The Neighboring Families

This seemed to them to be really a little too much, but since the people all showed such regard for the roses, they would do the same. "Twit!" they said, and swept the ground with their tails, with one eye on the roses. They did not look at them long before they were convinced that they were their old neighbors, and so they really were. The artist who had sketched the rosebush near the charred ruins of the house had later obtained permission to transplant it, and had then given it to the architect of the Museum, for lovelier roses could not be found; and the architect had planted it on Thorvalsden's grave, where, as a living symbol of the beautiful, it blossomed and gave its red, fragrant petals to be carried as remembrances to foreign lands.

"Have you got an establishment in town now?" asked the sparrows. And the roses nodded; they recognized their gray neighbors, and were so glad to see them.

"How wonderful it is to live and blossom here, and to see old friends and kind faces every day! It is as if every day were a big holiday!"

"Twit!" said the sparrows. "Yes, they are our old neighbors. We remember them from the duckpond! Twit! How they have been honored! But then some people are while they're asleep. And what there is so wonderful in a red lump like that, I don't know! Ah, there's a withered leaf, for that I can see!"

So they pecked at the leaf until it fell off, but it only made the rose tree look fresher and greener. And the roses bloomed fragrantly in the sunshine on the grave of Thorvaldsen, with whose immortal name their beauty thus became linked.