flowers of a rosy hue like its beams. She was a curious child, quiet and
thoughtful, and while the other sisters decked out their gardens with
all kinds of extraordinary objects which they got from wrecks, she would
have nothing besides the rosy flowers like the sun up above, except a
statue of a beautiful boy. It was hewn out of the purest white marble
and had gone to the bottom from some wreck. By the statue she planted a
rosy red weeping willow which grew splendidly, and the fresh delicate
branches hung round and over it, till they almost touched the blue sand
where the shadows showed violet, and were ever moving like the branches.
It looked as if the leaves and the roots were playfully interchanging
kisses.

Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to hear about the world of human
beings up above; she made her old grandmother tell her all that she knew
about ships and towns, people and animals. But above all it seemed
strangely beautiful to her that up on the earth the flowers were
scented, for they were not so at the bottom of the sea; also that the
woods were green, and that the fish which were to be seen among the
branches could sing so loudly and sweetly that it was a delight to
listen to them. You see the grandmother called little birds fish, or the
mermaids would not have understood her, as they had never seen a bird.

'When you are fifteen,' said the grandmother, 'you will be allowed to
rise up from the sea and sit on the rocks in the moonlight, and look at
the big ships sailing by, and you will also see woods and towns.'

One of the sisters would be fifteen in the following year, but the
others,--well, they were each one year younger than the other, so that
the youngest had five whole years to wait before she would be allowed to
come up from the bottom, to see what things were like on earth. But each