Käthchen and the Kobold

Wait for me, my little sweetheart,

For when falling on the ground

I beheld those curious dewdrops

To your heart my heart was bound.

All my fairy life is nothing,

All my fairy joy I give,

Just to hold your hands, my sweetheart,

In your world with you to live.

Wait for me, my little sweetheart:

I will find the way to you,

As a grown man I will seek you,

Seek and find you ever true."

So singing they walked arm in arm through the long winding valley, till the dawn approached like a golden bird opening its great wings to fly.

Käthchen reached her cottage door. All was silent within. "Good-bye," she said, and their eyes met in one last farewell.

"Auf Wiedersehen!" said Green Ears (that pretty German farewell greeting which means so much more than good-bye), and then he stole back down the stony street, kissing his hands again and again to the little girl.

In some strange way Käthchen passed through the door of her little cottage; she had become for the time incorporeal; through the touch of a fairy her body and soul had become loose, that is to say, and she was able to enter the house as silently as a person in a dream. She went through the kitchen and up the steep wooden stairs. It seemed to her as if her feet did not touch the ground, she floated rather than walked. She reached her own little attic, and saw the room as if it were a picture, the square window-frame, the branches of the trees outside, the old pictures on the walls that she was so fond of.

But what was her surprise to see herself curled up asleep in her big wooden bed!

The horror of it made her faint, and she remembered no more until she found herself in her own bed under her own big feather sack. In order that she should not forget her night's adventures, or think it was all merely a dream, she found a ring of yellow grass wound tightly round her third finger. From that hour, though the ring fell to pieces, the mark of it was clearly to be seen on her finger. It was a fairy ring, you see.