安徒生童话：The Happy Family 幸福的家庭
the biggest leaf we have in this country is certainly the burdock leaf. if you hold one in front of your little stomach, it's just like a real apron; and in rainy weather, if you lay it on your head, it does almost as well as an umbrella. it's really amazingly large. now, a burdock never grows alone; no, when you see one you'll always see others around it. it's a splendid sight; and all this splendor is nothing more than food for snails-the big white snails which the fine people in olden days used to have made into fricassees. when they had eaten them, they would smack their lips and say, "my! how good that is!" for somehow they had the idea that the snails tasted delicious. you see, these snails lived on the burdock leaves, and that's why the burdock was first grown.
there was a certain old manor house where the people didn't eat snails any more. the snails had almost died out, but the burdock hadn't. these grew and grew on all the walks and flower beds-they couldn't be stopped-until the whole place was a forest of burdocks. here and there stood an apple or a plum tree, but except for that, people wouldn't have thought there had ever been a garden there. everywhere was burdock, and among the burdocks lived the last two incredibly old snails!
they themselves didn't know how old they were, but they could remember very clearly that once there had been a great many more of them, that they had descended from a prominent foreign family, and they knew perfectly well that the whole forest had been planted just for them and their family.
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