Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on snoozecast.com and follow us on Instagram at Snewscast to find behind the scenes content. If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the Apple Podcast app. Please know that we read and appreciate every single one. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by Tulip Petals. Tonight, we'll read a story from Hans Christian Anderson called Little Thumbelina. Thumbelina is about a tiny girl and her adventures with marriage-minded toads, moles, and doodlebugs. She successfully avoids their intentions before falling in love with a flower fairy prince just her size. Hans Christian Anderson was born in Denmark in 1805 to a shoemaker, an only child, Anderson shared a love of literature with his father, who read him fables and fairy tales. Together, they constructed panoramas and toy theaters and took long jaunts into the countryside. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. There was once a woman who wished very much to have a little child. She went to a fairy and said, I should so very much like to have a little child. Can you tell me where I can find one?" Oh, that can be easily managed. Said the fairy, here is a barley corn. It is not exactly of the same sort as those which grow in the farmer's fields, in which the chicken seat, put it into a flower pot and see what will happen. Thank you, said the woman, and she gave the fairy twelve shillings, which was the price of the barley corn. And she went home and planted it. And there grew up a large handsome flower, someone like a tool up in appearance. But with its leaves tightly closed, as if it were still a bud. It is a beautiful flower, said the woman, and she kissed the red and golden-colored petals, and as she did so, the flower opened, and she could see that it was a real tool up. But within the flower, upon the green, velvet stamens, sat a very delicate and graceful little maiden. She was scarcely half as long as a thumb, and they gave her the name of little thumb or or thumb-volina, because she was so small. A walnut shell, elegantly polished, served for her cradle. Her bed was formed of blue violet leaves, with a rose leaf for a counter-pain. Here she slept at night, but during the day she amused herself on a table where the peasant wife had placed a plate full of water. Around this plate were wreaths of flowers with their stems in the water, and upon it floated a large tulip leaf which served the little one for a boat. Here she sat and rode herself from side to side with two orres made of white horse hair. It was a very pretty sight. Thumbulina could also sing so softly and sweetly that nothing like her singing had ever been heard before. night while she lay in her pretty bed a a large, ugly, wet toad crept through a broken pain of glass in the window and leaped right upon the table where she lay sleeping under her rose leaf quilt. What a pretty little wife this would make for my son.

Said the Toad, and she took up the walnut shell in which Thumbelina lay a sleep and jumped through the window with it into the garden. the swampy margin of a broad stream in the garden, lift the toad with her son.