The Queen, the Princes and the Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen

Author:Hans Christian Andersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

In china, as surely you know, the emperor’s Chinese, and everyone he keeps around him is Chinese too. The story of this particular Emperor took place many years ago—and that’s exactly why it’s worth hearing, before it’s forgotten!

Now the Emperor’s palace was the most magnificent in the world, made completely out of fine porcelain. It was so expensive and so fragile that if you wanted to touch anything, you had to be very careful. The gardens were filled with amazing flowers, and tiny bells were tied to the most splendid of these. Then the bells would tinkle when you walked past so that you would be sure to admire them. Indeed, everything was cunningly arranged in the Emperor’s gardens, and they were so large that even the Imperial Gardener didn’t know where they ended. But if you kept on walking, you would come to a lovely forest with tall trees and deep lakes. The forest stretched right down to the deep blue sea, so that ships could sail right under its branches. And in these branches there lived a nightingale. The nightingale sang with such joy that even the poor fisherman, who had quite a lot to do, would stop and listen when he was out at night, pulling up his fishing net. “My goodness, how beautiful!” he would say, but then he would have to look to his net and he’d forget about the bird. And then the next night, when the fisherman went out and she sang again, he would say the same thing: “My goodness, how beautiful!”

Travellers from every country in the world came to marvel at the Emperor’s city, the palace and the gardens. But when they heard the nightingale, every one of them would exclaim, “That’s the very best of all!”

When they returned home, the travellers would talk about her. Scholars wrote many books about the city, the palace and the gardens, but they didn’t forget the nightingale either. They placed her above everything else there, and those who could write poems wrote beautiful poems about the nightingale in the forest by the deep blue sea.

These books travelled the world over, and one of them ended up in the hands of the Emperor himself. He was sitting in his golden chair, reading and reading. He kept nodding his head as he did, for it pleased him to read the marvellous descriptions of the city, the palace and the gardens. “Yet the nightingale surpasses everything!”—that’s what stood there, right on the page.

“What’s this?” wondered the Emperor. “The nightingale? I don’t know anything about her at all! Does she live in my empire—in my very own gardens, even? I’ve never heard of such a bird. The things you find out from reading!”

And then he called in his Lord-in-Waiting. This man was so elegant that when someone who was beneath him dared to speak to him, or to ask him about something, he would only answer “P!”—which doesn’t mean anything at all.

“There’s supposed to be the most remarkable bird living here, called the nightingale,” the Emperor told him.

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