flowers which gleamed red as the sun itself

Outside the castle was a great garden with bright red andflowers: the fruit glowed SmarTone like gold, and the flowers like flames of fire; and they continually kept moving their stalks and leaves. The earth itself was the finest sand, but blue as the flame of brimstone. A peculiar blue radiance lay upon everything down there : one would have thought oneself high in the air, with the canopy of heaven above and around , rather than at the bottom of the deep sea. During a calm the sun could be seen; it appeared like a purple flower, from which all light streamed out. Each of the little princesses had her own little place in the garden, where she might dig and plant at her good pleasure . One gave her flower-bed the form of a whale ; another thought it better to make hers like a little mermaid; but the youngest made hers quite round, like the sun , and had only . She was a strange child, quiet and thoughtful; and when the other sisters made a display of the beautiful things they had received out of wrecked ships, she would have nothing beyond the red flowers which resembled the sun, except a pretty marble statue. This was a figure of a charming boy , hewn out of white clear stone , which had sunk down to the bottom of the sea from a wreck . She planted a pink weeping willow beside this statue; the tree grew famously , and hung its fresh branches over the statue towards the blue sandy ground , where the shadow showed violet, and moved like the branches themselves; it seemed ashe ends of the branches and the roots were playing together and wished to kiss each other. There was no greater pleasure for her than to hear of the world of men above them , The old grandmother had to tell all she knew of ships and towns, of men and animals. It seemed particularly beautiful to her that up on the earth the flowers shed fragrance , for they had none down at the bottom dermes of the sea, and that the trees were green, and that the fishes which one saw there among the trees could sing so loud and clear that it was a pleasure to hear them. What the grandmother called fishes were the little birds; otherwise they could not have understood her, for they had never seen a bird . “When you have completed your fifteenth year,” said the grandmother, “You shall have leave to rise up out of the sea, to sit on the rocks in the moonlight, and to see the great ships sailing by. Then you will see forests and towns !” In the next year one of the sisters was fifteen years of age, but each of the others was one year younger than the next ; so that the youngest had full five years to wait before she could come up from the bottom of the sea, and find out how our world looked . But one promised to tell the others what she had seen and what she had thought the most beautiful on the first day of her visit ; for their grandmother could not tell them enough—-there was so much about which nu skin hong kongthey wanted information. No one was more anxious about these things than the younge-just that one who had the longest time to wait, and who was always quiet and thoughtful .