witch; and also for a long distance the only road lay right across a quantity
of warm, bubbling mire, called by the witch her turfmoor. Beyond this
stood her house, in the centre of a strange forest, in which all the trees and
flowers were polypi, half animals and half plants; they looked like serpents
with a hundred heads growing out of the ground. The branches were long
slimy arms, with fingers like flexible worms, moving limb after limb from
the root to the top. All that could be reached in the sea they seized upon,
and held fast, so that it never escaped from their clutches. The little
mermaid was so alarmed at what she saw, that she stood still, and her heart
beat with fear, and she was very nearly turning back; but she thought of the
prince, and of the human soul for which she longed, and her courage
returned. She fastened her long flowing hair round her head, so that the
polypi might not seize hold of it. She laid her hands together across her
bosom, and then she darted forward as a fish shoots through the water,
between the supple arms and fingers of the ugly polypi, which were
stretched out on each side of her. She saw that each held in its grasp
something it had seized with its numerous little arms, as if they were iron
bands. The white skeletons of human beings who had perished at sea, and
had sunk down into the deep waters, skeletons of land animals, oars,
rudders, and chests of ships were lying tightly grasped by their clinging
arms; even a little mermaid, whom they had caught and strangled; and this
seemed the most shocking of all to the little princess.
She now came to a space of marshy ground in the wood, where large, fat
water-snakes were rolling in the mire, and showing their ugly, drab-colored
bodies. In the midst of this spot stood a house, built with the bones of
shipwrecked human beings. There sat the sea witch, allowing a toad to eat
from her mouth, just as people sometimes feed a canary with a piece of
sugar. She called the ugly water-snakes her little chickens, and allowed
them to crawl all over her bosom.
“I know what you want,” said the sea witch; “it is very stupid of you, but
you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess.
You want to get rid of your fish’s tail, and to have two supports instead of it,
