stal. Many hundreds of colossal shells,--some of a deep
red, others of a grass green,--with blue fire in them, stood in rows on
each side. These lighted up the whole salon, and shone through the walls
so that the sea was also illuminated. Innumerable fishes, great and
small, swam past the crystal walls; on some of them the scales glowed
with a purple brilliance, and on others shone like silver and gold.
Through the halls flowed a broad stream, and in it danced the mermen and
the mermaids to the music of their own sweet singing.

No one on earth has such lovely voices as they, but the little mermaid
sang more sweetly than all. The whole court applauded her with hands and
tails, and for a moment her heart felt quite gay, for she knew she had
the sweetest voice either on earth or in the sea. But soon she thought
again of the world above her; she could not forget the charming prince,
nor her sorrow that she had not an immortal soul like his. She crept
away silently out of her father's palace, and while everything within
was gladness and song, she sat in her own little garden, sorrowful and
alone. Then she heard the bugle sounding through the water and thought:
"He is certainly sailing above, he in whom my wishes center and in whose
hands I should like to place the happiness of my life. I will venture
all for him and to win an immortal soul. While my sisters are dancing in
my father's palace I will go to the sea witch, of whom I have always
been so much afraid; she can give me counsel and help."

Then the little mermaid went out from her garden and took the road to
the foaming whirlpools, behind which the sorceress lived. She had never
been that way before. Neither flowers nor grass grew there; nothing but
bare, gray, sandy ground stretched out to the whirlpool, where the
water, like foaming mill wheels, seized everything that came within its
reach and cast it into the fathomless deep. Through the midst of these
crushing whirlpools the little mermaid was obliged to pass before she
could reach the dominions of the sea witch. Then, for a long distance,
the road lay across a stretch of warm, bubbling mire, called by the
witch her turf moor.

Beyond this was the witch's house, which stood in the center of a
strange forest, where all the trees and flowers were polypi, half
animals and half plants. They looked like serpents with a hundred heads,
growing out of the ground. The branches were long, slimy arms, with
fingers like fle