lads, and the older ones told fairy tales of elves and goblins. It could not be finer anywhere.

"How beautiful it is here in the winter!" said the little girl.

Then all the trees were covered with hoarfrost, until they looked like trees of white coral. The snow crackled crisply underfoot, as if you were always walking in new boots, and one shooting star after another fell from the sky. In the room the Christmas tree was lighted, and there were presents and happiness. In the farmer's cottage the violin sounded and games were played for apple dumplings, and even the poorest child cried, "It's beautiful in winter!"

Yes, it was beautiful, and the little girl showed the boy everything.

The blossoming elder tree always smelled fragrant, and the red flag with the white cross always waved, the same flag under which the old seaman in New Town had sailed away.

And the boy became a young man, and he too had to sail far away to warmer countries, where the coffee grows. But when they departed, the little girl took and elder blossom from her breast and gave it to him as a keepsake. He laid it away in his hymnal, and whenever he took out the book in foreign countries it always came open by itself at the spot where lay the flower of memory. And the more he looked at the flower the fresher and sweeter it became, so that he seemed to be breathing the air of the Danish forests, and he could plainly see the little girl looking up at him with her clear blue eyes from between the petals of the flower, and could hear her whispering, "How beautiful it is here in spring, summer, autumn, and winter!" And hundreds of pictures drifted through his thoughts.

Many years passed by, and now he was an old man, sitting with his old wife under a blossoming tree; they were holding hands, just as Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother out in New Town had done before. And like them they talked of olden times and of their golden wedding anniversary.

Now the little maiden with the blue eyes and the elder blossoms in her hair sat up in the tree and nodded to them both and said, "Today is your golden wedding anniversary!" Then from her hair she took two flowers, and kissed them so that they gleamed, first like silver, and then like gold. And when she laid them on the heads of the old couple, each became a golden crown. There they both sat, a king and a queen, under the fragrant tree that looked just exactly like an elder bush, and he told his old wife the story of the Elder Tree Mother, just as it had been told to him when he was a little boy. They both thought that much of the story resembled their own, and that part they liked best.

"Yes, that's the way it is," said the little girl in the tree. "Some people call me Elder Tree Mother, and some call me the Dryad, but my real name is Memory. It is I who sit up in the tree that grows on and on, and I can remember and I can tell stories. Let me see if you still have your flower."

Then the old man opened his hymnal, and there lay the elder blossom, as fresh as if it had just been placed there. Then Memory nodded, and the two old people with the golden crowns sat in the red twilight, and they closed their eyes gently and - and - and that was the end of the story....

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