Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/92

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
72
HANS ANDERSEN’S FAIRY TALES

is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.

Now we shall hear how Ole-Luk-Oie came every night during a whole week to the little boy named Hjalmar, and what he told him. There were seven stories, as there are seven days in the week.


THE JOURNEY.


MONDAY.

“Now pay attention,” said Ole-Luk-Oie, in the evening, when Hjalmar was in bed, “and I will decorate the room.”

Immediately all the flowers in the flower-pots became large trees, with long branches reaching to the ceiling, and stretching along the walls, so that the whole room was like a greenhouse. All the branches were loaded with flowers, each flower as beautiful and as fragrant as a rose; and, had any one