THE GREEN BIRD
THERE was once a Prince whose palace lay in the midst of a wonderful garden. From gate to gate was a day's journey, where spring, summer, and autumn stayed captive; for warm streams flowed, bordering its ways, through marble conduits, and warm winds, driven by brazen fans, blew over it out of great furnaces that were kept alive through the cold of winter. And day by day, when no sun shone in heaven, a ball of golden fire rose from the palace roof and passed down to the west, sustained invisibly in mid-air, and giving light and warmth to the flowers below. And after it by night went a lamp of silver flame, that changed its quarters as the moon changes hers in heaven, and threw a silver light over the lawns and the flowered avenues.
All these things were that the Prince might have delight and beauty ever around him. To his eyes summer was perpetual, without end, and nothing died save to give out new life on the morrow. So through many morrows he lived, and trod the beautiful soft ways devised for him by cunning hands, and did not know that there was winter, or cold, or hunger to be borne in the world, for he never crossed the threshold of his enchanted garden, but stayed lapped in the luxury of its bright colours and soft airs.
One day he was standing by a bed of large white bell-lilies. Their great bowls were full of water, and inside among the yellow stamens gold fish went darting to and fro. While he watched he saw, mirrored in the water, the breast of a green bird flying towards the trees of the garden.
It had come from a far country surely, for its shape and colour were strange to him; and the most curious thing of all was that it carried its nest in its beak.
Its flight came keen as a sword's edge through those bowery spaces, till its wings closed with a shock that sent the golden fruit tumbling from the branches where it had lodged: and through the whole garden went a crashing sound as of soft thunder.
The Prince waited long, hoping to hear the bird sing, but it hid itself silently among the thickest of the leaves, and never moved or uttered a sound. He went back to the palace a little sorry not to have heard the green bird sing; "But, at least," he said to himself, "I shall hear it to-morrow."
That night he dreamed that something came and tapped at his heart; and that his heart tapped back saying, "Go away, for if I let you in there will be sorrow!"
In the morning on the window-sill he saw a green feather lying; but as he opened the window a puff of wind lifted it, and carried it high up into the air and out of sight.
