picture-book could have more beautiful colors. Gerda jumped for joy, and
played till the sun went down behind the tall cherry-trees; then she slept in
an elegant bed with red silk pillows, embroidered with colored violets; and
then she dreamed as pleasantly as a queen on her wedding day. The next
day, and for many days after, Gerda played with the flowers in the warm
sunshine. She knew every flower, and yet, although there were so many of
them, it seemed as if one were missing, but which it was she could not tell.
One day, however, as she sat looking at the old woman’s hat with the
painted flowers on it, she saw that the prettiest of them all was a rose. The
old woman had forgotten to take it from her hat when she made all the roses
sink into the earth. But it is difficult to keep the thoughts together in
everything; one little mistake upsets all our arrangements.
“What, are there no roses here?” cried Gerda; and she ran out into the
garden, and examined all the beds, and searched and searched. There was
not one to be found. Then she sat down and wept, and her tears fell just on
the place where one of the rose-trees had sunk down. The warm tears
moistened the earth, and the rose-tree sprouted up at once, as blooming as
when it had sunk; and Gerda embraced it and kissed the roses, and thought
of the beautiful roses at home, and, with them, of little Kay.
“Oh, how I have been detained!” said the little maiden, “I wanted to seek
for little Kay. Do you know where he is?” she asked the roses; “do you
think he is dead?”
And the roses answered, “No, he is not dead. We have been in the ground
where all the dead lie; but Kay is not there.”
“Thank you,” said little Gerda, and then she went to the other flowers,
and looked into their little cups, and asked, “Do you know where little Kay
is?” But each flower, as it stood in the sunshine, dreamed only of its own
little fairy tale of history. Not one knew anything of Kay. Gerda heard many
stories from the flowers, as she asked them one after another about him.
And what, said the tiger-lily? “Hark, do you hear the drum? - ‘turn,
turn,’-there are only two notes, always, ‘turn, turn.’ Listen to the women’s
