THE WILD SWANS
disagreeable as she wished,—the Princes were changed into eleven white swans. Sending forth a strange cry, they flew out of the palace windows, over the park and over the wood.
It was still early in the morning when they passed by the place where Elise lay sleeping in the peasant's cottage; they flew several times round the roof, stretched their long necks, and flapped their wings, but no one either heard or saw them; they were forced to fly away, up to the clouds and into the wide world, so on they went to the forest, which extended as far as the sea-shore.
The poor little Elise stood in the peasant's cottage amusing herself with a green leaf, for she had no other plaything. She pricked a hole in the leaf and peeped through it at the sun, and then she fancied she saw her brother's bright eyes, and whenever the warm sunbeams shone full upon her cheeks, she thought of her brother's kisses.
One day passed exactly like the other. When the wind blew through the thick hedge of rose-trees in front of the house, she would whisper to the roses, c Who is more beautiful than you?' but the roses would shake their heads and say, 'Elise.' And when the peasant's wife sat on Sundays at the door of her cottage reading her hymn-book, the wind would rustle in the leaves and say to the book, 'Who is more pious than thou?'—'Elise,' replied the hymn-book. And what the roses and the hymn-book said, was no more than the truth.
Elise was now fifteen years old, she was sent for home; but when the Queen saw how beautiful she was, she hated her the more, and would willingly have transformed her like her brothers into a wild swan, but she dared not do so, because the King wished to see his daughter.
So the next morning the Queen went into a bath which was made of marble, and fitted up with soft pillows and the gayest
191
