leaf, her eyes were as blue as the deepest lake. But like all the rest, she had no feet-her body ended in a fish’s tail.

      All the day they were playing in the palace in the great halls. The big windows of amber stood open, and the fishes swam in through them.

      Outside the palace there was a large garden with fiery red and dark blue trees, whose fruit shone like gold, and their flowers were like a flaming fire. They were always moving their stems and leaves.

      The ground was of the finest sand, but blue like the flame of sulphur. Down there lay a wonderful blue sheen. In a calm you could see the sun: it looked like a purple flower.

      Each of the young Princesses had her little plot in the garden, where she could dig and plant as she liked. Some Princesses made their flower-bed in the shape of a whale, other preferred the shape of a little mermaid, but the youngest made hers quite round, like the sun. She only had flowers that shone red. She was an odd child, quiet and thoughtful. Whereas her other sisters were decking out their gardens with the quaintest things, that they took from sunken ships, she only had red flowers that were like the sun and a pretty statue of marble. It was of a handsome boy, which came down to the sea bottom from a wreck.

      Beside the statue she planted a rose-red weeping willow[11], which grew splendidly and hung its fresh branches over it, right down to the blue sand bottom.

      She liked to dream about the world of men up above. The old grandmother told her all she knew about ships and horses and men and animals. It seemed to her particularly delightful that up there on earth the flowers smelt sweet (which they did not at the sea bottom). She was surprised that the woods were green and the fish which one saw among the branches could sing loud and prettily. It was a joy to hear them. It was the little birds that the grandmother called fish. The little mermaid never saw a bird.

      “When you’re fifteen years old,” said the grandmother, “I’ll allow you to come up out of the sea and sit on the rocks in the moonlight. You’ll see big ships and forests and houses”.

      The eldest sister promised the next one to tell her everything about the outer world. Of course, for their grandmother didn’t tell them enough. There were very many things the mermaids wanted to know about.

      The youngest mermaid was quiet and thoughtful. Many nights she stood at the open window and gazed up through the dark blue waters where the fish were waving their fins and tails. She could see the moon and the stars. Of course they were very pale, but they looked much larger than they do to our eyes.

      If a black passed along beneath them, she knew that it was either a whale, or even a ship with a number of people in it. Certainly they never thought that beneath them there was a lovely little mermaid.

      And now the eldest Princess was fifteen years old and could rise up above the surface of the sea.

      When she came back she had a hundred things to tell. The most beautiful thing, she said, was to lie on a sandbank in the moonlight in the calm sea, and to see the big town where the lights twinkled like hundreds of stars, and to hear the sound of music and the noise of carts and people, and see all the church towers and hear the bells.

      The

Скачать книгу