Nur, who had forgotten all about this young man as soon as possible.

Thereupon Nur the wise placed a series of lenses and mirrors before
the king in an order so exact that it looked like disorder, but
which enabled him to show the king in a mirror the form of George of
Blanchelande as he was when the nixies carried him away. By a lucky
choice and a skilful adjustment of instruments the dwarf was able to
reproduce for the love-sick king all the adventures of the son of that
Countess to whom a white rose announced her end. And the following,
expressed in words, is what the little man saw in all the reality of
form and colour.

When George was borne away in the icy arms of the daughters of the lake
the water pressed upon his eyes and his breast and he felt that he was
about to die. And yet he heard songs that sounded like a caress and his
whole being was permeated by a sense of delicious freshness. When
he opened his eyes he found himself in a grotto whose crystal columns
reflected the delicate tints of the rainbow. At the end of the grotto
was a great sea shell of mother-of-pearl iridescent with the tenderest
colours, and this served as a dais to the throne of coral and seaweed
of the Queen of the Nixies. But the face of the Sovereign of the waters
shone with a light more tender than either the mother-of-pearl or the
crystal. She smiled at the child which her women brought her, and her
green eyes lingered long upon him.

"Friend," she said at last, "be welcome into our world, in which you
shall be spared all sorrow. For you neither dry lessons nor rough
sports; nothing coarse shall remind you of earth and its toil, for you
only the songs and the dances and the love of the nixies."

And indeed the women of the green hair taught the child music and
dancing and a thousand graces. They loved to bind his forehead with the
cockle shells that decked their own tresses. But he, remembering his
country, gnawed his clenched hands with impatience.

Years passed and George longed with a passion unceasing to see the earth
again, the rude earth where the sun burns and where the snow hardens,
the mother earth where one suffers, where one loves, the earth where he
had seen Honey-Bee, and where he longed to see her again. He had in the
meantime grown to be a tall lad with a fine golden down on his upper
lip. Courage came with the beard, and so one day he presented himself
before the Queen of the Nixies and bowing low, said:

"Madam