The days seemed all too short, and the guests were surprised when the time for their departure arrived. The feasting and dancing and sight-seeing were at last ended in the valley of enchantment; one glorious morning they rose with the Sun, and bidding good-bye to Princess Kuldah and her people, started to meet the black dwarf of the mountains. The same guide would accompany them to the place where they were to meet him. The Princess saw none of them felt much desire to go; Ethelda was particularly downcast, still she bore up bravely, and with a smiling face she began the journey.
Although Ethelda and her companions were charmed with the splendors of the deep, they were still more impressed with delight over the new beauties they discovered upon the land. They had seen the glittering mountains of the Moon and the fiery craters of the Sun, and had wondered at such magnificence, but the Earth’s fresh coloring was a revelation. And the Earth had decked herself right royally to receive them. The month was April, and the world, rioting in flowers, was aflame with color. The poppies, yellow and scarlet, burst forth from the meadows’ tenderest green. The white petalled, yellow centred daisies came out in thousands to greet them, while the roses, pink and white and red, flashed everywhere. The trees, too, dressed in the earliest Spring green, nodded and waved their long branches in a glad welcome, and the tiny wood violet, modest and sweet, sent forth its perfumed breath in waves of delight, filling the air with sweetness.
“Wonderful—wonderful!” cried Ethelda, throwing herself in an ecstasy of pleasure upon the soft greensward, and gathering handfuls of the flowers to weave into garlands. “I should like to live here always,” she said. The Sun Prince shared his bride’s delight, but he whispered cautiously: “Take care, sweetheart. Remember a Moon maiden and a Sun Prince can only visit for a twelvemonth. A longer stay would be dangerous; it would keep us here for ever.”
“O, yes,” answered Ethelda; “I was hardly in earnest when I spoke, for I could not leave my beloved mother sorrowing. Yet I am very happy here.”
Days of pleasure passed, on the journey. Days of wonderment too. When the strangers saw how the small seed planted in the ground—warmed by the sun and watered by the rain—throve and became a tiny blade of grass, a delicate flower, or a magnificent tree, this seemed a miracle to them, for nothing ever grows out of the soil of the Moon or the Sun.
One day as they stood on the top of a high mountain they saw a very strange sight. A great sea lay shining in the distance, sparkling and glittering in gold and blue. It washed the shores of magnificent valleys and rich gardens. Fruits and flowers grew in abundance, but the strange sight lay in the fact that the valleys and fruit gardens stretching out so broadly suddenly stopped at a line of yellow sand,—stopped so abruptly that it seemed almost a straight line, it was so clean cut,—and the sand covered hundreds and hundreds of miles of the Earth.
“How queer it looks!” they said among themselves; “not a blade of grass, not a tree, on the barren waste! We have never seen anything like it before. What is it?”
“It will take two stories to explain that wonderful view lying before us,” replied the guide.
“Oh, do tell them!” cried the Moon people in chorus; “we love stories”; and they settled themselves to listen.
“Well,” began the guide, “the first relates to the Princess Ethelda.”