Once there lived under the earth a race of fairies called gnomes. They
were strange little beings, with dull eyes and harsh voices; but they
did no harm, and lived in peace.
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."