Thumbelina and the Mysterious World: A Fairy Tale Sleep Story

Full transcript

In a small room in Denmark, in the quiet after a witch had gone, a childless woman knelt with a flower pot cradled in her lap and a single barleycorn pressed into the dark soil. And from the flower that rose there came Thumbelina, a girl no larger than a thumb. This is the tale that Hans Christian Andersen set down in Copenhagen in the winter of 1835 and gave to the world as the story of Tomalese, a child the size of a thumb, born from a barley plant into a life that would seem far too large for her. She weighed less than a petal, and she had no mother of her own blood, and no place yet in the world that was truly hers.

If these old tales help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you beside the fire. From her first waking breath, one riddle waited under the hole of her small life. How does a girl know larger than a thumb, planted from a barleycorn and carried off by every creature who wants her, at last find a home and a husband exactly her own size? Hold that question softly the way the woman held the pot, for the answer takes a long and winding road. The tiny girl was fair beyond anything the woman had seen.

Her skin was fine as the inside of a rose. Her eyes were bright, and though she stood no higher than a thumb from tip to knuckle, she was perfect in every part, whole and finished and lovely. The woman kissed her upon the brow and called her Thumbelina, for there was no other name that fit so small a wonder, and she set about making her a place to sleep. Everything in that room was vast to a girl so little. A teacup could have been a bathing pool. A single sewing needle could have been a spear taller than herself.

The world that the woman thought of as ordinary and near was, to Thumbelina, a country without edges. And somewhere in that country, though no one yet knew it, there was a place shaped exactly to her size and a heart that would one day fit against her own. For a bed the woman chose a walnut shell, polished until the grain gleamed like dark honey, and she lined it soft. Blue violet petals became the mattress, heaped and pressed until they held the shape of a sleeping child, and a single rose leaf, curled at its edges, became the coverlet drawn up beneath Thumbelina's chin. There she slept at night, safe upon the tabletop by the window, and in the daytime she would play, and she would sing, and her voice was so sweet and so small and so clear that no one in that house or any near it had ever heard the like. She had a little dish of water for a lake, ringed round with a chain of flowers, And upon it floated a tulip petal for a boat, and she would row from one side to the other with two white horse-hairs for oars, and sing all the while.

It was a small and gentle happiness, and it might have lasted if the world had let so lovely a thing be. But beauty that small draws the eyes of the whole marsh and meadow, and a girl who fits in a walnut shell, is a girl that every creature thinks it might carry home. One after another, they would come for her. The toad from the water, the beetle from the air, the mole from the ground beneath. And each would want to keep her, and from each, she would have to slip away, small and frightened and brave, still searching for the one who was made to her measure.

But go back for a moment to the longing that made her at all, because Thumbelina began not with a barleycorn but with a wish. There was a woman who wanted, more than anything the world could offer, a child of her own. She had waited and hoped, and the years had worn thin around the empty place in her house. And at last she went to seek out a witch, for she knew no other door left to knock upon. She came before the old woman and said, plainly and without shame, that her whole heart ached for a little child.

And she asked whether there was any way in all the world that such a wish might be granted. The witch did not laugh at her. She said that the thing could be done. She gave the woman a single barleycorn, and it was not the common barley that grows in the farmer's field and feeds the cattle through the winter. It was another kind, she said. The woman was to take it home and plant it in a flower pot and wait and watch what came of it, and in payment the woman gave over what small coins she carried and went home with the seed closed inside her hand as though it were already the child itself.

Now there is a second doorway into this same story, and it is worth pausing at because not every teller opens the tale the same way. When the story first crossed the sea into English, carried by the translator Mary Howett in 1847, she began it a little differently. In her telling, there is no witch consulted behind a closed door. Instead, a poor beggar woman comes to the cottage of a peasant's wife, hungry and asking for food, and in return for a little kindness at the table, she gives the barleycorn as a gift, a small and grateful payment for bread. The one opening has a witch and a bargain struck in secret. The other has a beggar and and a loaf shared freely. Both lead to the same flower pot, the same soil, the same slow miracle rising from the earth. And so the old tellers say, it matters little which door the listener chooses to walk through, whether by witchcraft purchased or kindness repaid.

The barleycorn came into that house, and the woman planted it, and the child within it began to grow toward the light. The seed did not keep her waiting. Almost at once a fine large flower shot up out of the soil, and it looked much like a tulip. Its petals shut tight and colored red and yellow, as though it were still only a bud holding its breath. The woman looked at it and thought it a lovely flower indeed, and she bent and kissed the closed red and yellow petals, and in the very moment that her lips touched them, the flower gave a soft sound, like a small sigh, and opened wide. It was a true tulip in shape.

Anyone could see that. But there, seated upon the green cushion at the very center of the blossom, small and delicate and alive, sat the little girl. That was the beginning of her and the beginning of everything the toad and the beetle and the mole would later want. For now she was only a marvel on a windowsill, singing to a dish of water, sleeping under a rose leaf, loved and safe, and entirely unaware of how many eyes the night held. It was the night that came for her first, and it came in the shape of a toad.

Thumbelina lay sleeping in her walnut shell cradle, the violet petals soft beneath her, and the rose leaf drawn up warm, and the window of the room had a pane of glass that was cracked and broken at one corner. Through that broken pain, while the house slept and the moon lay pale across the tabletop, an old toad came creeping. She was wet and heavy and ugly, and she moved with the slow patience of a thing that has decided already what it wants. She climbed to where the cradle rested, and she looked down at the sleeping girl beneath the rose leaf, and a thought settled in her cold and croaking mind. Here was a wife for her son. Here was a bride, small and fair and perfect, for the ugly young toad who lived down among the reeds and the mud. She said as much to herself, low and satisfied, that This would make a lovely bride indeed, and then she reached out and took hold of the walnut shell, with the girl still sleeping inside it, and she carried the whole cradle away through the broken window and down into the garden and out to the marsh, where the stream ran wide and slow and brown between its banks.

The toad lived where the water was muddiest, along a broad and marshy stretch of the stream, and it was there she brought the cradle and the sleeping child. She knew her son too well to trust him with a bride set loose. If she left the girl upon the bank, the small thing might wake and run, might slip away into the tall grass before the wedding was so much as spoken of. So the old toad carried the walnut shell out into the middle of the stream to where a broad green lily pad floated flat upon the surface, its wide leaf riding the slow current like a raft anchored to nothing. There, in the very center of the water, She set the cradle down upon the leaf, where the girl would be ringed round on every side by cold running water, a prisoner without walls or chains, held by nothing but the width of the stream she could not cross.

And then the toad went back to her muddy home under the bank to make ready, and to fetch her sun, and to gather the wet green rushes for the wedding bower. Thumbelina woke to find the world entirely changed. She had gone to sleep upon a windowsill in a warm room, and she woke to open sky and moving water and the wide green leaf trembling faintly beneath her. When she saw where she was and understood that the stream ran all around her on every side and that there was no way at all to reach the bank, she began to weep, for she was very small and very frightened and utterly alone.

She could see the toad below in the muddy water, decking out the marriage bower with rushes and yellow wildflowers, making it fair for the bride she meant to bring home. And presently the old toad swam out to the lily pad with her ugly sun beside her, and they bowed low in the water before the little girl and said that here was her bridegroom and that the two of them would live together in splendor down in the mud. The sun could only say, croak, croak, for that was the whole of his speech.

And then the two of them took up the pretty walnut cradle and swam away with it to make ready their home, and left Thumbelina all alone upon the green leaf in the middle of the stream, where she sat and cried, because she could not bear the thought of living with the clammy old toad or of taking her croaking sun for her husband. But the small things of the water had heard her weeping, and they pitied her. Down beneath the surface swam the little fish, and they had listened to the toad speak, and now they put their heads up out of the water to see the girl for themselves.

When they saw how lovely she was and understood the fate the toad had planned for her, they were filled with sorrow that so fair a creature should be dragged down to live in the mud. They would not have it. They gathered together in a crowd around the green stalk that held the lily pad fast, the long stem that ran down through the water and anchored the leaf in place, and they set to work upon it with their small mouths, gnawing and biting at the stalk until, all at once, it gave way.

The leaf broke free and the moment it was loose, the current took it and the lily pad went sailing away down the stream, carrying Thumbelina with it, far and away from the toad and her son, who could never follow so fast, and who were left behind in the muddy water with their empty wedding bower. The leaf drifted on, past this bank and that, and everywhere it Right past, the little birds in the bushes saw the tiny girl riding by and sang out how sweet she was. And the stream carried her father and father into open country she had never seen. A pretty white butterfly came fluttering above the water, round and round the drifting leaf, and at last settled upon it, near the girl, for it had taken a liking to her. Thumbelina was glad of the company, and glad as still that the toad was far behind and could reach her no longer, and everything around her was beautiful, the sun striking gold upon the water until it shone like the finest metal.

So she untied the silken sash from about her waist, and she made one end of it fast to the butterfly, and the other end she tied firmly to the leaf, and at once the leaf glided on more swiftly than before, with the girl standing upon it and the white wings pulling her along the bright water. In that manner she went, drawn by wing and carried by current, away through the open country, free of the marsh at last, and sailing onward toward whatever the stream and the day would bring her to next.

Suddenly a great beetle came flying, a cock chafer, heavy in the warm air, and before Thumbelina could so much as turn her head, he had caught her round the slender waist with his claw, and carried her up, up into a tree. He bore her away so swiftly that the green leaf went on down the stream without her, and the poor white butterfly went with it, for it was still tied fast by the silken sash, and could not free itself. The butterfly could only flutter helplessly against the knot, bound to the drifting leaf, unable to follow, and Thumbelina was terribly sorry for it, and afraid that it might starve there upon the water, with no one to loosen the sash at war. But the beetle cared nothing for any of that. He settled himself upon the largest green leaf of the whole tree, and There he set the little girl down, and he gave her the sweet part of a flower to eat, and he told her how very pretty she was, though she was not in the least like a beetle.

For a while the beetle sat and admired her, turning her this way and that in the light, well pleased with the tiny bright creature he had carried up into the branches. But then all the other beetles who lived in the tree came to call upon him, curious to see what he had found. They looked at Thumbelina from every side. The lady beetles drew in their feelers and said, Why? She has only two legs. And what a wretched thing that is to see. She has no feelers at all, said another. Her waist is so thin she looks almost like a human being," said a third, and how very ugly that is.

And so they all declared, one after another, that she was plain and strange and not fit company, though in truth she was the loveliest little thing that could be imagined. As fair as the sweetest rose petal, and the beetle, who had carried her off, had thought so himself only a short while before. Yet a great many voices saying the same thing over and over will wear down even one who knows better. The beetle listened to his friends, and he heard them call her ugly so many times that But at last he began to believe it too.

He no longer wished to keep her. She might go wherever she pleased, he decided. It was all one to him. So he flew down out of the tree with her and set her upon a daisy in the grass. And there he left her and flew back to his own kind. Thumbelina sat upon the flower and wept, because she had been thought so hideous by the beetles that they would not have her among them, and yet all the while she was more beautiful than words can tell. It is a strange grief, to be cast out not for any wrong, but only for being unlike the ones who judge you, and it lay heavy on her small heart as she sat alone in the grass.

The whole of that long summer, poor Thumbelina lived quite alone in the great wood. She did not despair, for the weather was kind and the days were long. And a small creature can make a great deal out of very little when the world is warm. She wove herself a bed out of blades of grass, plating them together as neatly as a basket. And she hung this little bed underneath a broad leaf so that the rain could not reach her while she slept. When she was thirsty, she drank the dew that gathered upon the leaves each morning, jamming the green with cool bright drops. And when she was hungry, she ate the honey out of the flowers, going from blossom to blossom, to sip the sweetness at their hearts. In this way she passed the warm months, and there was a kind of peace in it, a slow and solitary contentment, with the sun on the leaves and the hum of small wings all about her, and no toad and no beetle to trouble her rest.

So the summer and the autumn went by, but the fair season could not last, and Thumbelina knew it, for she felt the mornings grow sharper and saw the light lie thinner along the grass. Then came the winter, the long, cold winter. All the birds that had sung so sweetly to her flew away to warmer lands. The trees shed their leaves and the flowers withered, and the great cloverleaf under which she had lived rolled itself up and turned yellow and shriveled away to nothing until there was no shelter left where her shelter had been. She herself was terribly cold, for her clothes were worn to rags, and she was so small and slight, no thicker than a straw, that the cold went straight through her. It began to snow, and every snowflake that fell upon her was as if a whole shovelful had been thrown upon a grown person, for a person of her size, against a flake of that size. She wrapped herself in a dry withered leaf, but it gave no warmth at all, and she shivered inside it, close to freezing. She was hungry, and she was frozen, and she was quite alone, and never in the whole of her small life had she been in such desperate straits as this.

the wood lay a great stubble-field, where the corn had been reaped long since, and only the dry short stalks stood up stiff out of the frozen ground, a whole forest of them to one so tiny, and she went in among them, stumbling and pushing her way through, trembling with the cold. And so at last she came to the door of a field mouse, a little hole down among the stubble. There the field mouse lived, snug and warm, with a whole room full of corn, and a fine kitchen, and a store of good things laid by for the winter.

Lumbulina stood at the doorway like any poor beggar child, and she begged for a single barleycorn, for she had not had a bit to eat for two whole days. Dear me, said the field mouse, who was in truth a kindly old creature, you poor little thing come into my warm room and dine with me. And because she took a liking to the girl at once, she said more than that. "'You may stay with me through the winter, if you please,' she told her. "'Only you must keep my rooms clean and neat, and you must tell me stories, for I am very fond of stories.' And Thumbelina did all that the good old mouse asked of her, and she was very comfortable there, out of the snow and the killing cold. So the little girl kept the field mouse's dwelling swept and orderly, and every evening, when the work was done, she sat and told the tales she knew, and the old mouse listened with great pleasure, and grew fonder of her company with each passing day. And by and by the field mouse began to speak of a certain neighbor of hers, and she spoke of him often and with much respect.

"'We shall have a visitor soon,' she said. "'My neighbor comes to call on me once a week, and he is far better off even than I am. He has great rooms underground, and he wears a coat of the finest black velvet you ever saw. If only you could get him for a husband, you would be well provided for indeed. But he cannot see, poor fellow, and so you must tell him the very prettiest stories you know. Thumbelina did not much care for all this talk, for she had no wish to marry the neighbor, who was a mole.

But she said nothing and only waited to see what manner of creature this rich neighbor might be. He came, and he came in his coat of black velvet, just as the field mouse had said, and he was indeed very rich and very learned. His rooms underground were twenty times larger than the field mouse's, so the old mouse declared, and he had a great deal of knowledge stored up in his head, for he had studied many things. He knew a good deal of ancient history, and of many other learned subjects besides, and he could speak of times long past, and of matters that neither the mouse nor the girl had ever heard of. Yet for all his wisdom he had no love at all for the sun.

nor for the flowers, and small wonder, for he had never seen either of them. He spoke slightingly of the warm, bright world above the ground, calling it a poor sort of place, though he knew it only by hearsay, for he lived always in the dark, and never came up into the light. She passed all his days below, in the black earth, and the whole wide arch of the sky, and the whole golden face of the sun, were nothing to him but words in another creature's mouth. But when Thumbelina was asked to sing, she sang, and her small clear voice went into the dark.

She sang the old songs she knew, and among them the one that ran, Fly away, fly away, little bird, and come again in the spring. And she sang so sweetly that the Mole was quite charmed with her, there in the shadows where he could not even see the face that made such music. Still, being a cautious and sober creature, he said nothing of what he felt, for he was much too prudent a gentleman to speak of such things in haste. Instead, he told them of something he had done. He had lately dug a long passage through the earth, from his own dwelling to theirs, a broad underground way where the field mouse and Thumbelina might come and go as they liked.

And he begged them not to be afraid of a certain thing that lay along the middle of that passage. And he bade them walk through it whenever they pleased. And so he gave the two of them leave to go down into the dark road he had made beneath the field. And there was something lying in that passage, of which he had spoken with a strange kind of caution that they would come upon when they went walking through the cold underground way he had opened between the two homes. That thing was a bird, and it lay quite still in the cold underground way, laid out along the earth where the passage was widest.

The Mole went before them with a bit of rotten wood in his mouth, for rotten wood shines a little in the dark, and served him for a lantern down there, where no lantern could be lit. And by that faint and greenish glow the two of them came upon the creature stretched out on the floor of the tunnel. It was a swallow, a true swallow of the summer air, with its long wings folded close against its sides, and its head drawn in, and its little feet gathered up beneath it. And it did not stir at all when the light fell over it. There it lay in the black earth, the bird that belonged to the open sky, and it seemed for all the world to be dead of the winter cold. The Mole thrust at it with his broad snout, pushing it against the frozen wall of the passage, and he spoke of it with great contempt.

"'There lies one of the little birds,' he said, "'that does nothing all the summer long, but Twitter, Twitter, and give itself airs, and pipe away as if the whole world were made for its singing. And when the winter comes, and the corn is cut, and the cold sets its teeth into the ground, then such a creature must starve and freeze and perish miserably in the dark. And much good all its twittering does it then. God be thanked, said the sober mole, that none of my children will ever be born a bird, for a bird has nothing in the world but its foolish song.

And when the frost comes, that song is worth nothing, and the singer must die of hunger and of cold. The field mouse said much the same, and agreed that a bird was a poor, improvident thing, and that a mole in his warm velvet coat, with his full storerooms and his learned head, was worth a hundred such feathered idlers, who did nothing but chirp. Thumbelina said not a word to either of them, but when the two had turned their backs and were speaking together of other matters, she bent down over the swallow where it lay, and she stroked aside the soft feathers that had fallen across its closed eyes, and a great pity rose up in her, secret and warm, that she dared not let the others see.

Perhaps it was this very bird, she thought, that sang so sweetly over me all through the summer, in the days when I still had the sun and the green leaves. How much pleasure the little creature gave me then, and how it must have grieved to feel its wings grow heavy and its song die in its throat. And she thought no more of the mole and his velvet coat and his contempt, but only of the small cold body lying in the dark. And she wished with all her heart that she might do it some good. She could do nothing then, with the mole so near and the field-mouse looking on, and so she went back with them along the passage and up into the warm room. And she kept her sorrow to herself. But when the night came and the old mouse had gone to her rest. Thumbelina rose up quietly in the dark. She gathered together a good armful of dry hay, the soft hay she had saved for the sweeping and the mending of the floor. And she platted it and pressed it and made of it a warm coverlet.

And she carried it down the long tunnel to the place where the bird lay. She spread the hay carefully over the swallow, tucking it close about the folded wings, and drawing it up beneath the little chin, that the poor thing might lie warm in the cold ground, even if it lay there dead. And she found besides some soft dry flower down that she had by her, and this she laid beneath the bird's head for a pillow, so that it should not rest upon the bare and freezing earth. Then, having done all this, she knelt down and laid her ear against the swallow's breast, half in sorrow and half in a hope she scarcely dared to own. And she heard, very faint and very far away, a small and steady beating. It was The bird's heart, still moving under the still feathers.

The swallow was not dead at all. It was only stunned and stiffened with the cold, and now that a little warmth had come to it from the plaited hay, its heart had begun again to stir, and the life in it, which had drawn far down into the dark, was creeping slowly back toward the light. After that, Thumbelina came every night at midnight, when the field-mouse slept, and the whole burrow lay silent, and she told the old mouse nothing of any of it. She stole down the passage in the dark, feeling her way along the cold earthen wall, and she She came to the swallow and tended it as well as her small hands could, little by little, the warmth won back into the bird.

And it opened its eyes at last and looked at her. And though it was very weak, it knew that she had befriended it. It could only gaze at her the first night, with the shine of the rotten wood glimmering faintly at the tunnel's mouth, and it looked at her as though it would thank her if it had the strength. "'Thank you, pretty little child,' the swallow said to her, when at length it found its voice. "'Thank you, for you have warmed me through, and soon I shall have my strength again, and be able to fly out into the warm sunshine.' She brought it water in the cup of a withered leaf, and it drank, and she brought it crumbs, and a grain or two of corn, and it ate a little, and each night it was a little stronger than the night before.

And the swallow told her how it had come to be lying there in the dark, so far from the sky that was its home. It had torn one of its wings upon a thorn bush, it said, in the days of the autumn when the corn stood ripe, and with the hurt wing it could not fly well, and so when all the other swallows gathered and rose up together and streamed away toward the warm countries in the south, this one had been left behind. It had flown lower and lower, weaker and weaker, until at last its strength had failed it altogether, and it had fallen down, it hardly knew how, into the mole's dark passage under the field.

Of the cold that came after it could remember nothing at all, and it did not know in the least how it had come to be lying there in the black earth. So it had lain, more dead than living, until the little girl found it, and covered it with hay and gave it back its life. All the long winter through Thumbelina kept her secret vigil, and the swallow stayed hidden in the passage and grew slowly well again. She could not carry it up into the warm room, for the mole and the field mouse must never know, and so she made its bed as snug as she could, down there in the buried dark.

And she came to it faithfully at the hour when the others slept. And a tender friendship grew up between the tiny girl and the wounded bird, alone together under the frozen field. She sang to it the songs she knew, softly, that her voice might not carry up the tunnel and wake the mouse. And she told it the tales she had told the field-mouse in the evenings, and many more besides. And the swallow, for its part, told her of the far warm lands it had flown over in the years before its wing was torn.

It told her of countries where the sun always shone and the sky was always blue, of great vineyards heavy with purple grapes, of orange trees and lemon trees standing dark and glossy in the heat, of woods where the loveliest flowers bloomed the whole year round and the air was sweet with a fragrance she had never breathed. It told her of a place where two great white marble pillars stood among the green, fallen from some old and ruined house, and where a swallow had built its nest in the very hollow of the stone.

Thumbelina listened, and in the cold black passage under the winter earth she seemed to see those bright, far places, and to feel a little of their warmth, and she was glad. This quiet friendship was the one warmth she had in all that hard season, and it was hidden from the mouse and the mole in their rooms above. The days were short and the nights were long, and the frost lay heavy on the field, and up in the warm burrow the field-mouse spun and spoke and scolded, and told her tales of the rich neighbor, and never guessed at all that below her, down the tunnel she had been given leave to walk through, a small girl sat by a living swallow at the dead of every night, singing and telling stories and being told them in return.

It was a strange, sweet secret to carry, and Thumbelina carried it gladly, and the winter, for all its cruelty, was gentler to her than it might have been, because there was one creature in the dark that was glad when she came, and sorry when she went. So the winter wore itself away, as even the longest winter must. And at last there came a change in the air of the passage, a faint mildness creeping down through the earth. And Thumbelina knew that up above the sun was growing warm again and the ground was softening and that the spring was near.

The swallow felt it too, and stirred, and lifted its wings and tried them, and found that they would bear it once more. It was well again and strong, and the whole of the sky was calling to it. Then Thumbelina took a little pin, or something like a pin, and worked away at the roof of the passage overhead, and she scraped and loosened the earth until she had made a small round hole up through the ground. And through that hole, the warm sun of the spring came pouring down into the dark in a single bright shaft that fell across the floor of the tunnel where the two of them stood, and oh, how good and how blessed that warmth was, and how the light danced with the little swimming moats of dust after the long blind winter under the field. The swallow lifted its face to the opening and to the blue that showed beyond it, and it asked her to come away with it.

"'Come with me,' it said. Now the fine warm days are here, and I am strong, and I am going far away into the green woods where the sun shines. You could sit upon my back and bind yourself fast with your girdle, and we should fly together, out of this dark ground, away over the mountains, into the warm countries where I told you the flowers bloom the whole year round. Come away with me, little one, for you saved my life in the cold winter, and I cannot bear to leave you here in the dark.

Thumbelina longed to go, and her heart went up with the light through the hole in the roof and out into the blue. But she thought of the old field-mouse, who had taken her in out of the snow when she was starving and had been kind to her in her rough way. And she knew that it would grieve the old creature sorely if she stole off without a word. And so she said, No. I cannot go. I cannot leave the good old mouse who sheltered me, for it would be a poor return for her kindness. Then the swallow was sorry, but it saw that she would not be moved.

Farewell then, it said. Farewell, you good and pretty child. And it thanked her once more for all that she had done, and it promised her that it would come back again to that very place when the year came round. Then it spread its wings, and it flew up through the little hole she had made, out into the wide bright morning, and she heard its song, tweet, tweet, growing faint and far as it rose into the blue and was gone. And Thumbelina stood alone in the shaft of sun, with the tears standing in her eyes, for she had grown to love the swallow with all her heart, and now the one friend of her winter was flown away over the field. The bright shaft of sunlight moved and faded as the days went by. For the corn that the farmer had sown above the passage grew up tall and thick and its roots reached down and closed the little hole and it stood like a great forest over the head of the small girl who could not climb it, and the summer came on and the corn ripened and turned from green to gold, and Thumbelina went about her tasks in the burrow as before and did not speak of the swallow and kept her sorrow to herself.

Then the field mouse came to her one day with news, and she spoke of it as of the finest good fortune in the world. "'You are to be married, little one,' she said. My neighbor has asked for you, and it is a great match for such a poor motherless creature as you. Only think what luck for you that a mole so rich and so learned in his coat of black velvet should wish to take you for his wife. Now you must set to work upon your wedding clothes, for you must be well furnished, both in woollen things and in linen things, that you may want for nothing when you are the wife of so grand a gentleman." So the spinning was begun.

The field mouse hired four spiders to spin and to weave, both day and night. And the spiders worked away in the corners of the passage and spun out their fine grey thread, and wove it into cloth for the little bride. And every evening the Mole came visiting, and he sat and talked in his slow and learned way. And he spoke always of the time when the summer should be over, for he could not abide the summer. The sun baked the ground so hard that a mole could scarcely dig through it. When the summer was gone, he said, and the autumn come, then they too should be married.

But there was no joy in it at all for Thumbelina, for she did not like the tiresome mole in the least, and the thought of belonging to him weighed upon her heart like the earth itself. Every morning when the sun rose, and every evening when it set, she would steal to the doorway of the burrow, and when the wind parted the ears of the ripe corn for a moment, so that she could see a little scrap of the blue heaven, she would think how bright and how fair it was out there in the free air, and she would long with all her soul to see the the dear swallow once again. But the swallow did not come, for it was flown far away into the green wood, and she did not know if she should ever see it more. Now the wedding drew nearer, and she dreaded it more with every day. She could not bear the thought of it, that she, who so loved the sun and the flowers and the open sky, should be shut away forever, ground with the Mole, in his dark rooms where no ray of the sun and no breath of the flowers could ever come. He was learned, and he was rich, and he could speak of ancient history, and of a hundred grave and weighty things. But he lived always in the Black Earth, and he hated the very sun that she loved, and never in his life would he come up to see it. To be his wife was to say farewell to the daylight altogether, to give up the sky and the warm wind and the growing green things, and to go down and live in the dark as he did all her days. And yet the good old field-mouse pressed her and told her she was a lucky child and would hear of no refusal, and Thumbelina was so small and so friendless and so entirely in their keeping, that she could see no way at all to escape.

And so, sorrowful as she was, she saw little choice but to yield, and to let the wedding clothes be spun, and to wait for the day when the summer should end, and she must go down into the dark for good. The morning that she dreaded came at last, and the corn stood cut in the fields, and the light of the low autumn sun lay thin and golden along the stubble. Thumbelina rose while the burrow was still quiet, and she went out along the passage and up to the little doorway in the earth, and she stepped through it into the open air. She meant to look upon the sun this once, with her whole heart. For very soon, when the day of the wedding came, she would be carried down and shut away below, and never see it more. So she walked out from the mouth of the burrow to the edge of the field, where the ground fell away and the sky opened wide above her, and she stood there, small and alone, in the great morning. The red flowers of the field were there still, a few of them lingering among the cut stalks, and they nodded their heads a little in the cool wind. Thumbelina reached out her hand and touched the nearest of them, and she bid it farewell, for she knew she would not see it again. Then she lifted both her arms toward the sun, and she stretched them up as far as they would go, as though she might gather a little of the warmth and keep it.

Goodbye, she said, to the bright sun. Goodbye, she said, to the wide open sky, and to the wind, and to all the growing green things of the world above. She turned her small face up to the light and let it fall warm across her cheeks, and she thought she had never seen anything so fair, and she grieved that so much beauty should go on without her, down in the dark, where she must live all her days. Nearby, a little scarlet flower grew, and she put her arms about its stem and leaned her head against it.

If the dear swallow should ever come this way again, she said softly, give him my greeting and tell him that I remembered him. For she thought often of the swallow that she had tended through the long cold, and of the wide, warm lands he had told her of, where the sun shone always and the flowers never died. She did not truly believe that he would hear her, or that any word of hers would reach him where he flew, far off in the green wood. She only said it because her heart was too full to keep still, and because there was no other creature in all the world to whom she could speak her sorrow, out there at the edge of the field in the pale gold of the morning.

And even as she said it, she heard above her head a sound that she knew, a soft rushing of wings, and a small clear twittering that she had listened to through a whole long winter of midnights. She looked up, and there was the swallow himself, wheeling in the bright air, come back as he had promised he would come. When he saw the little girl standing below him, he was full of gladness, and he swept down and settled beside her, and he told her how he had never forgotten her, and how he had thought of her all the season through.

But Thumbelina could not be glad as he was glad, for the shadow of the wedding lay over her, and when he asked her what troubled her, she told him everything. She told him of the Mole, and of his coat of black velvet, and of his rooms deep under the ground where the sun could never reach. She told him that she was to be married to him when the autumn ended, and that she would have to go down and live below the earth for the rest of her life, and never again see the daylight, nor the flowers, nor the open sky that she loved.

And as she spoke of it, she wept, for the thought of it was more than she could carry alone. Then the swallow was troubled for her sake, and he said to her that the cold winter was coming, and that he must fly far away to the warm countries. And would she not come with him, she could sit upon his back, he told her, and bind herself fast with her sash, and they would fly away together, out of the dark burrow, over the mountains, to the lands where the sun shone warm, and the flowers stood always in bloom.

There she would never be cold again, and never be shut underground, and she should be far from the mole, and far from the dim rooms she dreaded. Come with me, dear little Thumbelina, said the Swallow, you who saved my life when I lay frozen in the dark passage. And this time she did not hold back, and she did not think of the good field-mouse who would grieve to find her gone. She climbed up onto the Swallow's back and set her feet upon his outspread wing, and She loosed her sash from her waist and made one end of it fast to the strongest of his feathers.

Then she held tight and the swallow rose into the air. Up he went, and up, over the dark wood where the tall trees stood, over the wide fields where the corn had been cut, over towns where the smoke rose thin from the chimneys in the morning cold. The wind was keen and clean about her, and the earth fell away beneath, small and patched and quiet, and Thumbelina looked down at it and drew a long free breath, for she had left the burrow behind her, and the mole and the spiders spinning their gray cloth, and the wedding that she had dreaded.

Higher still they flew, over great forests that were dark green and endless, and over mountains where the snow lay white upon the peaks, so cold that she crept in among the swallow's warm feathers and left only her small head out to watch the world go by. And then the mountains too fell behind, and below them lay the sea, wide and blue and glittering, stretching away to the round edge of the world. On and on, the swallow carried her, southward and southward, away from the cold and toward the sun, and the field mouse and the mole were left far behind and never knew where she had gone. At last, the air grew soft and warm about them, and the light grew golden and full, and they came into a country of endless summer.

Here the sun shone twice as bright as it had ever shone at home, and along the ways there grew the loveliest green and purple grapes, and in the woods hung oranges and lemons, and the air was sweet with the scent of blossom, and lovely children ran about and played among the great flowers. But the swallow flew on with her, past all of these, for he had a fairer place in mind, until they came to a broad blue lake, and beside it, gleaming white in the sun, stood the ruins of an old palace of marble, with the vines climbing up its fallen pillars. There the The swallow had his nest high among the columns, but he did not set Thumbelina there.

Instead, he flew down and set her gently upon one of the broad open flowers that grew in a sunny field below, among a great host of blossoms, and there he left her to rest in the warm light. Tumbelina looked about her, and what was her wonder to see, sitting in the very heart of the flower where she stood, a tiny man no larger than herself. He was clear and bright and delicate, as though he were made of glass, and upon his head he He wore a small golden crown, and upon his shoulders he bore a pair of shining wings.

He was exactly her own size, no bigger and no smaller, and he was the fairest little being she had ever looked upon. For in every flower of that field there dwelt just such a small man or woman, and this one was the king over the maul, the fairy prince of the flowers. He was nothing at all like the cold wet toad, whose son had wanted her for a bride in the marsh. He was nothing like the heavy beetle who had carried her up into the tree and then cast her aside. And he was nothing like the dark and learned mole, who hated the sun and lived his days in the earth.

Here at last was one who was made as she was made, and who loved the light as she loved it, and who was in every way to her liking. When the flower prince saw Thumbelina, he was filled with joy, for she seemed to him the most beautiful maiden he had ever beheld, and altogether different from the flower folk of his own field. He took the little golden crown from his own head and set it upon hers, and he asked her name, and he asked her whether she would be his wife, and be queen over all the flowers with him.

Here was a husband indeed, so unlike the son of the toad in his cold pool, and so unlike the mole in his velvet coat down under the ground. She looked at the small bright prince who sat before her in the sunlit blossom, and she gave him her hand, and she gladly said that she would. Then out of every flower in the field there came a little lord or a little lady, each one a wonder to behold, and they came to greet her and to bring her gifts for the wedding. And the gift that pleased her best of all was a pair of wings, fine and gauzy and clear, that had once belonged to a great white butterfly.

These they fastened to her small shoulders, and now she too could fly from flower to flower, as light as any of them. There was great gladness then among the flower-folk, and the swallow sat above them in his neck nest among the marble pillars, and he sang for them the finest wedding song that he could sing, though it grieved him at his heart, for he too had loved the little maiden in his own way through the long winter, and he knew that now she belonged to another and that he must leave her behind.

And the flower prince said to Thumbelina that the name she had carried was too plain a name for so fair a queen of the flowers, and that she should have a new one. So the little people of the field gave her a new name at the last, and they called her Maya, which was the name they thought most beautiful. And she was Maya from that day, mistress of the flowers, in the joyful ending that Anderson set down for her. So the small girl who had been carried off by the toad, and cast down by the beetle, and near frozen in the winter fields, and pressed to wed the mole she could not love, home at the last, into the warm land of endless summer, to a husband of her own size, and a crown of her own, and wings upon her shoulders, and a new name that was all her own. The swallow stayed on awhile in that warm country, up in his old nest among the ruined marble, and he watched the flower folk at their happiness in the field below. But the summer of the south was not his home, and when the season turned he grew restless, and he knew that he must fly on alone, far to the north again, back to the cold lands from which he had come.

So he said his farewell to the little queen of the flowers, and he sang for her once more, and then he spread his wings and rose up into the air and turned his small breast toward the north. Long and far the swallow flew, over the blue sea again, and over the white mountains, and over the great dark forests, back across all the wide way that he had carried her. And at the end of that long journey he came at last to a little house in the north, where he had built his summer nest above the window, and where there lived a man who knew how to tell stories and to write them down in books. To this man the swallow sang, perched close beside the window in the fading light, and he told over in his own small twittering the whole of the tale of the tiny girl born from the barley-flower and the toad and the beetle and the long winter, and the moles she would not wed, and the flight to the warm lands, and the flower-prints, and the new name Maya.

And the story lets us understand, though it does not say it plainly, that the man who sat and listened by that northern window, and who set the whole tale down for others to keep was none other than Hans Christian Andersen himself, who had first given the little maiden her life upon the page. And so the tale comes to its rest, and the small life it followed lies open before us now, whole and complete, from the barley flower to the field of endless summer. It is worth pausing a moment over the quiet answer that the story has been giving all along, patiently, one creature at a time, without ever once saying it aloud.

For consider how she came to be carried off, again and again, by nearly everyone who found her. The toad in the marsh took her up in the night because she was pretty, and because she would make a fitting bride for a son who could give her nothing she wanted. The beetle plucked her from the lily leaf because she seemed a marvel to him, a thing to be shown and admired, until his own friends turned their feelers away from her and named her plain, and then she was a marvel no longer, and he set her down upon a daisy and left her there.

The field mouse sheltered her against the winter because she was useful, because she could sweep the little rooms and tell a good story of an evening. And the field mouse loved her in the way one loves a servant who is also a comfort, and the mole beneath the ground desired her for his own quiet reasons. her voice was sweet and her manners were fine, and because a wife who sang was a pleasant thing to keep in the warm dark of his tunnels. Each of them wanted her. Not one of them was suited to her. That is the whole of it, and the tale has been drawing the line between those two things through every field and every frost. To be wanted is to be seen as something another creature needs, or covets, or would keep for its own sake. To be suited is a rarer thing altogether, and it has nothing to do with being needed. It is to stand beside another being and find that the world looks the same from both your heights. That what you love, the other loves, that neither of you must shrink or stretch or pretend in order to fit.

Weigh the mole against the flower prince, and the difference stands out plain as sun on snow. The Mole was no fool, and the story is careful never to make him one. He was learned in a way that few creatures ever become. He knew the old histories, the long chronicles of things that had happened deep in the earth and far in the past. He could speak of matters that the field mouse held in awe, and his velvet coat was rich, and his rooms were warm, and he would have kept his little wife in comfort all the days of her life. Yet he despised the sun he had never seen, and mocked the birds and the light, and the wide blue air above. For he lived always underground, and he loved the dark, because the dark was his.

A creature may know a great deal and still know nothing of the one thing that another creature cannot live without. All the buried learning in the world could not give Thumbelina back the sky. And the Prince of the Flowers offered her almost nothing of that kind. He had no long histories at his command, no tunnels stocked against the winter, no store of grave and ancient knowledge. What he had was this. He was exactly her own size, and he stood in the light, and the field where he lived was full of it. When she looked at him, she did not look up as at a captor, nor down as at a keeper. She looked across, at eye level at a small, bright creature who wished for the very things she wished for, warmth and open air and a life spent moving from blossom to blossom in the sun. That was the whole of his fortune, and it was the only fortune that could ever have suited her.

So the central question the tale has carried since the first cold night, the question of where so small and gentle a creature could ever be at home in a world of pools and tunnels and long-killing winters, finds its answer not in safety and not in comfort and not in the esteem of the clever. It finds its answer in likeness. She came home when she found the One being in all the world, who was made to her own measure, and who stood with her beneath the same sun, wanting no more of her than that she should be glad to be there, two creatures of one size in the open light.

That was the belonging she had been carried past, again and again, all the long way, and had at last flown free to reach. Let the figures who carried her there be named once more, gently, in the order that they came, before the tale is laid down for the night. First there was the woman who longed for a child and had none, and who received a single grain of barley to plant in a flower pot, and watered it, and watched the great flower open to show a girl, no bigger than a thumb, asleep upon the green.

In the old English telling that Mary Howett gave the world, the barleycorn came from a beggar woman at the door, traded for a little kindness and a bit of food. Though in Anderson's first Danish pages, it was a witch the childless woman went to for her counsel. However the grain was given, from it the child was born, and Thumbelina was her name. Then came the toad, heavy and wet and croaking, who bore off the walnut shell where the little girl lay sleeping and set it on a broad leaf in the middle of the stream, meaning to wed her to that dull and dripping sun of hers. And the fish came, the small silver fishes in the water, who took pity on so fair a prisoner and gnawed through the green stem until the the leaf drifted free and carried her away downstream, out of the toad's reach forever.

And the butterfly came, white and glad, who let her bind her sash to him and drew the floating leaf faster along the sunlit water, so that for one bright while she was born swiftly and happily onward, a small girl sailing on a leaf behind a white wing. Then came the beetle, the cock-shafer with his hard gleaming back, who snatched her up into a tree and thought her lovely until his own kind looked her over and found her wanting, at which he He lost his fondness and set her down alone upon a daisy in the wide grass.

And then came the loneliness and the long, slow turning of the year toward the cold, the withering of the flowers, the falling of the leaves, and at the last the snow, under which so small a creature, wrapped in a dry leaf against the wind, had almost no hope left at all. Then came the field-mouse, old and kindly in her warm burrow stocked with grain, who took the frozen wanderer in and gave her food and shelter through the worst of the winter, and asked in return only that she keep the little rooms in order, and tell a tale now and then when the evenings were long.

And near the field-mouse lived the Mole, that rich and learned neighbour in his dark, who came courting in his black velvet, and spoke of all he knew, and who wished to take the little maiden down into the sunless world below. And in the mole's cold passage, given up for dead, lay the swallow, struck down by the frost, and fallen into the earth, whom Thumbelina found and would not leave. Through the deep of that winter she went to him in secret at the midnight hour, and warmed him, and covered him with hay, and sang to him softly and told him her stories and listened to his own until the warmth crept back into his small body and his wings grew strong again.

When the spring at last broke open the frozen ground, he rose and thanked her and promised to remember the place and flew up into the free blue air while she was left below to to face the marriage the field mouse had arranged. And then, on the very day she was to go down into the dark forever, when she had climbed up for one last look at the sun she loved, the swallow came again and heard her grief and bade her climb upon his back and hold fast to his feathers. So he carried her away, far to the south, over the sea and the mountains, out of the winter altogether and into the warm bright country where the flowers never fade.

There, in the sunny field, among the white marble and the blossoms, she came at last to the small prince of the flowers, exactly her own size and exactly to her liking, who asked her to be his queen. From the heart of every flower a little lord or lady came to greet her. And their finest gift was a pair of clear wings taken from a great white butterfly, fastened to her shoulders so that she too might fly from bloom to bloom. And They gave her a new name, the most beautiful they knew, and called her Maya, and Maya she remained.

So the tale, in Anderson's ending, gave her wings and a new name together in the one glad moment of her wedding. Recall her whole small passage now, all of it at once, and let it settle into stillness. The walnut cradle rocking on the dark water. The silver fishes at the green stem. The white butterfly and the drifting leaf. The daisy in the empty grass and the snow coming down. The warm burrow and the velvet mole. And the swallow lying cold in the tunnel. The midnight songs through the long winter, The great flight over the sea, and at the far end of it all, The sunny field of flowers, the small bright prince, The clear wings, the new name, A very little life, measured against the width of the world, And yet, it crossed marsh and stream and forest and frozen field and open sea to find the one place where it fit.

Let that long journey rest now, folded quietly closed, complete. Imagine that sunny field of flowers far behind you now, its warm hum and its bright crowding petals no longer pressing upon your thoughts. The little wings, the small glad voices among the blossoms, the endless summer light, let all of it drift gently away, growing softer and dimmer, until it is only a warmth at the very edge of memory. In your mind, reach back toward that field and take hold of an invisible door and draw it slowly closed, feel it move on silent hinges, without a sound, sealing all the small wonders of Thumbelina's story, safely away, in calm and order, the toad and the swallow and the prince, the frost and the flower, each one settled and still behind the quiet door. And And now, in the darkness before you, see a single candle, its flame steady and small and unwavering, the last soft light in a room grown dim.

Look at it a moment, that little steadfast flame, keeping its gentle watch. Then draw a slow and easy breath, deep and unhurried, and as you let it go, blow that candle out gently and watch the last thin curl of light lift and fade and vanish softly into the night. well. Sleep deeply and let the old tales carry you into the night.