counterpane. Here she slept at night, but during the day she amused herself
on a table, where the woman had placed a plateful of water. Round this
plate were wreaths of flowers with their stems in the water, and upon it
floated a large tulip-leaf, which served Tiny for a boat. Here the little
maiden sat and rowed herself from side to side, with two oars made of
white horse-hair. It really was a very pretty sight. Tiny could, also, sing so
softly and sweetly that nothing like her singing had ever before been heard.
One night, while she lay in her pretty bed, a large, ugly, wet toad crept
through a broken pane of glass in the window, and leaped right upon the
table where Tiny lay sleeping under her rose-leaf quilt. “What a pretty little
wife this would make for my son,” said the toad, and she took up the
walnut-shell in which little Tiny lay asleep, and jumped through the
window with it into the garden.
In the swampy margin of a broad stream in the garden lived the toad,
with her son. He was uglier even than his mother, and when he saw the
pretty little maiden in her elegant bed, he could only cry, “Croak, croak,
croak.”
“Don’t speak so loud, or she will wake,” said the toad, “and then she
might run away, for she is as light as swan’s down. We will place her on one
of the water-lily leaves out in the stream; it will be like an island to her, she
is so light and small, and then she cannot escape; and, while she is away, we
will make haste and prepare the state-room under the marsh, in which you
are to live when you are married.”
Far out in the stream grew a number of water-lilies, with broad green
leaves, which seemed to float on the top of the water. The largest of these
leaves appeared farther off than the rest, and the old toad swam out to it
with the walnut-shell, in which little Tiny lay still asleep. The tiny little
creature woke very early in the morning, and began to cry bitterly when she
found where she was, for she could see nothing but water on every side of
the large green leaf, and no way of reaching the land. Meanwhile the old
toad was very busy under the marsh, decking her room with rushes and wild
yellow flowers, to make it look pretty for her new daughter-in-law. Then
