cially because she was so fond of the little mermaid princesses, her
grandchildren. They were six beautiful children, but the youngest was
the prettiest of all; her skin was as soft and delicate as a roseleaf,
her eyes as blue as the deepest sea, but like all the others she had no
feet, and instead of legs she had a fish's tail.

All the livelong day they used to play in the palace in the great halls,
where living flowers grew out of the walls. When the great amber windows
were thrown open the fish swam in, just as the swallows fly into our
rooms when we open the windows, but the fish swam right up to the little
princesses, ate out of their hands, and allowed themselves to be patted.

[Illustration: _The Merman King had been for many years a widower, but
his old mother kept house for him; she was a clever woman, but so proud
of her noble birth that she wore twelve oysters on her tail, while the
other grandees were only allowed six._]

Outside the palace was a large garden, with fiery red and deep blue
trees, the fruit of which shone like gold, while the flowers glowed like
fire on their ceaselessly waving stalks. The ground was of the finest
sand, but it was of a blue phosphorescent tint. Everything was bathed in
a wondrous blue light down there; you might more readily have supposed
yourself to be high up in the air, with only the sky above and below
you, than that you were at the bottom of the ocean. In a dead calm you
could just catch a glimpse of the sun like a purple flower with a
stream of light radiating from its calyx.

Each little princess had her own little plot of garden, where she could
dig and plant just as she liked. One made her flower-bed in the shape of
a whale; another thought it nice to have hers like a little mermaid; but
the youngest made hers quite round like the sun, and she would only have
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