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 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 one promised the others to give a full account of all that she had seen, and found most wonderful on the first day.  Their grandmother could never tell them enough, for there were so many things about which they wanted information.

None of them was so full of longings as the youngest, the very one who had the longest time to wait, and who was so quiet and dreamy.  Many a night she stood by the open windows and looked up through the dark blue water which the fish were lashing with their tails and fins.  She could see the moon and the stars, it is true; their light was pale, but they looked much bigger through the water than they do to our eyes.  When she saw a dark shadow glide between her and them, she knew that it was either a whale swimming above her, or else a ship laden with human beings.  I am certain they never dreamt that a lovely little mermaid was standing down below, stretching up her white hands towards the keel.