and then the young lady
cockchafers turned up their feelers and said, "She has only two legs!
how ugly that looks." "She has no feelers," said another. "Her waist is
quite slim. Pooh! she is like a human being."

"Oh, she is ugly," said all the lady cockchafers. The cockchafer who had
run away with her believed all the others when they said she was ugly.
He would have nothing more to say to her, and told her she might go
where she liked. Then he flew down with her from the tree and placed her
on a daisy, and she wept at the thought that she was so ugly that even
the cockchafers would have nothing to say to her. And all the while she
was really the loveliest creature that one could imagine, and as tender
and delicate as a beautiful rose leaf.

During the whole summer poor little Thumbelina lived quite alone in the
wide forest. She wove herself a bed with blades of grass and hung it up
under a broad leaf, to protect herself from the rain. She sucked the
honey from the flowers for food and drank the dew from their leaves
every morning.

So passed away the summer and the autumn, and then came the winter--the
long, cold winter. All the birds who had sung to her so sweetly had
flown away, and the trees and the flowers had withered. The large
shamrock under the shelter of which she had lived was now rolled
together and shriveled up; nothing remained but a yellow, withered
stalk. She felt dreadfully cold, for her clothes were torn, and she was
herself so frail and delicate that she was nearly frozen to death. It
began to snow, too; and the snowflakes, as they fell upon her, were like
a whole shovelful falling upon one of us, for we are tall, but she was
only an inch high. She wrapped herself in a dry leaf, but it cracked in
the middle and could not keep her warm, and she shivered with cold.

Near the wood in which she had been living was a large cornfield, but
the corn had been cut a long time; nothing remained but the bare, dry
stubble, standing up out of the frozen ground. It was to her like
struggling through a large wood.

Oh! how she shivered with the cold. She came at last to the door of a
field mouse, who had a little den under the corn stubble. There dwelt
the field mouse in warmth and comfort, with a whole roomful of corn, a
kitchen, and a beautiful dining room. Poor Thumbelina stood before the
door, just like a little beggar girl, and asked for a small piece of
barleycorn, for she had been without a morsel to eat