In a large town, where there were so many people and houses that there was not enough room for everybody to have a garden, lived two poor children. They were not brother and sister, but they loved each other just as much as if they were. Their parents lived opposite one another in two attics, and each family had planted a rose tree and sweet peas in a window-box. In summer the two children were allowed to sit out underneath the rose trees and play games together all afternoon.
In the winter they could not do this, so they heated pennies on the stove and put them against the frozen window-panes. These made perfect peepholes through which they could gaze at each other across the frozen gutters.
His name was Kay, her name was Gerda.
One day it was snowing very hard.
"Those are the white bees swarming," said the old grandmother.
"Have they got a queen bee too?" asked the little boy, for he knew that the real bees have one.
"To be sure," said the grandmother. "She flies wherever they swarm the thickest. She is the Snow Queen and is the biggest of them all. She never remains still upon the earth, but always returns to the black clouds. Often at midnight she flies through the streets of the town and peeps in at all the windows, and then the snowflakes freeze in pretty patterns and look like flowers." The children agreed, since they had seen those patterns.
That evening, when little Kay was going to bed, he jumped on the chair by the window and peeped through the little hole. A few snowflakes were falling, and one of them, the largest, lay on the edge of one of the window-boxes. The snowflake grew larger and larger till it took the form of a maiden, dressed in finest white gauze. She was so beautiful and delicate, but all ice - hard, glittering ice.
She nodded at the window, and beckoned to Kay with her hand. The little boy was frightened at the sight of her and sprang down from the chair. Suddenly it seemed as if a great white bird had flown past the window.
Spring began, everything turned green. Then summer came and the rose trees grew bigger.
One day the children were looking at a picture book. The clock in the great church had just struck five, when Kay suddenly exclaimed, "Oh! Something has stung my heart, and now I've got something in my eye!" Gerda threw her arms around his neck. He blinked his eyes again and again; but no, she could see nothing in them.
"I think it is gone now," he said. But it had not gone. It was one of the tiny splinters from the magic mirror we have heard about, the mirror that turned all that was good and beautiful into small and ugly. And a splinter found its way to poor Kay's heart, which began to change into a lump of ice. His heart did not hurt him at all, but the splinter was still there.
"Why are you crying?" he asked Gerda. "It makes you look so ugly! There's nothing wrong with me. Just look! That rose is all worm-eaten, and this one is stunted! What ugly roses they are!"
He began to pull them to pieces.
"Kay, what are you doing?!" exclaimed the little girl.
When he saw how frightened she was, he pulled of another rose and ran inside to his window, away from dear little Gerda.
