A BOOK OF

FAMOUS FAIRY TALES

THE SNOW QUEEN

BY HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.

CHAPTER I.

ET us sit by our Christmas fire, children, and watch the bright, flickering flames, whilst I tell you of what happened once long ago.

In a very large town, where there were

so many houses and people, and such

little room for them that there was no chance of their having gardens, and so that the most of them had to be contented with flower-pots in their windows, two little children lived, who were, however, better off than most folk. They were not brother and sister, though they were as fond of one another as if they had been.

The parents of these two children lived at the bottom of a court. Their houses were opposite one another, and quite at the end, where the blank wall of a neighboring house joined the two together. The children and their parents lived right on the top floor, and from a little window in each house they could actually step

out and cross over to each other's homes, because the gutter pipe which ran across the blank wall was broad that they could walk upon it; and the windows were quite close, the houses being so funnily built — like those old houses at Chester, where each floor comes farther out than the one underneath it.

Each house had a large wooden box, in which grew a little rose tree, mustard and cress, and other little plants. The parents fixed the boxes close to the gutter, so that they nearly reached from one window to another, and looked like banks of flowers. Pretty everlasting peas grew over the edge of the boxes, and the rose trees twined their long sprigs about the windows, and grew so well that they touched each other with their branches.

In the beautiful summer weather the children could fix their stools on to the gutter, and sit under the rose trees. It was heavenly to sit in the bright sun and play together; but when the winter came these pleasures were impossible, for the windows were closed up with the frost. So they warmed some pennies on the stove and laid them on the frozen pane, which gave them a nice little round peephole, and then a soft bright eye beamed from each window, and Karl and Gerda could look at one another. But if they wanted to talk, they had many stairs to go up and down before they could meet, and now the snowflakes were flying all around.

But to understand our story properly, we must leave Karl and Gerda, and tell what had happened ages before.

Once there lived a wicked Goblin (the Evil One), so wicked that his greatest happiness was to do harm to other people. And one day when he was at his very

happiest, and therefore wickedest, he made a lookingglass, which possessed the power of making everything good and beautiful that was reflected on its surface smaller, while all that was worthless and bad-looking was made larger. Seen in this glass, the most lovely landscapes looked like cooked spinach, and the best amongst mankind looked horribly ugly as if standing on his head. Faces were so distorted that friends could not know them; and if one had a single freckle, it looked as if it went over one's nose and mouth. The Evil One thought this looked charming; but, worst of all, if a good, pious thought came into a human being's mind, a flaw appeared in the looking-glass. All who went to the Evil One's school for he kept a schoolspread the fame of the wonderful glass, and declared that people might now for the first time see how the world and its inhabitants really looked. The devil's scholars carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a human being left who had not been seen distorted on its surface. Now they wanted to fly with it to the regions of the blessed; but the higher they flew with the glass, the more it cracked, and they could scarcely hold it; but they flew higher and higher, and nearer and nearer the sun, till the glass got so hot that it slipped out of their hands, and fell upon the earth, where it broke into millions and millions of pieces. But this was a greater misfortune than ever, for some of the bits of glass were hardly so large as a grain of sand, and these flew about the world, and when they lodged in anybody's eye, they remained there, and the person thenceforth saw everything upside down, and only approved wicked things; for every tiny piece of

glass possessed the qualities that had belonged to the whole. Some human beings got a piece right through the heart, and this was shocking, for their hearts became as cold as a lump of ice, and the poor things became wicked and bad. Other pieces were set as spectacles, and it was very hard for those who wore them to be good or true; and that Evil Spirit laughed till he shook his sides, so delighted was he with his mischief, whilst, alas! alas! the little bits of glass flew everywhere.

CHAPTER II.

OW we will go back to Karl and Gerda, who were standing beside the grandmother one winter's day watching the snowflakes. "The white bees are swarming," said the grandmother.

"Have they a Queen Bee?" said the little boy, for he knew all about the bees.

"To be sure," said the grandmother,

"she is flying in the thickest of the swarm; she is the largest of them all, and never stays upon the ground, but flutters up again to the black clouds. She often flies through the streets of the town at midnight, and peeps into the windows, and then the snowflakes freeze into such odd shapes like flowers."

"Yes, I have seen that," said both of the children. And now they knew it was true.

"Can the Snow Queen come in here?" asked the little girl.

"Let her come," said the little boy; "I will put her on the warm stove, and then she must melt."

In the evening, when little Karl went home, and had half undressed, he climbed on a chair up to the window, peeped through the little hole, and saw some snowflakes falling, the largest amongst which alighted on the edge of one of the flower boxes, and kept increasing and increasing till it became a full-grown