They never saw the sun; but they had lamps much brighter than our gaslight, which burned night and day, year after year.
They had music; but it was the tinkling of silver bells and golden harps,—not half so sweet as the singing of birds and the babbling of brooks.
Flowers they had none, but plenty of gems,—“the stars of earth.” There were green trees in the kingdom: but the leaves were hard emeralds; and the fruit, apples of gold or cherries of ruby; and these precious gems the gnomes ground to powder, and swallowed with much satisfaction.
They heaped up piles of gold and diamonds as high as your head; and never was there a gnome so poor as to build a house of any thing a whit coarser than jasper or onyx. You would have believed yourself dreaming, if you could have walked through the streets of their cities. They were paved with rosy almandine and snowy alabaster; and the palaces glittered in the gay lamplight like a million stars.
These gnomes led, for the most part, rather dull lives. Like their cousins, the water-sprites, or undines, they were roguish and shrewd, but had no higher views of life than our katydids and crickets. Indeed, they hardly cared for any thing but frisking about, eating and sleeping. But, after all, what can be expected of creatures without souls? One sees, now and then, stupid human beings, whose eyes have no thoughts in them, and whose souls seem to be sound asleep. Such lumps of dulness might almost as well be gnomes, and slip into the earth and have done with it.
These underground folk had a great horror of our world. They knew all about it; for one of them had peeped out and taken a bird’s-eye view. He went up very bravely, but hurried back with such strange accounts, that his friends considered him a little insane.
“Listen!” said the gnome, whose name was Clod. “The earth has a soft carpet, of a new kind of emerald; overhead is a blue roof, made of turquoise; but I am told that there is a crack in it, and sometimes water comes pouring down in torrents. But the worst plague of all is a great glaring eye-ball of fire, which mortals call the sun.”
When Clod told his stories of the earth, he always ended by saying,—
“Believe me, it is bad luck to have the sun shine on you. It nearly put my eyes out; and I have had the headache ever since.”
Now, there was a young girl, named Moneta, who listened very eagerly to the old gnome’s stories of the earth, and thought she would like to see it for herself. She was a kind little maiden, as playful as a kitten; and her friends were not willing she should go. But Moneta had somewhere heard that fairies who marry mortals receive the gift of a human soul: so, in spite of all objections, she was resolved to take the journey; for she had in her dark mind some vague aspirations after a higher state of being.