Stories and Fairy Tales
Author: Hans C. Andersen
Date: 1834-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fairy tales; Danish -- Translations into English; Fantasy; Short Stories
Description: When someone says “fairy tales,” chances are your first thought will be “Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen.” ~~~~~ Here then, an extensive collection of 158 of Andersen’s fairy tales, stories, and essays. Not all are fantastical, but elements of wonder abound. Persons familiar only with the “Disney-fied” versions of some of the fairytales have surprises in store, and perhaps even longstanding Andersen fans will meet new friends here.
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: The original Danish text is in the public domain worldwide. This eBook is in the public domain where copyright is "Life+90" or less.

Stories
&
Fairy Tales

—

Hans Christian Andersen

TRANSLATIONS BY
Mrs. H. B. Paull
Mrs. Edgar Lucas
H. L. Braekstad
H. Oskar Sommer
Horace E. Scudder
M. R. James

MobileRead Edition
2019

About this eBook

—

Stories & Fairy Tales

BY:
Hans Christian Andersen
(1805–1875)

TRANSLATIONS BY:
Mrs. H. B. (Susannah) Paull
(1812–1888)
Horace E. Scudder
(1838–1902)
Hans Lien Braekstad
(1845–1915)
Heinrich Oskar Sommer
(1861–1929)
Mrs. Edgar (Alice) Lucas
(1851–1935)
M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
(1862–1936)
A. G. Bell & E. Bell
(?–?, publ. 1873)

WITH: Alphabetical Index of Titles,
including alternate titles.
Endnotes provided by
the Author and the translators.

When someone says “fairy tales,” chances are your first thought will be “Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen.”

Here then, an extensive collection of 158 [*] of Andersen’s fairy tales, stories, and essays. Not all are fantastical, but elements of wonder abound. Persons familiar only with the “Disney-fied” versions of some of the fairytales have surprises in store, and perhaps even longstanding Andersen fans will meet new friends here.

* * * *

Danish auther Hans Christian Andersen (2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, but he is best remembered for his fairy tales.

His stories, expressing themes that transcend age and nationality, have become culturally embedded in the West’s collective consciousness. They are readily accessible to children, but present lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well.

Andersen’s stories have been translated into more than 125 languages, and have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films. His most famous fairy tales include The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, The Princess on the Pea, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Little Match Girl, Thumbelina, The Nightingale, The Red Shoes, and The Snow Queen.
(—adapted from Wikipedia.)

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, December 2019, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

These stories were first published 1835 ~ 1873. The various translations were first published between 1870 and 1930.
The original Danish text is in the public domain worldwide. This eBook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less.

Click here for editing notes.

[*]  Ten titles were omitted: no English translations in the public domain could be found.

+

Contents

—

<>  About This eBook

<>  Endnotes
[BACK OF BOOK]

<>  Alphabetical Index of Titles
[BACK OF BOOK]

<>  The Tales:

<>   The Ugly Duckling
<>   The Steadfast Tin Soldier
<>   Little Ida’s Flowers
<>   Ole Lukoie
<>   The Goblin and the Grocer
<>   What the Old Man Does Is Always Right
<>   Jack the Dullard
<>   Little Claus and Big Claus
<>   The Emperor’s New Clothes
<>   The Princess on the Pea
<>   The Swineherd
<>   The Shepherdess and the Sweep
<>   The Flying Trunk
<>   The Travelling Companion
<>   The Tinderbox
<>   The Elfin Hill
<>   Soup from a Sausage Skewer
<>   The Galoshes of Fortune
<>   The Court Cards
<>   In the Nursery
<>   The Pen and the Inkstand
<>   The Money-Pig
<>   The Flax
<>   The Shirt Collar
<>   The Darning Needle
<>   The Sweethearts
<>   The Jumpers
<>   The Racers
<>   The Farmyard Cock and the Weathercock
<>   The Beetle
<>   The Old Street Lamp
<>   The Silver Shilling
<>   The Story of the Year
<>   Twelve by the Mail-Coach
<>   The Days of the Week
<>   The A-B-C Book
<>   Sunshine Stories
<>   The Naughty Boy
<>   The Wicked Prince
<>   The Bell’s Hollow
<>   The Old House
<>   The Toad
<>   The Metal Pig
<>   Thumbelisa
<>   The Little Mermaid
<>   The Elf of the Rose
<>   The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
<>   The Red Shoes
<>   The Eleven Wild Swans
<>   The Garden of Eden
<>   The Stone of the Wise Men
<>   The Dryad
<>   Elder-tree Mother
<>   The Daisy
<>   The Snowdrop
<>   The Nightingale
<>   The Storks
<>   The Fir Tree
<>   The Snowman
<>   The Nis and the Dame
<>   The Neighbours
<>   The Happy Family
<>   In the Duck-Yard
<>   The Shadow
<>   The Snail and the Rose-Tree
<>   The Buckwheat
<>   The Puppet-Show Man
<>   Aunty Toothache
<>   The Flea and the Professor
<>   The Storm Shifts the Shields
<>   Everything in Its Proper Place
<>   The Wind’s Tale
<>   The Bishop of Börglum and His Warriors
<>   Danish Popular Legends
<>   Godfather’s Picture-Book
<>   From a Window in Vartou
<>   The Dream of Little Tuk
<>   A String Of Pearls
<>   Great-Grandfather
<>   The Swans’ Nest
<>   Holger the Dane
<>   The Thorny Path of Honour
<>   Two Brothers
<>   The Great Sea-Serpent
<>   The Old Church-Bell
<>   The Bird of Popular Song
<>   The Old Grave-Stone
<>   The Phoenix Bird
<>   The Muse of the Coming Age
<>   The Bond of Friendship
<>   Ib and Christine
<>   The Old Bachelor’s Nightcap
<>   Under the Willow Tree
<>   Golden Treasure
<>   The Porter’s Son
<>   Peiter, Peter, and Peer
<>   She Was Good for Nothing
<>   The Cripple
<>   Chicken Greta’s Family
<>   The Story Old Johanna Told
<>   Ole the Watchman
<>   The Will-o’-the Wisp Is in the Town
<>   The Windmill
<>   The Bottle-Neck
<>   Two Maidens
<>   Five Out of One Shell
<>   The Butterfly
<>   The Teapot
<>   The Rags
<>   The Pigs
<>   A Great Grief
<>   What Happened to the Thistle
<>   Which Was the Happiest?
<>   There Is a Difference
<>   A Leaf from the Sky
<>   Beauty of Form and Beauty of Mind
<>   Psyche
<>   A Rose from Homer’s Grave
<>   The Gardener and the Gentry
<>   The Most Extraordinary Thing
<>   What One Can Invent
<>   It’s Perfectly Certain
<>   Good Humour
<>   The Greenies
<>   The Drop of Water
<>   In a Thousand Years
<>   Children’s Prattle
<>   Aunty
<>   The Door-Key
<>   The King’s Quest
<>   My Boots
<>   Luck May Lie in a Pin
<>   Hidden but Not Forgotten
<>   The Little Match Girl
<>   The Candles
<>   The Last Dream of the Old Oak Tree
<>   The Bell
<>   The Uttermost Parts of the Sea
<>   Grandmother
<>   What the Whole Family Said
<>   The Silent Book
<>   A Picture from the Rampart
<>   The Comet
<>   Something
<>   The Loveliest Rose in the World
<>   The Last Pearl
<>   The Angel
<>   A Vision of the Last Day
<>   A Story
<>   The Child in the Grave
<>   The Jewish Girl
<>   Anne Lisbeth
<>   The Story of a Mother
<>   What The Moon Saw
<>   The Snow Queen
<>   The Marsh King’s Daughter
<>   The Ice Maiden
<>   A Story from the Sand-hills

The Tales

—

The Ugly Duckling

—

It was delightful out in the country: it was summer, and the cornfields were golden, the oats were green, the hay had been put up in stacks in the green meadows, and the stork went about on his long red legs and chattered Egyptian, for that was the language he had learned from his mother. Round the fields and meadows were great forests, and in the midst of the forests lay deep lakes. Yes, it was really delightful out in the country! In the midst of the sunshine there lay an old manor-house, with deep canals round it, and from the wall down to the water grew large burdocks, so high that little children could stand upright under the tallest of them. It was just as wild there as in the deepest wood.

Here sat a duck upon her nest, for she had to hatch her ducklings, but she was almost tired out, for it took such a long time; and she so seldom had visitors. The other ducks liked better to swim about in the canals than to climb up to sit under a burdock and cackle with her.

At last one egg after another cracked open. “Peep! peep!” they cried; all the yolks had come to life, and little heads were peeping out.

“Quack! quack!” said the Duck, and they all came out quacking as fast as they could, looking all round them under the green leaves, and the mother let them look as much as they wished, for green is good for the eyes.

“How wide the world is!” said the young ones, for they truly had much more room now than when they were in the eggs.

“Do you think this is the whole world?” said the mother. “That stretches far across the other side of the garden, quite into the parson’s field; but I have never been there yet! I hope you are all here,” she said, and she stood up. “No, I haven’t got you all. The biggest egg is still there. How long is this going to last? I am getting tired of it.” And she sat down again.

“Well, how goes it?” said an old duck, who had come to pay her a visit.

“It’s taking so long with this one egg,” said the Duck sitting there. “It will not break. But look at the others! They are the prettiest ducklings I have ever seen! They are all just like their father, the rascal! He never comes to see me.”

“Let me see the egg which will not break,” said the old one. “Depend upon it, it is a turkey’s egg! I was once cheated in that way, and had a lot of bother and trouble with the young ones, for they are afraid of the water. I could not get them into it. I quacked and pecked, but it was no use! Let me see the egg. Yes, that’s a turkey’s egg! Let it alone, and teach the other children to swim.”

“I think I’ll just sit on it a little longer,” said the Duck. “I’ve sat so long now that I may as well sit a few days more.”

“Just as you please,” said the old duck, and she went away.

At last the big egg broke. “Peep! peep!” said the little one, and crept out. It was very big and ugly. The Duck looked at it.

“That’s a terribly big duckling!” said she; “none of the others look like that: can it really be a turkey chick? Well, we shall soon find that out! Into the water he shall go, even if I have to push him in myself!”

Next day the weather was splendidly bright, and the sun shone on all the green burdocks. The Mother-Duck went down to the canal, with all her little ones. Splash!—she sprang into the water. “Quack! quack!” she said, and one duckling after another plumped in. The water closed over their heads, but they came straight up again and swam beautifully; their legs went of themselves, and there they were, all in the water, and the ugly grey duckling swimming with them.

“No, he’s not a turkey,” said she; “see how well he uses his legs, and how upright he holds himself! He’s my own child! On the whole he’s quite pretty, if only you look at him properly. Quack! quack! come along with me, and I’ll lead you out into the world, and present you in the poultry-yard; but keep close to me, so that no one may tread on you, and watch out for the cats!”

And so they came into the poultry-yard. There was a terrible riot going on there, for two families were quarrelling about an eel’s head, and the cat got it after all.

“See, that’s the way of the world!” said the Mother-Duck; and her beak watered a bit, for she too wanted the eel’s head. “Now use your legs,” said she. “See that you bustle about, and bow your heads before the old duck yonder. She’s the grandest of all of them here; she’s of Spanish blood—that’s why she’s so fat, and, do you see, she has a red rag round her leg; that’s something unusually fine, and the greatest distinction any duck can enjoy: it means that they don’t want to lose her, and that she’s to be recognized by man and beast. Stir yourselves—don’t turn in your toes! A well-brought-up duck turns its toes right out, just like his father and mother—so! Now bend your necks and say ‘Quack!’”

And so they did; but the other ducks round about looked at them, and said loudly:

“Look there! Now we’re to have that lot too, as if there were not enough of us already! And—fie!—look how ugly that duckling is! We won’t stand that!” And one duck flew straight at him, and bit him in the neck.

“Let him alone,” said the mother; “he is doing no harm to anyone.”

“Yes, but he’s too big, and so odd,” said the duck who had bitten him, “and therefore he must be pecked.”

“Those are pretty children that mother has there!” said the old duck with the rag on her leg, “They’re all pretty but that one; that’s not a lucky one! I wish she could hatch him over again!”

“That cannot be, your Highness,” said the duckling’s mother. “He is not pretty, but he has a really good disposition, and swims as well as any other—yes, I may even say better! I think he will grow pretty, and may become smaller in time! He has lain too long in the egg, and therefore has not got the proper shape.” And she stroked his neck and smoothed his feathers. “Besides, he is a drake,” said she, “and so it does not matter so much. I think he will be very strong, and make his way in the world!”

“The other ducklings are graceful enough,” said the old duck. “Make yourself at home; and if you find an eel’s head you may bring it to me.”

So now they felt at home. But the poor Duckling which had crept last out of the egg, and looked so ugly, was bitten and pushed and made a fool of, as much by the ducks as by the chickens.

“He is too big!” they all said. And the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought himself an emperor, puffed himself up like a ship in full sail, and bore down upon him, and gobbled, and grew quite red in the face. The poor Duckling did not know where to stand or where to go; he was quite miserable because he looked ugly, and was the butt of the whole yard.

So it went on the first day, and afterwards it became worse and worse. The poor Duckling was chased about by them all; even his brothers and sisters were quite cross with him, and said, “If only the cat would catch you, you ugly thing!” And his mother said, “If you were only far away!” And the ducks bit him, and the chickens pecked at him, and the girl who fed the poultry kicked him aside.

Then he ran and flew over the hedge, and the little birds in the bushes flew up in fear.

“That is because I am so ugly!” thought the Duckling; and he shut his eyes, but ran on farther; so he came out into the great moor, where the wild ducks lived. Here he lay the whole night long; he was so tired and sorrowful.

Towards morning the wild ducks flew up, and looked at their new comrade.

“What sort of a one are you?” they asked; and the Duckling turned in every direction, and bowed to them as best he could. “You are remarkably ugly!” said the Wild Ducks. “But that’s all the same to us, so long as you do not marry into our family!”

Poor thing! He certainly was not thinking of marrying, and only hoped to get leave to lie among the reeds and drink some of the marsh water.

Thus he lay two whole days, and then there came two wild geese, or, rather, ganders, for both were males. It was not long since each came out of the egg, and that’s why they were so saucy.

“Listen, comrade,” said one of them. “You’re so ugly that I like you. Will you go with us, and become a bird of passage? Near here, in another moor, there are a few sweet lovely wild geese, all unmarried, and all able to say ‘Quack!’ You’ve a chance of making your fortune, ugly as you are!”

“Bang! bang!” sounded in the air above, and the two ganders fell dead in the swamp, and the water was stained blood-red. “Bang! bang!” it sounded again, and whole flocks of wild geese rose up from the reeds. And then there was another shot. A great hunt was going on. The hunters were lying in wait all round the moor—yes, some were even sitting up in the branches of the trees, which stretched far over the reeds. The blue smoke rose up like clouds among the dark trees and drifted far over the water; into the mud came the hunting dogs—splash, splash!—and the rushes and the reeds bent on every side. That was a fright for the poor Duckling! He turned his head to put it under his wing, but at that moment a frightful great dog stopped close to the Duckling. His tongue hung far out of his mouth and his eyes gleamed horribly; he thrust out his nose close to the Duckling, showed his sharp teeth, and—splash, splash!—on he went, without touching him.

“Oh, thank heaven!” sighed the Duckling. “I am so ugly that even the dog does not want to bite me!”

And so he lay quite still, while the shots rattled through the reeds, and gun after gun went off. At last, late in the day, all was quiet again; but the poor Duckling did not dare to move; he waited several hours before he looked round him, and then made off out of the marsh as fast as he could. He ran on over field and meadow, and such a storm was blowing that it was difficult to get along at all.

Towards evening the Duckling came to a miserable little peasant’s hut. It was so tumbledown that it did not know which way to fall first, and that’s why it remained standing. The storm whistled so fiercely about the Duckling that he was obliged to sit down to withstand it; and the tempest grew worse and worse. Then the Duckling noticed that one of the hinges of the door had given way, and the door hung so askew that he could slip through the crack into the room; and so he did.

Here there lived a woman, with her Cat and her Hen. And the Cat, whom she called Sonny, could arch his back and purr, and he could even give out sparks, but for that one had to stroke his fur the wrong way. The Hen had very little short legs, and therefore she was called Chickabiddy-shortlegs; she laid good eggs, and the woman loved her as her own child.

In the morning the strange Duckling was noticed at once, and the Cat began to purr, and the Hen to cluck.

“What’s all this?” said the woman, and looked about her; but she could not see well, and so she thought the Duckling was a fat duck that had strayed in. “This is a rare catch!” she said. “Now I shall have duck’s eggs. I hope it is not a drake. That we must find out!

And so the Duckling was taken on trial for three weeks; but no eggs came. And the Cat was master of the house, and the Hen was mistress, and always said, “We and the world!” for she thought they were half the world, and by far the better half too. The Duckling thought it might be possible to hold another opinion, but the Hen would not allow it.

“Can you lay eggs?” she asked. “No! Then you’d better hold your tongue.”

And the Cat said, “Can you arch your back, and purr, and give out sparks? No! Then you mustn’t have any opinion of your own when sensible folk are talking.”

And the Duckling sat in a corner and was in a sad humour; then the fresh air and the sunshine streamed in; and he was seized with such a strange longing to swim on the water that he could not help telling it to the hen.

“What are you thinking of?” cried the Hen. “You have nothing to do, that’s why you have these fancies. Lay eggs or purr and they will pass away.”

“But it is so delightful to swim on the water!” said the Duckling, “so delightful to let it close over your head, and dive down to the bottom!”

“Yes, that must be a great pleasure truly,” said the Hen. “You must be going crazy. Ask the Cat about it—he’s the wisest creature I know—ask him if he likes to swim on the water or to dive under it: I won’t speak of myself. Ask our mistress, the old woman; no one in the world is wiser than she. Do you think she has any longing to swim, and to let the water close over her head?”

“You don’t understand me,” said the duckling.

“We don’t understand you? Then pray who will understand you? You surely don’t pretend to be wiser than the Cat and the old woman—to say nothing of myself. Don’t be conceited, child, and be grateful for all the kindness that has been shown you. Have you not come into a warm room, and into company where you may learn something? But you are an idle chatterer, and it’s no pleasure to be with you. You may believe me, I speak for your own good. I say unpleasant things to you, and that’s the way you may always know your true friends! Just you learn to lay eggs, or to purr and give out sparks!”

“I think I’ll go out into the wide world,” said the Duckling.

“Yes, do, by all means,” said the Hen.

And away went the Duckling. He swam on the water and dived, but he was slighted by all the other creatures because of his ugliness.

Then autumn came. The leaves in the forest turned yellow and brown, the wind caught them so that they danced about, and the air turned very cold. The clouds hung low, heavy with hail and snow, and on the fence stood the raven and croaked, “Caw! caw!” from sheer cold; yes, it makes one shiver only to think of it. The poor Duckling certainly was in a bad case.

One evening—the sun was just setting in all its beauty—there came a whole flock of great handsome birds out of the bushes. The duckling had never seen anything so beautiful. They were dazzlingly white, with long, slender necks: they were swans. They uttered a very peculiar cry, spread their lovely long wings, and flew away from that cold region to warmer lands, to open lakes. They rose so high, so high, that the ugly little duckling felt quite queer as he watched them. He turned round and round in the water like a wheel, stretched out his neck towards them, and uttered such a strange loud cry that he frightened even himself. Oh! he could not forget those beautiful, those happy birds; and as soon as he could see them no longer he dived right down to the bottom, and when he came up again he was quite beside himself. He knew not what birds they were, nor where they were flying; but he loved them more than he had ever loved anyone before. He was not at all envious of them. How could he think of wishing for such loveliness as they had? He would have been quite happy if only the ducks would have allowed him to be with them—the poor ugly little thing!

And the winter grew so cold, so cold! The Duckling was forced to swim about in the water to prevent it from freezing all over; but every night the hole in which he swam became smaller and smaller. It froze so hard that the icy covering creaked; and the Duckling had to use his legs all the time to keep the hole from freezing up. At last he became exhausted, and lay quite still, and soon froze fast into the ice.

Early in the morning a peasant came by and saw him. And he went onto the ice, and broke the ice to pieces with his wooden shoe, and carried the Duckling home to his wife. There he came to again. The children wanted to play with him, but the Duckling thought they would hurt him, and in his fright he fluttered up into the milk-pan, so that the milk splashed all over the room. The woman cried out and clapped her hands, at which the Duckling flew into the butter-tub, and then into the meal-barrel and out again. What a sight he was then! The woman screamed, and struck at him with the fire-tongs; the children tumbled over one another in trying to catch the Duckling; and they laughed and they screamed! Luckily the door stood open, and the poor creature was able to slip out among the shrubs into the newly fallen snow.

But it would be too sad to tell you all the misery and trouble the Duckling had to bear through the hard winter. He was lying out on the moor among the reeds, when the sun began to shine warmly again. The larks were singing, and it was lovely springtime.

Then all at once the Duckling flapped his wings: they beat the air more strongly than before, and bore him quickly away; and before he knew it he found himself in a large garden, where the apple trees were in bloom, and lilacs scented the air and hung their long green branches down to the winding canals. Oh, here it was so beautiful, in the freshness of spring! and right in front of him from the thicket came three lovely white swans; they ruffled their feathers, and swam lightly over the water. The duckling knew the splendid creatures, and was seized with a strange sadness.

“I will fly to them, these royal birds! and they will kill me, because I, that am so ugly, dare to go near them. But that will not matter! Better be killed by them than snapped at by ducks, pecked by fowls, and kicked by the girl who takes care of the poultry-yard, and suffer hunger in winter!” And it flew down to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans; they saw him, and came sailing up with ruffled feathers. “Only kill me!” said the poor creature, and bent his head down to the water and awaited his death. But what did he see in the clear water? He beheld his own image, but he was no longer a clumsy, dark grey bird, ugly and ungainly. He was himself a swan.

It matters little to be born in a duck-yard when one comes from a swan’s egg!

He felt quite glad at all the trouble and misfortune he had suffered, for now he really appreciated his good fortune in all the beauty that surrounded him. And the big swans swam round him, and stroked him with their beaks.

Into the garden came some little children, and threw bread and corn into the water; and the youngest cried, “There is a new one!” and the other children shouted with joy, “Yes, a new one has come!” And they clapped their hands and danced about, and ran to their father and mother; and bread and cake were thrown into the water; and they all said, “The new one is the most beautiful of all! so young and handsome!” and the old swans bowed their heads to him.

Then he felt quite shy, and hid his head under his wing, for he did not quite know what to do; he was so happy, and yet not at all proud, for a good heart is never proud. He thought of how he had been persecuted and despised; and now he heard them all saying that he was the most beautiful of all beautiful birds. Even the lilac bent its branches straight down into the water before him, and the sun shone warm and mild. He ruffled his feathers and lifted his slender neck, and from his heart he cried joyfully:

“Such happiness I never dreamed of when I was the Ugly Duckling!”

[ 1844 ]

The Steadfast Tin Soldier

—

There were once five-and-twenty tin soldiers, who were all brothers, as they were cast from an old tin spoon. They all carried their guns on their shoulders and looked straight ahead, and they all had the same smart uniform, red and blue. The first words which they heard upon seeing the light of day, when the lid was taken off the box in which they were packed, were, “Tin soldiers!” These words were uttered by a little boy who had received them as a birthday present, and he clapped his hands for joy; he then put them in rank and file on the table. One soldier looked exactly like another; only one, who had been cast last of all, when there was not enough tin left, was not like his brothers, for he had only one leg; nevertheless, he stood just as firmly on his one leg as the others on two; and he was the very one who became famous.

On the table where they were placed were many other toys; but what caught the eye most of all was a pretty castle of paper. Through its little windows one could look into the rooms. Before the castle stood little trees round a clear lake, which was made by a little looking-glass. Swans made of wax were swimming on it and were reflected in it. All this was very pretty, but the prettiest of all was a little lady who stood in the open door of the castle; she was cut out of paper, but she had a frock of the whitest muslin on, and a piece of narrow blue ribbon was fixed on her shoulders like a scarf, and on it was fixed a glittering tinsel rose, as large as her whole face. The little Lady stretched out both arms, for she was a dancer; and as she had lifted one leg high up, so that the Tin Soldier could not see it, he thought she had only one leg like himself.

“That’s the wife for me,” he thought; “but she is very grand; she lives in a castle, while I have only a box, which I share with four-and-twenty; that is no place for her. But I must make her acquaintance.” And then he laid himself at full length behind a snuff-box which was on the table; there from his place he could see the little dainty lady, who continued to stand on one leg without losing her balance.

At night all the other tin soldiers were put back into their box, and the people of the house went to bed. Now the toys began to play, to pay visits, to make war, and to go to balls. The tin soldiers rattled in their box, for they wished to take part in the games, but they could not raise the lid. The Nutcrackers played leapfrog, the Slate-pencil scribbled nonsense on the Slate; they made so much noise that the Canary woke up and began to talk, and in poetry, too! The Tin Soldier and the Dancer were the only ones who remained in their places. She was standing on tiptoe with her arm stretched out; he stood firmly on his one leg, never taking his eyes away from her for a moment. When the clock struck twelve, suddenly the lid of the snuff-box flew open. There was no snuff in it, but a small black troll, a jack-in-the-box, who did the trick.

“Tin Soldier,” said the Troll, “will you keep your eyes to yourself?”

The Tin Soldier pretended not to hear it.

“All right; wait till tomorrow,” said the Troll.

When morning came and the children were up, the Tin Soldier was placed on the windowsill. All at once, whether it was the Troll or the draught, the window flew open and the soldier fell headlong down into the street from the third story. That was a terrible fall! With his one leg in the air, he stood on his helmet, while his bayonet stuck between the paving stones. The servant and the little boy came down at once to look for him; but although they were so close to him that they almost trod upon him, they did not find him. If the Tin Soldier had cried out, “Here I am!” they would surely have found him; but he did not think it was proper to cry for help, because he was in uniform.

Then it began to rain, and the drops fell faster and faster, till there was a regular torrent. When the rain had stopped, two street boys came by.

“Look, there is a tin soldier!” said one of them. “Let’s give him a sail!”

So they made a boat out of a piece of newspaper, put the Tin Soldier in it, and let him float down the gutter; both the boys ran by the side and clapped their hands. Heaven preserve us! What waves there were in the gutter, and such a strong current too, for the rain had been pouring down in torrents. The paper boat rocked up and down; sometimes it turned round so quickly that the Tin Soldier trembled; but he remained firm, he did not move a muscle, and looked straight ahead, holding his gun on his shoulder. All at once the boat was driven into a long drain, and there it became as dark as it had been in his box.

“Where am I going to?” he thought. “This is the fault of the Black Troll. Ah! if only the little Lady sat here with me in the boat, then I should not mind if it was twice as dark.”

Then there came a big water-rat which lived in the drain.

“Have you got a pass?” asked the Rat. “Give me your pass!”

But the Tin Soldier kept silent and held his gun tighter than before.

The boat rushed on; the Rat followed, gnashing its teeth, and crying out to the chips of wood and straws: “Stop him, stop him! He has not paid the toll! he has not shown his pass!”

The current became stronger and stronger; the Tin Soldier could already see the light of day where the drain ended; but he also heard a roaring noise, strong enough to frighten a brave man. Just think; there, where the drain ended, the water rushed into a big canal, for him as dangerous as for us to be carried over a big waterfall. He was already so close to it that to stop was impossible. The boat dashed on; the poor Tin Soldier held himself as stiff as he could; nobody could say of him that he had blinked an eye. The boat rapidly whirled round three or four times, and was filled with water to the very brim; it must sink. The Tin Soldier stood up to his neck in water; deeper and deeper sank the boat, more and more soaked became the paper; then the water closed over the soldier’s head. He thought of the sweet little Dancer whom he should never see again, and there sounded in his ear:

Farewell, soldier, true and brave.

Nothing now thy life can save.

Then the paper boat fell to pieces, and the Tin Soldier, sinking into the water, was snapped up by a big fish.

It was very dark indeed inside the fish, much darker than in the drain, and it was awfully narrow too, but the Tin Soldier remained firm, and lay down full length, holding his gun firmly on his shoulder.

The fish rushed about and made the most extraordinary movements; at last it became quiet; it seemed as if a flash of lightning passed through it, the broad daylight appeared, and a voice shouted, “The Tin Soldier!” The fish had been caught and taken to market; there it had been sold and brought to the kitchen, where the cook had just cut it open with a big knife. With two fingers she took the Tin Soldier round the middle, and carried him upstairs, to show everybody the wonderful man who had been travelling about in a fish’s stomach; but the Tin Soldier was not proud. They put him on the table, and—what strange things happen in this world!—there he was in the self-same room where he had been before! He saw the same children and the same toys were on the table; there was also the pretty castle, with the dear little Dancer. She stood still on one leg and held the other high up in the air: she too was steadfast. The Tin Soldier was very much touched, and he nearly shed tin tears, but that was not becoming for a soldier. He looked at her, and she looked at him, but neither said a word. Suddenly one of the little boys took up the Tin Soldier and threw him into the stove. without giving any reason for this strange conduct! Of course it was the Troll in the snuff-box who was responsible!

The Tin Soldier stood there in the strong light and felt an unbearable heat, but whether this heat was caused by the real fire or by love he did not know. His colours had vanished, but nobody could say if that happened during his journey or if grief was the cause of it. He looked at the little Lady and she looked at him, and he felt that he was melting, but still he stood upright with his gun in his arm. All at once a door flew open, the wind took the Dancer and she flew like a sylph into the stove to the Tin Soldier, blazed up, and was gone in a moment. The Tin Soldier melted down into a lump, and when the servant cleared out the cinders next morning she found him in the shape of a little tin heart. Of the little Dancer only the tinsel rose was left, and that was burned as black as coal.

[ 1838 ]

Little Ida’s Flowers

—

“My poor flowers are quite dead,” said little Ida. “They were so pretty yesterday, and now all the leaves hang withered! Why do they do that?” she asked the student who was sitting on the sofa, for she liked him very much. He knew how to tell the most beautiful stories, and could cut the most amusing pictures out of paper: hearts, with little ladies in them who danced, flowers, and big castles with doors that could be opened. He was a jolly young fellow. “Why do my flowers look so faded today?” she asked again, and showed him the bouquet, which was quite withered.

“Do you know what is the matter with them?” said the Student. “The flowers were at a ball last night, and that’s why they hang their heads.”

“But flowers can’t dance!” said little Ida.

“Oh, yes!” said the Student. “When it grows dark, and we are asleep, they jump merrily about; they have a ball almost every night.”

“Can children go to this ball?”

“Oh, yes!” said the Student; “little tiny daisies and the snowdrops.”

“Where do the beautiful flowers dance?” asked little Ida.

“Have you not often been outside the town gate, near the big castle where the king lives in the summer, where the beautiful garden is with all the flowers? You have seen the swans which swim up to you when you give them bread-crumbs. Out there, there are splendid balls, believe me.”

“I was out in the garden there yesterday with my mother,” said Ida; “but all the leaves were off the trees, and there are no longer any flowers there. Where are they? In the summer I saw so many!”

“They are in the castle,” said the Student. “You must know that as soon as the king and all the Court return to town the flowers immediately run out of the garden into the castle and enjoy themselves. You ought to see that: the two most beautiful roses seat themselves on the throne, and then they are king and queen; all the red cockscombs come and place themselves on each side and bow—they are the chamberlains. Afterwards all the pretty flowers arrive, and a great ball takes place. The blue violets represent little naval cadets; they dance with hyacinths and crocuses, which they address as ‘Miss’; the tulips and the large tiger-lilies are old ladies, who see that they all dance well, and behave themselves.”

“But,” asked little Ida, “is nobody there who hurts the flowers because they dance in the king’s castle?”

“The truth is, nobody knows about it,” said the Student. “Sometimes, of course, the old steward of the castle, who has to keep watch, comes during the night; he has a big bunch of keys, but as soon as the flowers hear the keys rattle they are quiet, and hide themselves behind the curtains, and only poke their heads out. ‘I can smell that there are flowers here,’ says the old steward, but he cannot see them.”

“That’s splendid!” said little Ida, and clapped her hands. “But should I not be able to see the flowers either?”

“Yes,” said the Student; “only remember when you go there again to look through the window, then you will see them. I looked in today, and saw a large yellow lily resting on the sofa and stretching herself. She was a lady-in-waiting.”

“Can the flowers from the Botanical Gardens also go there? Can they go such a long way?”

“Yes, certainly,” said the Student; “if they wish they can fly. Have you not seen the pretty butterflies, red, yellow, and white? They look almost like flowers, and that is what they’ve been. They have flown off their stalks high into the air, and have beaten it with their petals as if they had little wings, and then they flew. And because they behaved themselves well they obtained permission to fly about in the daytime too, and had not to return home and sit still on their stalks; and thus the petals became in the end real wings. That you have seen yourself. It may be, however, that the flowers in the Botanical Gardens have never been at the king’s castle, or do not know that there is such merriment out there at night. Therefore I will tell you how you can give a surprise to the professor of botany, who lives next door. You know him well, do you not? When you go into his garden you must tell one of the flowers that a large ball takes place at the castle every night; then the flower will tell all the others, and they will all fly away; and if the professor comes into the garden he will not find a single flower there, and he will be unable to understand what has become of them.”

“But how can one flower tell the others? Flowers can’t talk!”

“Of course they can’t,” said the Student, “but then they make signs. Have you never seen that when the wind blows a little the flowers nod to one another and move all their green leaves? That they understand as well as us when we talk together.”

“Can the professor understand their signs?” asked Ida.

“Certainly. One morning he came into the garden and saw a large stinging-nettle making signs with its leaves to a beautiful red carnation. It said: ‘You are so pretty, and I love you with all my heart.’ But the professor can’t stand things of that sort, and beat the stinging-nettle at once on its leaves, which are its fingers; but then it stung him, and since that time he never dares touch a stinging-nettle again,”

“That’s funny,” said little Ida, laughing.

“How can one make a child believe such silly things!” said a tiresome Lawyer, who had come to pay a visit and was also sitting on the sofa. He could not bear the Student, and always grumbled when he saw him cutting out the funny amusing figures: sometimes he cut out a man hanging on a gibbet and holding a heart in his hand, for he had been stealing hearts; sometimes an old witch, who was riding on a broomstick, and carrying her husband on her nose. But all this the old Lawyer could not abide, and then he generally said, as he did now; “How can one make a child believe such silly things? They are stupid fancies!”

But to little Ida what the Student told her about the flowers seemed very amusing, and she thought a great deal about it.

The flowers hung their heads because they were tired of dancing all night; they were surely ill. So she took them to her other toys, which were kept on a nice little table, and the whole drawer was full of pretty things. In the doll’s bed, her doll Sophy was sleeping, but little Ida said to her: “You must really get up now, Sophy, and be satisfied to lie in the drawer tonight. The poor flowers are ill, and they must lie in your bed; perhaps then they will recover!” And she took her out at once, and the doll looked very cross and did not say a single word, for she was angry that she could not keep her own bed.

Then Ida placed the flowers in the doll’s bed, pulled the little quilt over them, and said they must lie quietly, and she would make them some tea, so that they might get well again, and be able to get up in the morning. She drew the little curtains round the bed, lest the sun might shine in their eyes. She could not help thinking the whole evening about all the Student had told her. And when she was going to bed herself, she first looked behind the curtains at the window, where her mother’s beautiful flowers stood, hyacinths and tulips, and she whispered in a low voice: “I know where you are going tonight—to the ball!” The flowers pretended not to understand her, and did not stir a leaf, but little Ida knew what she knew.

When she had gone to bed she lay for a long time thinking how delightful it would be to see the beautiful flowers dancing in the king’s castle. “I wonder if my flowers have really been there?” Then she fell asleep. In the night she woke up again; she had been dreaming of the flowers and of the Student whom the Lawyer had scolded. It was very quiet in the bedroom where Ida slept; the night-light was burning on the table, and her father and mother were asleep.

“I wonder if my flowers are still lying in Sophy’s bed!” she thought. “How I should like to know!” She raised herself a little and looked towards the door, which was ajar; in there lay her flowers and all her toys. She listened, and it seemed to her as if she heard someone in the room playing the piano, but very softly, and more beautifully than she had ever heard before. “I am sure all my flowers are dancing in there,” she thought. “How much I should like to see them!” But she dared not get up for fear of waking her father and mother.

“Oh! I wish they would come in here!” she thought. But the flowers did not come, and the music continued to play beautifully. At last she could bear it no longer—it was too beautiful. She crept out of her little bed, went softly towards the door, and peeped into the room. What an amusing sight she saw!

There was no night-light in there, and yet it was quite light; the moon was shining on the floor; it was almost as light as day. All the hyacinths and tulips stood in two long rows in the room; not a single one remained on the windowsill, where only the empty pots were left. On the floor, all the flowers danced very gracefully round one another, made figures, and held each other by their long green leaves while swinging round. At the piano sat a large yellow lily, which little Ida was certain she had seen in the summer, for she remembered distinctly that the Student had said: “How much that lily is like Miss Lina!” Then they all laughed at him; but now it seemed to little Ida as if the flower was really like the young lady: it had just her manners when she played—sometimes she bent her yellow smiling face to one side, sometimes to the other, and nodded in time to the sweet music! No one noticed little Ida. Then she saw a big blue crocus jump on the table, walk straight to the doll’s bed, and draw away the curtains; there were the sick flowers, but they got up at once and nodded to the others, to say that they wished to dance with them too. The old nutcracker in the shape of a man, whose lower jaw was broken off, got up and bowed to the beautiful flowers; they did not look at all ill now; they jumped down to the others and enjoyed themselves very much.

Then it seemed as if something fell from the table. Ida looked and saw the carnival rod jump down, and it seemed as if it was one of the flowers. It looked very pretty, and a little wax doll with a broad-brimmed hat, such as the Lawyer usually wore, sat upon it. The carnival rod hopped about among the flowers on its three red stilts, and stamped quite loudly, for it was dancing a mazurka, a dance which the other flowers were unable to manage, as they were too light and could not stamp.

The wax doll on the carnival rod suddenly grew big, and, raising itself over the paper flowers which were on the rod, exclaimed: “How can one make a child believe such foolish things? They are stupid fancies!” And the wax doll looked exactly like the Lawyer—just as yellow and cross as he was. But the paper flowers hit him on his thin legs, and then he shrank up again and became quite a little wax doll. All this was very amusing to see, and little Ida could not help laughing. The carnival rod continued to dance, and the Lawyer had to dance too. There was no getting out of it, whether he made himself tall or long or remained the little yellow wax doll with the broad-brimmed black hat. Then the other flowers, especially those which had rested in the doll’s bed, interceded in his favour, and the carnival birch-rod gave in. At the same moment a loud knocking was heard in the drawer where Ida’s doll Sophy lay with many other toys; the Nutcracker walked up to the edge of the table, laid itself down at full length, and began to open the drawer a little way. Sophy rose and glanced with astonishment all round. “I suppose there is a ball here tonight,” she said. “Why has nobody told me of it?”

“Will you dance with me?” said the Nutcracker.

“You are a nice one to dance with!” she said, and turned her back upon it.

Then she sat down on the edge of the drawer and thought that perhaps one of the flowers would ask her to dance, but none came. Then she coughed, “Hem! hem! hem!” but even in spite of this none appeared. Then the Nutcracker began to dance by itself—not so badly, after all! As none of the flowers seemed to notice Sophy, she let herself drop down onto the floor, to make a noise. All the flowers came running to her and inquired if she had hurt herself; they were all very polite to her, especially the flowers who had been in her bed. But she was not hurt, and Ida’s flowers thanked her for the beautiful bed, and were very kind to her—took her into the centre of the room, where the moon was shining, and danced with her, while all the other flowers stood in a circle round them. Now Sophy was happy, and said they might keep her bed; she did not mind sleeping in the drawer.

But the flowers said: “You are very kind, but we cannot live any longer; we shall be dead by tomorrow. Tell little Ida to bury us in the garden, where she has buried the canary; then we shall wake up again next summer and be more beautiful than ever!”

“No, you must not die,” said Sophy, and kissed them. Then the door flew open and many beautiful flowers came dancing in. Ida could not at all understand where they came from; surely they had come from the king’s castle. Two beautiful roses with crowns on their heads walked in front; they were king and queen. Then came pretty stocks and carnations, bowing to all sides: they had brought music with them. Large poppies and peonies blew on pea-pods until they were quite red in the face. The blue hyacinths and the little white lilies of the valley tinkled as if they had bells. That was wonderful music! Then many other flowers came, and they all danced—blue violets, red daisies, and lilies of the valley. All the flowers kissed one another; it was lovely to watch. At last the flowers said “Good night” to one another, and then little Ida stole back into her bed again, and dreamed of all she had seen. When she got up in the morning, she quickly went to the little table to see if her flowers were still there. She drew the curtains from the little bed, and there they lay, all withered—much more so than the day before. Sophy was lying in the drawer where she had placed her, but she looked very sleepy.

“Can you remember what you have to tell me?” asked little Ida. But Sophy was mute, and did not say a single word. “You are not good,” said Ida. “Didn’t they all dance with you?” Then she took a small paper box on which pretty birds were painted, opened it, and put the dead flowers in it. “This will be a pretty coffin for you,” she said, “and when my cousins come again they shall help me to bury you, out in the garden, that next summer you may grow again, and be prettier than ever!”

The cousins were two lively boys called Jonas and Adolph; their father had given them two new crossbows, which they had brought with them to show Ida. She told them about the poor flowers, and asked them to help her to bury them. The two boys walked in front with their crossbows on their shoulders, while little Ida followed, carrying the pretty box with the dead flowers. In the garden they dug a little grave. Ida first kissed the flowers and then laid them with the box in the earth. Adolph and Jonas shot with their crossbows over the grave, for they had neither guns nor cannons.

[ 1835 ]

Ole Lukoie

—

There is no one in the world who knows so many stories as Ole Lukoie. [01]  He can tell them beautifully!

Towards evening, when the children are still sitting nicely at table or on their stools, then comes Ole Lukoie, He comes up the stairs so quietly, for he always walks in his socks. He opens the doors gently, and—whish! he squirts sweet milk into the children’s eyes in tiny drops, but still quite enough to prevent them from keeping their eyes open and therefore from seeing him. He steals behind them, and blows softly on their necks, and this makes their heads heavy.

Oh, yes, but it does not hurt them, for Ole Lukoie is the children’s friend; he only wants them to be quiet, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep.

They must be quiet so that he may tell them stories.

When the children are asleep, Ole Lukoie sits down upon the bed. He has fine clothes on; his coat is of silk, but it is impossible to say what colour it is, for it shines green, red, or blue, every time he turns. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; the one with pictures on it he opens over good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories all night; but the other, which has no pictures, he opens over naughty children, and then they sleep as though they were deaf, so that when they awake in the morning they have not dreamed the least thing.

Now we shall hear how for one whole week Ole Lukoie came to a little boy named Hjalmar every evening, and what he told him. There are seven stories, for there are seven days in the week.

MONDAY

“Listen now!” said Ole Lukoie in the evening, when he had put Hjalmar to bed. “I’ll just make things look nice.”

And all the flowers in the flower-pots grew into large trees, stretching out their long branches across the ceiling and along the walls, so that the whole room looked like a beautiful arbour; and all the branches were full of flowers, every flower being finer than a rose, and smelling sweetly. If anyone had wanted to eat them they were sweeter than jam. The fruits shone like gold, and there were cakes simply bursting with currants. It was marvellous. But at the same time a terrible wail was heard coming from the table drawer where Hjalmar’s school-books lay,

“Whatever is the matter?” said Ole Lukoie, going to the table and opening the drawer. It was the slate, upon which a terrible riot was going on, because a wrong figure had got into the sum, so that it was nearly falling to pieces; the slate pencil hopped and skipped at the end of its string, as if it were a little dog, and would have liked to put the sum right, but it could not. And from Hjalmar’s copybook there also came the sounds of woe, terrible to hear. On every page there stood at the beginning of each line a capital letter, with a small one next to it; that was for an example. Now, next to these stood some other letters which Hjalmar had written, and these thought they looked just like the first two. But they lay there as if they had fallen over the pencil lines upon which they ought to have stood.

“Look!—this is the way you ought to hold yourselves up,” said the example. “Look!—slanting like this, with a powerful flourish.”

“Oh, we should like to,” said Hjalmar’s letters; “but we can’t—we are too weak!”

“Then you must take some medicine,” said Ole Lukoie.

“Oh, no,” they cried, and stood up so straight that it was a pleasure to see.

“Well, we cannot tell any stories now!” said Ole Lukoie; “I must drill them. One, two! one, two!” And so he drilled them until they stood up quite straight, and looked as nice as a copy can look. But when Ole Lukoie had gone, and Hjalmar looked at them in the morning, they were just as weak and crooked as before.

TUESDAY

As soon as Hjalmar had gone to bed, Ole Lukoie touched all the pieces of furniture in the room with his little magic squirt; whereupon they immediately began to chatter.

And they all talked about themselves except the spittoon, which stood there silent and angry at their being so vain as to talk only about themselves, to think only about themselves, and to take no notice whatever of the spittoon, which stood modestly in the corner and let itself be spat at.

Over the chest of drawers hung a large picture in a gilt frame; it was a landscape. In it one could see lofty old trees, flowers in the grass, and a wide river flowing round about a wood, past many castles, and far into the wide sea.

Ole Lukoie touched the picture with his magic squirt, and the birds immediately began to sing, the branches of the trees to wave, and the clouds to drift across it; one could see their shadows passing over the landscape.

Then Ole Lukoie lifted little Hjalmar up to the frame, and Hjalmar put his feet into the picture, right into the high grass; and there he stood. The sun shone down upon him through the branches of the trees. He ran to the water and sat himself in a little boat which was lying there; it was painted red and white, the sails shone like silver, and six swans, all with golden crowns round their necks and a bright blue star on their heads, drew the boat along, past the green wood where the trees tell of robbers and witches, and where the flowers speak of the dainty little elves and of what the butterflies have told them.

Beautiful fish, with scales like silver and gold, swam after the boat. Now and then they took a jump, making the water splash, and birds, red and blue, small and large, flew in two long rows after them.

The gnats danced, and the May-bugs said, “Boom! boom!” They all wanted to follow Hjalmar, and each had a story to tell.

That really was a pleasant voyage! At times the woods were thick and dark, at times full of sunlight and flowers, like the most beautiful garden. There were great castles built of glass and of marble, and on the balconies stood Princesses, who were all little girls whom Hjalmar knew very well, and with whom he had formerly played. Each one stretched out her hands, offering the prettiest sugar-heart that you could find in a candy shop. Hjalmar caught hold of one end of a sugar-heart as he sailed by, and the Princess also held on tightly, and each got a piece of it; but Hjalmar’s was bigger. At every castle little Princes kept guard. They shouldered their golden swords and showered down raisins and tin soldiers; it was easy to see they were real Princes.

Sometimes Hjalmar sailed through forests, sometimes through great halls or through the middle of a town; he also came to the town where his nursemaid lived, who had carried him when he was quite a little boy and who had always been so fond of him, and she nodded and beckoned to him, and sang the pretty little verse which she had herself written and sent to Hjalmar:

“I think of thee full many a time,

Hjalmar, my own dear boy;

Thy little mouth, thy rosy cheeks.

How oft I kissed with joy.

I heard thee lisp thy first sweet words.

Yet must I say goodbye;

May heaven bless thee here on earth.

Dear angel from on high!”

And all the birds sang too, the flowers danced on their stalks, and the old trees nodded as if Ole Lukoie were also telling them stories.

WEDNESDAY

How the rain was pouring down outside! Hjalmar could hear it in his sleep, and when Ole Lukoie opened one of the windows the water came up to the windowsill. It formed quite a lake, and a splendid ship was lying close to the house.

“Would you like to sail with me, little Hjalmar?” said Ole Lukoie. “You can reach foreign countries tonight, and get back here by the morning.”

Then Hjalmar suddenly found himself dressed in his Sunday clothes on board the beautiful ship. The weather at once became fine, and they sailed through the streets, cruised round the church, and were soon on a great stormy sea. They sailed until they lost sight of land, and saw a flock of storks which were also coming from home and going to warm countries. They were flying in a line one after another, and had already come very far. One of them was so tired that his wings could scarcely carry him any longer; he was the last in the line, and was soon left a long way behind, till at last he sank with outspread wings lower and lower. He flapped his wings once or twice more, but it was of no use; first he touched the rigging of the ship with his feet. Then he slid down from the sail, and bump!—at last he stood on the deck.

The cabin-boy took him and put him into the hen-house with the Chickens, Ducks, and Turkeys; and there stood the poor Stork, a prisoner among them.

“Just look at that fellow!” said all the Fowls, and the Turkey-cock puffed himself out as much as he could, and asked him who he was. The Ducks waddled backward and jostled each other, quacking, “What a fool! What a fool!” And the Stork told them about the heat of Africa, and the pyramids, and about the ostrich who runs across the desert like a wild horse; but the Ducks did not understand him, and nudged each other, saying: “I suppose we all agree that he is very stupid?”

“Of course he is very stupid,” said the Turkey; and then he gobbled. So the Stork was silent and thought of his Africa.

“What beautifully thin legs you have,” said the Turkey-cock. “What do they cost a yard?”

“Skrat, skrat, skrat!” grinned all the Ducks; but the Stork pretended not to have heard it.

“You might laugh anyhow!” said the Turkey-cock to him; “for it was very wittily said. But perhaps it was too deep for you! Ha! ha! He is not very clever. We will keep to our interesting selves.” And then he gobbled, and the Ducks quacked “Gik, gak! gik, gak!” It was irritating to hear how they amused themselves!

But Hjalmar went to the hen-house, opened the door, and called the Stork, who hopped out to him on the deck. He had now had a good rest, and he seemed to nod to Hjalmar, as if to thank him. He then spread his wings and flew to the warm countries; but the Hens clucked, the Ducks quacked, and the Turkey-cock turned fire-red in the face.

“Tomorrow we shall make soup of you,” said Hjalmar; and with that he awoke and found himself in his little bed. It was a strange journey upon which Ole Lukoie had taken him that night.

THURSDAY

“Do you know what?” said Ole Lukoie; “only don’t be frightened, and you will see a little Mouse here.” And he held out his hand with the pretty little animal in it. “She is come to invite you to a wedding. There are two little Mice here who are going to enter the married state tonight. They live under the floor of your mother’s larder, which must be a fine place to dwell in.”

“But how can I get through the little mouse-hole in the floor?” asked Hjalmar.

“Let me look after that,” said Ole Lukoie. “I will soon make you small.” And then he touched Hjalmar with his little magic squirt, and he grew smaller and smaller, until at last he was only as big as a finger. “Now you can borrow the clothes of the tin soldier; I think they will fit you, and it looks well to wear uniform when you are in company,”

“So it does,” said Hjalmar, and in the blink of an eye he was dressed like the prettiest little tin soldier.

“Will you be good enough to sit in your mother’s thimble?” said the little Mouse. “Then I shall have the honour of drawing you along.”

“Gracious! And will you yourself take so much trouble, madam?” said Hjalmar; and in that way they drove to the mouse’s wedding.

At first they came to a long passage under the floor, just high enough to enable them to drive along with the thimble, and the whole passage was illuminated with rotten wood.

“Doesn’t it smell delightful here?” asked the Mouse, who was drawing him along. “The passage is smeared with bacon-rind. There can be nothing nicer!”

Then they came to the hall where the wedding was to take place. On the right-hand side stood all the little lady mice, and they whispered and giggled as though they were having rare good fun; on the left stood all the gentlemen mice, stroking their whiskers with their paws. In the middle of the hall could be seen the bride and bridegroom standing in the hollowed-out rind of a cheese; they were kissing each other in a shameless manner before the eyes of all, but you know, they were already betrothed and on the point of being married.

More and more strangers kept coming; the mice were almost treading each other to death, and the bridal pair had placed themselves right in the doorway, so that it was impossible to go out or in. The whole room, like the passage, had been smeared with bacon-rind, and that was all the refreshments there were; for dessert, however, a pea was shown, in which a mouse of the family had bitten the name of the bridal pair—that is to say, of course, only the initials. But what a novel idea it was!

All the mice agreed that it was a splendid wedding, and that the conversation had been most agreeable.

Then Hjalmar drove home again. He had certainly been in distinguished society, but he had also had to huddle himself up a good deal, to make himself small, and to wear a tin soldier’s uniform.

FRIDAY

“It is unbelievable how many grown-up people there are who would only be too pleased to have me,” said Ole Lukoie. “Particularly those who have done something bad. ‘Dear little Ole,’ they say to me, ‘we cannot close our eyes, and so we lie awake the whole night and see all our wicked deeds sitting like ugly little trolls on the bedstead, and squirting hot water over us; we wish you would come and drive them away, so that we could get a good sleep.’ Then they sigh deeply. ‘Indeed, we would willingly pay for it! Good night. Ole—the money is on the windowsill.’ But I don’t do it for money,” said Ole Lukoie.

“What are we going to do tonight?” asked Hjalmar.

“Well, I don’t know whether you would like to go to another wedding tonight; it is of quite a different kind to last night’s. Your sister’s big doll—the one that looks like a man and is called Hermann—is going to marry the doll Bertha. Besides this it is the bride’s birthday, and therefore they will receive a great many presents.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Hjalmar. “Whenever the dolls want new clothes my sister lets them have a birthday or a wedding. That has happened at least a hundred times already.”

“Yes, but tonight is the hundred-and-first wedding, and when a hundred-and-one is reached everything is over. That is why this one will be such a grand affair. Only just look!”

And Hjalmar looked upon the table. There stood the little doll’s house with lights in the windows, and all the tin soldiers presenting arms in front of it. The bride and bridegroom were sitting on the floor and leaning against the leg of the table. They seemed very thoughtful, and perhaps they had good cause. Ole Lukoie, dressed in Grandmother’s black gown, married them. When the ceremony was over all the furniture in the room began to sing the following beautiful song, written by the lead pencil. It went to the tune of the soldiers’ tattoo:

We’ll sing our song out like the wind,

Long live the bridal pair!

Though both so dumb, so stiff and blind,

Of leather made, they’ll wear.

Hurrah! hurrah! though deaf and blind,

We’ll sing it out in rain and wind.

And now came the presents; they had, however, declined to accept any eatables, love being enough for them to live on.

“Shall we take a country house or travel abroad?” asked the bridegroom. To settle this, the Swallow, who had travelled a great deal, and the old Hen, who had hatched five broods of chicks, were asked for their advice.

The Swallow spoke of the beautiful warm countries, where the grapes grow large and full, where the air is so mild and the mountains have such colours as are never seen in our country.

“But still, they have not our green cabbage,” said the Hen. “I was once in the country for a whole summer with all my chicks; there was a sand-pit, into which we might go and scratch about, and then we were admitted to a garden full of cabbage. Oh, it was grand! I cannot imagine anything nicer!”

“But one cabbage stalk is just like another,” said the Swallow; “and then we very often have bad weather here.”

“Well, one gets used to that,” said the Hen.

“But it is cold here, and it freezes.”

“That is good for cabbages,” said the Hen. “Besides, it can be warm here too. Didn’t we have a summer, four years ago, that lasted five weeks? It was almost too warm to breathe. And then we have not poisonous animals, as they have there; and we are free from robbers. He must be a wicked man who does not think that our country is most beautiful. He really does not deserve to be here.”

And then the Hen wept. “I have travelled too. I rode for more than twelve miles in a coop. Travelling is by no means a pleasure.”

“Yes, the Hen is a sensible woman,” said the doll Bertha. “I don’t in the least care for travelling over mountains myself, for you only go up and down again. No, we will go down to the gravel-pit outside the gate and walk in the cabbage-patch.”

And so it was settled.

SATURDAY

“Shall I hear any stories tonight?” asked little Hjalmar, as soon as Ole Lukoie had sent him to sleep.

“We have no time for any this evening,” said Ole Lukoie, opening his beautiful umbrella over him. “Just look at these Chinamen!”

The umbrella looked like a big Chinese bowl with blue trees and pointed bridges, and with little Chinamen nodding their heads.

“We must have the whole world cleaned up by tomorrow morning,” said Ole Lukoie, “for it is a holiday—it is Sunday. I will go to the church steeple and see whether the little church brownies are polishing the bells, so that they may sound sweetly. I will go out into the fields and see whether the wind is blowing the dust off the grass and the leaves; and, what is the biggest job of all, I must fetch down the stars to polish them. I take them in my apron; but first each one must be numbered, and the holes in which they are fixed must also be numbered, so that they may be put back in their right places. They would otherwise not hold fast, and we should have too many falling stars, one tumbling down after another.

“Look here! Do you know, Mr Ole Lukoie,” said an old Portrait which hung on the wall in Hjalmar’s bedroom, “I am Hjalmar’s great-grandfather? I thank you for telling the boy tales; but you must not put wrong ideas into his head. The stars cannot be taken down and polished. The stars are worlds, just like our earth, and that is the beauty of them.”

“Thanks shall you have, you old great-grandfather!” said Ole Lukoie. “Thanks shall you have! You are the head of the family; you are its founder; but I am still older than you. I am an old heathen; the Greeks and Romans called me the god of dreams. I have visited the grandest houses, and still go there. I know how to deal both with the humble and the great. Now you may tell your own stories.” And Ole Lukoie went away and took his umbrellas with him.

“Well! one is never to give an opinion, I suppose,” grumbled the portrait.

And Hjalmar awoke.

SUNDAY

“Good evening!” said Ole Lukoie. Hjalmar nodded and jumped up to turn his great-grandfather’s Portrait to the wall, so that it could not interrupt, as it did yesterday.

“You must tell me some stories about the five green peas who lived in one pod, about the leg of the cock which went courting the leg of the hen, and about the darning-needle who was so grand that she fancied she was an embroidery-needle.”

“You can have too much of a good thing,” said Ole Lukoie. “You know very well that I prefer showing you something. I will show you my brother. He also is called Ole Lukoie, but he never comes to anyone more than once, and when he does come to them he takes them with him on his horse and tells them stories. He only knows two; one is so extremely beautiful that no one in the world can imagine anything like it; the other is most awful and horrible—it cannot be described.”

Then Ole Lukoie lifted little Hjalmar up to the window, saying: “Now you will see my brother, the other Ole Lukoie. They call him Death. Do you see—he does not look so bad as in the picture-books, where they make him out to be a skeleton. No, it is silver embroidery on his coat; it is a splendid hussar uniform; a black velvet mantle floats behind him over the horse. See at what a gallop he rides.”

And Hjalmar saw how this Ole Lukoie rode away, taking both young and old upon his horse. Some he placed before him and others behind, but he always asked first:

“How is your report for good behaviour?”

“Good!” they all replied.

“Yes, but let me see it myself,” he said; and then each one had to show him the book. All those who had ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ were placed in front upon the horse and heard the delightful story; but those who had ‘tolerably good’ and ‘middling’ had to get up behind and listen to the horrible story. They trembled and cried, and wanted to jump off the horse, but could not do so, for they had suddenly grown fast to it.

“But Death is a most beautiful Ole Lukoie,” said Hjalmar. “I am not afraid of him.”

“Nor should you be!” said Ole Lukoie. “Only take care that you get good reports!”

“Well, that’s instructive,” mumbled the great-grandfather’s Portrait. “It is of some use to give one’s opinion occasionally.”

And so he felt satisfied.

And that is the story of Ole Lukoie. Perhaps he will tell you some more tonight himself.

[ 1842 ]

The Goblin and the Grocer

—

There was once a Student—a proper Student; he lived in an attic and owned nothing at all. There was also a Grocer—a proper Grocer; he lived in a proper room, and he owned the whole house. The little goblin stuck to him, for every Christmas Eve, the Grocer always gave him a bowl of porridge with a such a big lump of butter in it! That the Grocer could afford, and so the Goblin lived in the Grocer’s shop, which was very cunning of him.

One evening the Student came in by the back door to buy some candles and cheese. He had no one to send, and so he came himself. He got what he wanted, and the Grocer and Madam, his wife, both nodded him a good evening. And she—she was a woman who could do more than merely nod; she was gifted with a tongue, if you like! The Student nodded too, but suddenly stood still, reading the sheet of paper the cheese was wrapped up in. It was a leaf torn out of an old book, that ought never to have been torn up, an old book that was full of poetry.

“Here’s some more of the same kind,” said the Grocer; “I gave an old woman a few coffee-beans for it. If you give me twopence you shall have the rest.”

“Thanks!” said the Student. “Give it to me instead of the cheese; I can eat my bread and butter alone. It would be a sin to tear the book up into scraps. You are a fine man and a practical man, but you know as much about poetry as that tub there.”

Now this was very rude, especially to the tub, but the Grocer laughed and the Student laughed, for it was only said in fun. But the Goblin was angry that anyone should dare to say such a thing to a Grocer who was a householder and who sold the best butter.

When night was come and the shop shut up, and all were in bed but the Student, the Goblin came out, went into the bedroom, and took Madam’s tongue away. She did not want it while she was asleep. And whatever object in the room he put it on acquired speech and voice, and told its thoughts and feelings just as well as madam. But only one object at a time could use it, which was a blessing; otherwise they would all have been speaking at once.

The Goblin put the tongue on the tub, in which lay the old newspapers. “Is it really true,” he asked, “that you don’t know what poetry is?”

“Certainly I do,” said the Tub. “Poetry is something they always put at the bottom of newspaper pages, and which is sometimes cut out. I daresay I have a great deal more of it in me than the Student, and yet I am only a simple tub compared with the Grocer.”

Then the Goblin placed the tongue on the coffee-mill. Mercy on us! how it rattled away! And he put it on the butter-cask, and on the money-box—all were of the same opinion as the waste-paper tub, and the opinion of the multitude must be respected.

“Now I’ll tell the Student.” And with these words the Goblin stole quietly up the kitchen stairs to the attic where the Student lived. He had a candle burning, and the Goblin peeped through the keyhole and saw him reading in the torn book that he had got from the shop downstairs.

But how light it was in there! Out of the book shone a bright beam, which grew up into a thick stem and into a mighty tree, that rose and spread its branches over the Student. Every leaf was fresh, and every blossom was a beautiful maiden’s head, some with eyes dark and sparkling, others blue and wonderfully clear; every fruit was a shining star, and there was a sound of glorious singing.

No, such splendour the little Goblin had never dreamed of, let alone seen or heard. He remained standing there on tiptoe, peeping and peeping till the light in the garret went out. Probably the Student had blown it out and gone to bed, but the Goblin remained standing there all the same, for he could still hear the sweet lovely singing—a beautiful lullaby for the Student, who had lain down to rest.

“What a wonderful place this is!” said the Goblin. “I never expected such a thing. I should like to live with the Student.” Then he thought, and thought it over again, but he sighed. “The Student has no porridge,” and he went away—yes, he went down again to the Grocer’s. And it was a good thing too that he did come back, for the Tub had almost worn out Madam’s tongue: it had already spoken out at one side all that was contained in it, and was just about to turn round to give it out from the other side too, when the Goblin came and took the tongue back to Madam. But from that time forth the whole shop, from the cash-box down to the firewood, took its views from the Tub; and all paid it so much respect, and had such confidence in it, that when the Grocer afterwards read the art and dramatic criticism in the newspaper of an evening they all believed it came from the Tub.

But the little Goblin no longer sat quietly listening to the wisdom and wit to be heard down there. No, as soon as the light began to glimmer out of the garret, he felt as if the rays were strong cables, drawing him up, and he was obliged to go and peep through the keyhole. Then a feeling of greatness came over him, such as we feel beside the rolling sea when the storm sweeps over it, and he burst into tears. He did not know himself why he wept, but a strange and very pleasant feeling was mingled with his tears. How wonderfully glorious it must be to sit with the Student under that tree! But that could not be—he must content himself with the keyhole, and be glad of that. There he stood on the cold landing with the autumn wind blowing down from the trapdoor in the loft; it was cold, so cold, but the little fellow only felt that when the light in the attic was put out and the music in the wonderful tree had died away. Ugh! Then he felt frozen, and he crept down to his warm corner again—it was cosy and comfortable there! And when Christmas came, and with it the porridge and the great lump of butter—why, then the Grocer was the master for him!

But in the middle of the night the Goblin was awakened by a terrible noise and a banging at the shutters, against which the people outside were knocking as hard as they could. The night watchman blew his horn, for a great fire had broken out. Was it in the house itself, or at the neighbour’s? Where was it? It was a dreadful moment!

The Grocer’s wife was so bewildered that she took her gold earrings from her ears and put them into her pocket, so that she might save at least something; the Grocer made a dash for his banknotes, and the maid for her silk shawl which she had managed to afford. Everyone wanted to save the best they had; the Goblin wanted to do that too, and in a few leaps he was up the stairs and in the room of the Student, who was calmly standing at the open window gazing at the fire that raged in the house of the neighbour opposite. The little Goblin seized the book from the table, put it into his red cap, and clasped it with both hands—the greatest treasure in the house was saved. And then he ran up and away, out upon the roof of the house, on to the chimney. There he sat in the light of the flames from the burning house opposite, both hands pressed over his red cap which held his treasure, and now he knew where his heart was and to whom he really belonged. But when the fire was extinguished, and the Goblin again began to reflect calmly, well…

“I will divide myself between the two,” he said. “I cannot give the Grocer up altogether on account of the porridge!”

And that was only human, after all. Most of us stick to the Grocer for the sake of the porridge.

[ 1853 ]

What the Old Man Does
Is Always Right

—

I will tell you the story which I heard when I was a little boy.

Every time I thought of the story it seemed to me to become more and more charming, for it is with stories as it is with many people—they become better as they grow older.

You have been in the country, of course! Well, then, you must have seen a very old farmhouse with a thatched roof, and mosses and weeds growing wild upon it. There is a stork’s nest on the ridge of the roof, for we can’t do without the stork. The walls of the house are aslant, and the windows low, and only one of the latter is made so that it will open. The baking-oven sticks out of the wall like a little fat body. The elder tree hangs over the paling, and beneath its branches, at the foot of the paling, is a little pond with a duck and some ducklings under a knotted old willow tree. There is a yard dog too, who barks at everybody and everything.

Well, there was just such a farmhouse out in the country, and in it lived an old couple—a peasant and his wife. Small as was their property, there was one of their possessions that they could do without—a horse, which managed to live on the grass it found in the ditch by the side of the highroad. The old peasant rode it to town, and often his neighbours borrowed it, and rendered the old couple some service in return for the loan. But still they thought it would be best if they sold the horse or exchanged it for something that might be more useful to them. But what was it to be?

“You’ll know that best, old man,” said the wife. “It is fair-day today; so ride to town and sell the horse for money, or make a good exchange—whatever you do will be right to me. Ride off to the fair.”

And she tied his neckerchief for him, for she could do that better than he could; and she tied it in a double bow and made him look quite smart. Then she brushed his hat round and round with the palm of her hand and gave him a kiss. So he rode away upon the horse that was to be sold or exchanged for something else. Yes, the old man knew what he was about.

The sun shone hot, and there was not a cloud in the sky. The road was very dusty, for many people who were all bound for the fair were driving, or riding, or walking upon it. There was no shade anywhere from the burning sun.

Among the rest, a man was going along driving a cow to the fair. The cow was as pretty as a cow could be.

“She gives good milk. I’m sure,” thought the peasant. “That would be a very good exchange—the cow for the horse.”

“Hallo, you there with the cow!” he said. “Let’s have a word together. I fancy a horse costs more than a cow, but I don’t mind that; a cow would be more useful to me. If you like, we’ll exchange.”

“To be sure I will,” said the man with the cow. And so they exchanged.

So that was settled, and the peasant might just as well have turned back, for he had done the business he came to do, but as he had once made up his mind to go to the fair, he thought he’d go all the same, if only to have a look at it; and so he went on to the town with his cow.

Leading the cow, he strode on briskly, and after a short time he overtook a man who was driving a sheep. It was a fine fat sheep, well covered with good wool.

“I should like to have that,” said our peasant to himself. “It would find plenty of grass by our fence, and in winter we could have it in the room with us. Perhaps it would be more practical to have a sheep instead of a cow. Shall we exchange?”

The man with the sheep was quite ready, and the exchange was made. So our peasant went on along the highroad with his sheep.

Soon he saw another man, who came into the road from a field, carrying a big goose under his arm.

“That’s a heavy bird you have there. It has plenty of feathers and plenty of fat, and would look well tethered out by our pond. That would be something for my old woman to save up her scraps for. How often she has said, ‘If only we had a goose!’ Now, perhaps, she can have one—if it’s possible, it shall be hers. Shall we exchange? I’ll give you my sheep for your goose, and say ‘Thank you’ into the bargain.”

The other man had no objection; and so they exchanged, and our peasant got the goose.

By this time he was very near the town. The crowd on the road became greater and greater; there was quite a crush of men and cattle. They walked in the road and in the ditch, and at the toll-gate they even went into the toll-keeper’s potato-field, where his only hen was tethered so that she mightn’t run away and get lost. She had short feathers on her tail, and winked with one eye, and looked very wise.

“Cluck, cluck!” said the hen. What she meant by it I cannot tell you; but directly our good man saw her he thought, “That’s the finest hen I’ve ever seen in my life! Why, she’s finer than our parson’s brood hen. Upon my word, I should like to have that hen. A fowl can always find a grain or two; she can almost keep herself. I think it would be a good exchange if I could get that for my goose.”

“Shall we exchange?” he asked the toll-keeper.

“Exchange?” said the man. “Well, that’s not a bad idea!”

And so they exchanged, and the toll-keeper got the goose and the peasant got the hen.

Now he had done a good deal of business on his way to town, and he was hot and tired. He wanted a glass of ale and a bit to eat, so he turned his steps to an inn. He was just about to enter when the ostler came out, and they met at the door. The ostler was carrying a sackful of something on his back.

“What have you there?” said the peasant.

“Rotten apples,” answered the ostler. “A whole sackful of them—they will do to feed the pigs.”

“Why, that’s terrible waste! I wish my old woman at home could see that lot. Last year the old tree only bore a single apple. That apple had to be taken care of, and we kept it in the cupboard till it was quite rotten and spoiled. ‘That’s property, anyhow,’ my old woman said. Now here she could see a good deal of property—a whole sackful. I really wish she could see it.”

“What will you give me for the sackful?” asked the ostler.

“What’ll I give? I’ll give you my hen in exchange.”

And so he gave him the hen and got the apples, which he carried into the bar parlour. He stood the sack carefully by the stove, and then went to the table. But the stove was hot; he had not thought of that. There were many customers there: horse-dealers, drovers, and two Englishmen, and the two Englishmen were so rich that their pockets were bursting with gold, and they were making bets too, just as they are always supposed to.

Hiss-s-s! hiss-s-s! What was that by the stove? The apples were beginning to roast!

“What’s that?”

“Well, you see—” said our peasant; and then he told the whole story of the horse that he had exchanged for a cow, and all the rest of it, right down to the apples.

“Well, your old woman will give you a cuff when you get home!” said the Englishmen. “There’ll be a pretty row!”

“What? She’ll give me what?” said the peasant. “She will kiss me, and say, ‘What the old man does is always right.’”

“Shall we have a bet?” said the Englishmen. “We’ll wager a ton of gold coin—a hundred pounds to the hundred-weight!”

“A bushel will be enough,” said the peasant. “I can only set the bushel of apples against it; and I’ll throw in myself and my old woman into the bargain—and that’s piling up the measure, I should say.

“Done!”

And so the bet was made. The innkeeper’s cart was brought out, and the Englishmen got in, and the peasant got in, and the rotten apples, and away they went, and soon they reached the peasant’s little farm.

“Good evening, old woman!”

“Good evening, old man!”

“Well, I’ve made the exchange!”

“Yes, you know what you’re about,” said the woman, and she put her arms round him, looking neither at the sack, nor at the strangers.

“I got a cow in exchange for the horse,” said he.

“Heaven be thanked!” said she. “What lovely milk we shall have now, and butter and cheese on the table! That was an excellent exchange!”

“Yes, but I exchanged the cow for a sheep.”

“Why, that’s better still!” said the old woman. “You always think of everything. We have just grass enough for a sheep. Ewe’s milk and cheese, and woollen stockings, and even woollen jackets too! Those the cow could not give, she only loses her hair. How you think of everything!”

“But I gave away the sheep for a goose.”

“Then this year we shall really have roast goose to eat, my dear old man. You are always thinking of something to give me pleasure. How lovely that is! We can let the goose walk about on a tether, and she’ll grow fatter still before we roast her.”

“But I exchanged the goose for a hen,” said the man.

“A hen? That was a good exchange!” replied the woman. “The hen will lay eggs and hatch them, and we shall have chickens; we shall have a whole poultry-yard! Oh, that’s what I wished for most of all!”

“Yes, but I exchanged the hen for a sack of shrivelled rotten apples.”

“Well! Now I must really kiss you for that,” exclaimed the wife. “My dear, good husband! Now I’ll tell you something. Do you know, you had hardly left me this morning before I began thinking how I could give you something very nice this evening. Eggs and bacon with some chives, I thought. I had the eggs and the bacon too; all I needed was the chives. So I went over to the schoolmaster’s—they had some chives, I know—but his wife is a stingy woman, even though she looks so sweet. I begged her to lend me a handful of chives. ‘Lend!’ she answered. ‘Nothing whatever grows in our garden, not so much as a shrivelled apple. I could not even lend you a shrivelled apple.’ But now I can lend her ten—a whole sackful even. That I’m very glad of; that makes me laugh!” And with that she gave him a good smacking kiss.

“I like that!” said both the Englishmen together. “Always going downhill, and always happy. Why, that alone is worth the money.”

So they paid a bushel of gold to the peasant, who had got kisses, not cuffs, by his bargains.

Yes, it always pays when the wife sees and says that her husband knows best, and that what he does is right.

You see, that’s my story. I heard it when I was a child, and now you’ve heard it too, and know that “What the old man does is always right.”

[ 1861 ]

Jack the Dullard

—

AN OLD STORY TOLD ANEW.

Out in the country there was an old mansion, and in it lived an old squire and his two sons, who were so witty that they were really too clever by half. They wanted to woo the King’s daughter, which they were quite at liberty to do, for she had publicly announced that she would marry the person who could speak best for himself.

The two geniuses prepared themselves eight days beforehand—that was all the time they could give to it; but that was quite sufficient, for they possessed a good deal of elementary knowledge, and everybody knows how useful that is. One of them knew the whole Latin dictionary by heart, and the city newspaper three years running; and so well, that he could say it all either backwards or forwards. The other was deeply read in the corporation laws, and knew by heart what every alderman ought to know; and, accordingly, he thought he could talk of affairs of state, and put his spoke in the wheel in the council. And he knew one thing more; he could also embroider suspenders with roses and arabesques, for he was a tasty, light-fingered fellow.

“I shall win the Princess!” So cried both of them. Their old papa gave to each a handsome horse. The youth who knew the dictionary and newspaper by heart had a black horse, and he who knew all about the Corporations and aldermen and embroideries received a milk-white steed. Then they rubbed the corners of their mouths with cod-liver oil, so that they might become very smooth and glib. All the servants stood below in the courtyard, and looked on while they mounted their horses; and just by chance the third son came up; for there were three sons, but nobody counted the third with his brothers, because he was not so learned as they, and indeed he was generally known as “Jack the Dullard.”

“Hallo!” said Jack the Dullard, “where are you going to in your Sunday clothes?”

“To the palace to woo the King’s daughter. Haven’t you heard what the drummer is announcing all over the country?” And then they told him all about it.

“My word! I’ll be in it too!” said Jack the Dullard; and his two brothers burst out laughing at him, and rode away.

“Father,” said Jack, “I must have a horse too. I do fee! so desperately inclined to marry! If she accepts me, she accepts me; and if she won’t have me, I’ll have her; but she shall be mine!”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” replied the father. “You shall have no horse from me. You don’t know how to speak—you can’t arrange your words. Your brothers, now, they are statesmen.”

“Well,” quoth Jack the Dullard, “if I can’t have a horse, I’ll take the billy-goat, who belongs to me, and he can carry me very well!”

And so said, so done. He mounted the billy-goat, stuck his heels into its sides, and galloped down the highroad like a hurricane.

“Hei, houp! what a ride! Here I come!” shouted Jack the Dullard, and he sang till his voice echoed far and wide.

But his brothers rode slowly on in advance of him. They spoke not a word, for they were thinking about the fine extempore speeches they would have to bring out, and these had to be cleverly prepared and learned beforehand.

“Hallo!” shouted Jack the Dullard. “Here I am! Look what I have found on the highroad.”

And he showed them what it was, and it was a dead crow.

“Dullard!” exclaimed the brothers, “what are you going to do with that?”

“With the crow? why, I am going to give it to the Princess.”

“Yes, do so,” said they, and they laughed, and rode on.

“Hallo, here I am again! Just see what I have found now; you don’t find that on the highroad every day!”

And the brothers turned round to sec what he could have found now.

“Dullard!” they cried, “that is only an old wooden shoe, and the upper part is missing into the bargain; are you going to give that also to the Princess?”

“Most certainly I shall,” replied Jack the Dullard; and again the brothers laughed and rode on, and thus they got far in advance of him; but—

“Hallo—hop rara!” and there was Jack the Dullard again. “It is getting better and better,” he cried. “Hurrah! it is quite famous.”

“Why, what have you found this time?” inquired the brothers.

“Oh,” said Jack the Dullard, “I can hardly tell you. How glad the Princess will be!”

“Bah!” said the brothers; “that is nothing but clay out of the ditch.”

“Yes, certainly it is,” said Jack the Dullard; “and clay of the finest sort. See, it is so wet, it runs through one’s fingers.” And he filled his pocket with the clay.

But his brothers galloped on till the sparks flew, and consequently they arrived a full hour earlier at the town gate than could Jack. Now at the gate each suitor was provided with a number, and all were placed in rows immediately on then arrival, six in each row, and so closely packed together that they could not move their arms; and that was a prudent arrangement, for they would certainly have come to blows, had they been able, merely because one of them stood before the other.

All the inhabitants of the country round about stood in great crowds around the castle, almost under the very windows, to see the Princess receive the suitors; and as each stepped into the hall, his power of speech went right out.

“Good for nothing!” said the King’s daughter; “out with him!”

Now they came for that brother who knew the dictionary by heart; but he did not know it now; he had absolutely forgotten it altogether; and the boards seemed to re-echo with his footsteps, and the ceiling of the hall was made of looking-glass, so that he saw himself standing on his head; and at the window stood three clerks and a head clerk, and every one of them was writing down every single word that was uttered, so that it might be printed in the newspapers, and sold for a penny at the street corners. It was really terrible, and, moreover, they had put so much fire in the stove that the drum was red-hot.

“It is dreadfully hot here!” observed the first Brother.

“Yes, that’s because my father is roasting chickens today,” said the King’s daughter.

“Baa!” there he stood like a baa-lamb. He had not been prepared for a speech of this kind, and had not a word to say, though he intended to say something witty. “Baa!”

“Good for nothing!” said the Princess. “Off with him!” and so he had to go.

And now the second Brother came in.

“It is terribly warm here!” he observed.

“Yes, we’re roasting chickens today,” replied the Princess.

“What—what were you—were you pleased to ob—ob—er—” he stammered. And all the clerks wrote down, “pleased to ob”—

“Good for nothing!” said the Princess. “Away with him!”

Now came the turn of Jack the Dullard. He rode into the hall on his goat.

“Well, it’s most abominably hot here.”

“Yes, because I’m roasting chickens,” replied the Princess.

“Ah, that’s lucky!” exclaimed Jack the Dullard, “for I suppose you’ll let me roast my crow at the same time?”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said the Princess. “But have you anything you can roast it in? for I have neither pot nor pan.”

“Certainly I have!” said Jack. “Here’s a cooking utensil with a tin handle.”

And he brought out the old wooden shoe, and put the crow into it.

“Well, that is a famous dish!” said the Princess. “But what shall we do for sauce?”

“Oh, I have that in my pocket,” said Jack: “I have so much of it that I can afford to throw some away;” and he poured some of the clay out of his pocket.

“I like that!” said the Princess. “You can give an answer, and you have something to say for yourself, and so you shall be my husband. But are you aware that every word we speak is being taken down, and will be published in the paper tomorrow? Look yonder, and you will see in every window three clerks and a head clerk; and the old head clerk is the worst of all, for he can’t understand anything.”

But she only said this to frighten Jack the Dullard: and the clerks gave a great shout of delight, and each one spurted a blot out of his pen on to the floor.

“Oh, those are the gentlemen, are they?” said Jack; “then I will give the best I have to the head clerk.” And he turned out his pockets, and flung the wet clay full in the head clerk’s face.

“That was very cleverly done,” cried the Princess. “I couldn’t have done that; but I shall learn in time.”

And so Jack the Dullard was made a King, and received a crown and a wife, and sat upon a throne. And we read this in the official report of the head clerk, but that is not altogether to be trusted.

[ 1855 ]

Little Claus and Big Claus

—

There lived two men in one village, and they had the same name—both were called Claus; but one had four horses, and the other only a single horse. To distinguish them from each other, folk called the one who had four horses Big Claus, and the one who had only a single horse Little Claus. Now we shall hear what happened to each of them, for this is a true story.

The whole week through Little Claus was obliged to plough for Big Claus, and to lend him his one horse; then Big Claus helped him out with all his four, but only once a week, and that was on Sunday. Hurrah! how Little Claus cracked his whip over all five horses, for they were as good as his own on that one day. The sun shone gaily, and all the bells in the church tower were ringing to church. The people were all dressed in their best, and were going, with their hymn-books under their arms, to hear the parson preach, and they saw Little Claus ploughing with five horses. And he was so pleased that he cracked his whip again and again, and cried, “Gee-up, all my horses!”

“You must not say that,” said Big Claus, “only one of the horses is yours.”

But when some more people went by, Little Claus forgot that he was not to say this, and he cried, “Gee-up, all my horses!”

“Now, I tell you, you must stop it,” said Big Claus, “for if you say it again, I shall hit your horse on the head, so that he will fall down dead, and then that will be the end of him!”

“I will certainly not say it any more,” said Little Claus.

But when some people came by soon after and nodded “Good day” to him he was so pleased, and thought it looked so fine, after all, to have five horses to plough his field, that he cracked his whip again, and cried out, “Gee-up, all my horses!”

“I’ll ‘gee-up’ your horses for you!” said Big Claus. And he took a mallet and hit the only horse of Little Claus on the head, so that he fell down, and was dead instantly.

“Oh, now I haven’t any horse at all!” said Little Claus; and he began to cry.

But after a while he flayed the horse, and let the hide dry in the wind, and put it in a sack and hung it over his shoulder, and went to the town to sell it.

He had a very long way to go, through a great dark wood, and a violent storm came on. He lost his way entirely, and before he came to the right road again it was evening, and it was too far to get to the town or back home again before nightfall.

Close by the road stood a large farmhouse. The shutters were closed outside the windows, but the light could still be seen shining out over the top of them.

“I may be able to get permission to stay here for the night,” thought Little Claus; and he went and knocked.

The Farmer’s wife opened the door; but when she heard what he wanted, she told him to go away, as her husband was not at home, and that she did not take in strangers.

“Then I shall have to be out here,” said Little Claus. And the farmer’s wife shut the door in his face.

Close by stood a great haystack, and between this and the farmhouse was a little shed with a flat thatched roof.

“I can lie there,” said Little Claus, when he looked up at the roof; “that is an excellent bed. I hope the stork won’t fly down and bite me in the legs.” For a live stork was standing on the roof, where it had its nest.

Now Little Claus climbed up to the roof of the shed, where he lay down, and turned about to settle himself comfortably. The wooden shutters did not cover the windows to the top, and he could look straight into the room. There was a big table, with the cloth laid, and wine and roast meat and a splendid fish upon it. The Farmer’s wife and the Sexton were seated at table, and nobody besides. She was filling his glass, and he was sticking his fork into the fish, for that was his favourite dish.

“If only I could get some too!” said Little Claus, and he stretched out his head towards the window. Heavens! what a fine cake he saw there! Yes, certainly, that was a feast!

Now he heard someone riding along the highroad. It was the woman’s husband, who was coming home. He was a good man enough, but he had the strange peculiarity that he could never bear to see a sexton. If a sexton appeared before his eyes he got very angry. And that was the reason why the Sexton had called on the wife to wish her “Good day” when he knew that her husband was not at home; and the good woman had put the best fare she had before him. But when they heard the man coming they were frightened, and the woman begged the Sexton to creep into a big empty chest which stood there. And he did so, for he knew the husband could not bear the sight of a sexton. The woman quickly hid all the excellent meat and wine in her baking-oven; for if her husband had seen that, he certainly would have asked what it meant.

“Ah, yes!” sighed Little Claus up on the shed when he saw all the good fare put away.

“Is there anyone up there?” asked the Farmer; and he looked up and saw Little Claus. “What are you lying up there for? Better come down indoors with me.”

And Little Claus told him how he had lost his way, and asked leave to stay there for the night.

“Yes, certainly,” said the Farmer; “but first we must have something to live upon.”

The woman received them both very kindly, spread the cloth on a long table, and gave them a large dish of porridge. The Farmer was hungry, and ate with a good appetite, but Little Claus could not help thinking of the lovely roast meat, fish, and cake which he knew were in the oven. Under the table, at his feet, he had laid the sack with the horse’s hide in it; for, as we know, he had left home to sell it in the town. He could not relish the porridge at all, so he trod upon the sack with his foot, and the dry skin inside creaked quite loudly.

“Hush!” said Little Claus to his sack, at the same time treading on it again till it squeaked louder than before.

“Why, what have you in your sack?” asked the Farmer.

“Oh, that’s a magician,” said Little Claus. “He says we should not eat porridge, for he has conjured the oven full of roast meat, fish, and cake.”

“Wonderful!” said the Farmer; and he opened the oven door in a hurry, and found all the dainty food which his wife had hidden there, but which, as he thought, had been conjured there by the wizard under the table. The woman dared not say anything, but put the things at once on the table; and so they both ate of the meat, the fish, and the cake. Then Little Claus again trod on his sack and made the hide creak.

“What does he say now?” asked the Farmer.

“He says,” said Claus, “that he has conjured three bottles of wine for us too, and that they are standing there in the corner behind the oven.”

So the woman was obliged to bring out the wine which she had hidden, and the Farmer drank it, and became very merry. He would have been very glad to have such a magician as Little Claus had there in the sack.

“Can he conjure up the devil?” asked the Farmer. “I should like to see him, for now I am merry.”

“Oh, yes,” said Little Claus, “my magician can do anything that I ask of him—can’t you?” he asked, and trod on the hide till it squeaked. “Do you hear? He answers yes. But the devil is very ugly to look at; we had better not see him.”

“Oh, I’m not at all afraid. I wonder what he is like.”

“Well, he’ll look the very image of a sexton!”

“Ha!” said the Farmer, “that is ugly! You must know, I can’t bear the sight of a sexton. But it doesn’t matter now, for I know that he’s the devil, so I shall easily stand it. Now I have got up my courage, but do not let him come too near me.”

“Now I will ask my magician,” said Little Claus; and he trod on the sack and held his ear down.

“What does he say?”

“He says if you open the chest that stands in the corner, you will see the devil crouching inside; but you must hold the lid so that he doesn’t slip out.”

“Will you help me to hold it?” said the Farmer. And he went to the chest where the wife had hidden the real Sexton, who now lay inside, very much frightened. The Farmer opened the lid a little way and peeped in under it.

“Hu!” he cried, and sprang backward. “Yes, indeed, now I’ve seen him, and he looked exactly like our sexton. Oh, that was dreadful!”

After this he had to drink again. So they sat and drank until late into the night.

“You must sell me the magician,” said the Farmer. “Ask for him what you will! I’ll give you a whole bushel of money for him, at once!”

“No, I can’t do that,” said Little Claus! “Just think how much use I can make of this magician.”

“Oh, I should so much like to have him!” said the Farmer; and he went on begging.

“Well,” said Little Claus at last, “as you have been so kind as to give me shelter for the night, I’ll do it. You shall have the magician for a bushel of money, but I must have the bushel heaped up.”

“That you shall have,” said the Farmer. “But you must take the chest away with you as well. I will not keep it in my house another hour. One cannot tell—perhaps he may be there still.”

Little Claus gave the Farmer his sack with the dry hide in it, and got in exchange a whole bushel of money—heaped up, too. The Farmer also gave him a big wheelbarrow on which to carry off his money and the chest.

“Good-bye!” said Little Claus; and he went off with his money and the big chest, in which the Sexton was still sitting.

On the other side of the wood was a wide, deep river. The water rushed along so rapidly that it was scarcely possible to swim against the stream. A fine new bridge had been built over it. Little Claus stopped on the middle of the bridge, and said quite loud, so that the Sexton could hear it:

“Oh, what shall I do with this stupid chest? It’s as heavy as if stones were in it. I shall only get tired out if I drag it any farther, so I’ll throw it into the river. If it swims home to me, well and good; and if it doesn’t, it won’t matter much.”

And he took the chest with one hand and lifted it up a little, as if he meant to throw it into the river.

“No! don’t do that!” cried the Sexton from within the chest. “Let me out first!”

“Hu!” said Little Claus, pretending to be frightened, “he’s still inside! Then I must throw him into the river quickly, so that he drowns.”

“Oh, no! oh, no!” screamed the Sexton. “I’ll give you a whole bushel of money if you’ll let me go.”

“Oh, well! that’s different!” said Little Claus; and he opened the chest.

The Sexton crept out quickly, pushed the empty chest into the water, and went to his house, where Little Claus received a whole bushel of money. He had already received one from the Farmer, and so now he had his whole wheelbarrow full of money.

“See, I’ve been well paid for the horse,” he said to himself when he had got home to his own room and was emptying all the money into a heap in the middle of the floor. “That will make Big Claus angry, when he hears how rich I have grown through my single horse, but I won’t tell him about it outright.”

So he sent a boy to Big Claus for the loan of a bushel measure.

“What can he want with that?” thought Big Claus. And he smeared some tar underneath the measure, so that some part of whatever was measured should stick to it. And so it happened, for when he got the measure back there were three new silver shillings sticking to it.

“What’s this?” cried Big Claus; and immediately ran to Little Claus. “Where did you get so much money from?”

“Oh, that’s for my horse’s skin. I sold it yesterday evening.”

“That’s really being well paid,” said Big Claus. He ran home in a hurry, took an axe, and killed all his four horses; then he flayed them, and drove off to the town with their hides.

“Hides! hides! Who’ll buy any hides?” he cried through the streets.

All the shoemakers and tanners came running, and asked how much he wanted for them.

“A bushel of money for each!” said Big Claus.

“Are you mad?” said they all. “Do you think we have money by the bushel?”

“Hides! hides!” he cried again; and to all who asked him what the hides cost, he replied, “A bushel of money.”

“He wants to make fools of us,” they all said together. And the shoemakers took their straps, and the tanners their aprons, and gave Big Claus a sound thrashing.

“Hides! hides!” they shouted mockingly after him. “Yes, we’ll tan your hide for you till the blood runs. Out of the town with you!” And Big Claus made off at top-speed, for he had never had such a thrashing in his life.

“Well,” he said, when he got home, “Little Claus shall pay for this. I’ll strike him dead for it.”

Now at Little Claus’s house, the old grandmother had died. She had been very cross and unkind to him, but still he was very sorry, and took the dead woman and put her in his warm bed to see if she would not come to life again. There he meant her to lie all night, and he himself would sit in the corner and sleep on a chair, as he had often done before.

As he sat there in the night, the door opened, and Big Claus came in with his axe. He knew where Little Claus’s bed stood, and, going straight to it, he hit the old grandmother on the head, thinking she was Little Claus.

“There now!” he said. “You shall not make a fool of me again.” And so he went home again.

“That’s a bad fellow, that man,” said Little Claus. “He wanted to kill me. It was a good thing for my old granny that she was dead already, or else he would have taken her life.”

So he dressed his old grandmother in her Sunday clothes, borrowed a horse of his neighbour, harnessed it to the cart, and sat the old grandmother up against the back seat, so that she could not fall out when the cart started off. And off they drove through the wood. As the sun rose they came to an inn. There Little Claus pulled up, and went in to get something to eat.

The innkeeper was very, very rich; he was a very good man too, but as hot-tempered as if he was full of pepper and snuff.

“Good morning,” he said to Little Claus. “You’ve put on your Sunday clothes early today.”

“Yes,” said Little Claus. “I am going to town with my old grandmother; she’s sitting out there in the wagon. I can’t bring her into the room—will you take her a glass of mead? But you must speak pretty loud, for she can’t hear well.”

“Yes, that I will,” said the Innkeeper. And he poured out a big glass of mead, and went out with it to the dead grandmother, who had been propped up in the wagon.

“Here’s a glass of mead from your son,” said the Innkeeper. But the dead woman said not a word, but sat quite still. “Don’t you hear?” cried the Innkeeper, as loud as he could. “Here is a glass of mead from your son!”

He shouted it out once more, and yet again, but as she did not move, he flew into a passion, and threw the glass in her face, so that the mead ran down over her nose, and she tumbled backwards into the wagon, for she had only been propped up, and not bound fast.

“Hallo!” cried Little Claus, as he rushed out of the door and seized the innkeeper by the throat. “You’ve killed my grandmother now! See, there’s a big hole in her forehead.”

“Oh, what a misfortune!” cried the Innkeeper, wringing his hands. “That all comes of my hot temper. Dear Little Claus, I’ll give you a whole bushel of money, and have your grandmother buried as if she were my own; only keep quiet, or they will cut my head off, and that would be so unpleasant!”

So Little Claus again received a whole bushel of money, and the innkeeper buried the old grandmother as if she had been his own.

When Little Claus came home with all his money, he at once sent his boy to Big Claus to ask to borrow a bushel measure.

“How is this?” said Big Claus. “Have I not killed him? I must go myself and see to this.” So he himself took the bushel measure to Little Claus.

“Now, where did you get all that money from?” he asked; and he opened his eyes wide when he saw it all together.

“You didn’t kill me, but my grandmother,” replied Little Claus; “and I’ve been and sold her, and got a whole bushel of money for her.”

“That’s really being well paid,” said Big Claus; and he hastened home, took an axe, and killed his own grandmother forthwith, put her on a wagon, drove off to the town with her, to where the apothecary lived, and asked him if he would buy a dead person.

“Who is it, and where did you get him from?” asked the Apothecary.

“It’s my grandmother,” said Big Claus. “I’ve killed her to get a bushel of money for her.”

“Heaven save us!” cried the Apothecary. “You’re raving! Don’t say such things, or you may lose your head.” And he told him earnestly what a bad deed he had done, and what a bad man he was, and that he ought to be punished. And Big Claus was so frightened that he sprang out of the apothecary shop straight into his wagon, whipped up the horses, and drove off home. The Apothecary and all the people thought him mad, and so they let him drive wherever he liked.

“You shall pay for this!” said Big Claus when he got out upon the highroad. “Yes, you shall pay for this, Little Claus!” And directly he got home he took the biggest sack he could find, and went over to Little Claus’s, and said, “Now, you’ve tricked me again! First I killed my horses and then my old grandmother! And it’s all your fault, but you shall never trick me any more.” And he seized Little Claus round the body and pushed him into the sack, and took him upon his back, and shouted out to him, “Now I am going to drown you.”

It was a long way he had to go before he came to the river, and Little Claus was no light weight to carry. The road passed close by a church; the organ was playing, and the people were singing so beautifully! So Big Claus put down the sack with Little Claus in it, close to the church door, and thought it would be a very good thing to go in and hear a psalm before he went farther. Little Claus could not get out, and all the people were in church, and so Big Claus went in.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” sighed Little Claus in the sack. And he turned and twisted, but he found he could not loosen the cord. Soon there came by an old cattle drover with snow-white hair, and a long staff in his hand. He was driving a herd of cows and oxen before him, and they stumbled against the sack in which lay Little Claus and knocked it over.

“Ah me!” sighed Little Claus. “I’m so young still, and so soon going to heaven!”

“And I, poor fellow,” said the Drover, “am so old already, and yet I can’t get there!”

“Open the sack,” cried Little Claus; “get into it instead of me, and you will soon get to heaven.”

“With all my heart,” said the Drover; and he untied the sack, out of which Little Claus jumped quickly.

“But will you look after my cattle?” said the old man, and then he got into the sack, whereupon Little Claus tied it up, and went his way with all the cows and oxen.

Soon afterwards Big Claus came out of the church. He took the sack on his shoulders again, but it seemed to him as if the sack had become lighter, for the old drover was not more than half as heavy as Little Claus.

“How light he is to carry now! Yes, that is because I have heard a psalm.”

So he went on to the river, which was deep and broad, threw the sack with the old drover in it into the water, and called after him, thinking that it was Little Claus, “You lie there! Now you shan’t trick me any more!”

Then he went homeward; but when he came to a place where two roads crossed there he met Little Claus driving his cattle along.

“What’s this?” cried Big Claus. “Have I not drowned you?”

“Yes,” said Little Claus, “you threw me into the river less than half an hour ago.”

“But wherever did you get these beautiful cattle?” asked Big Claus.

“These are sea-cattle,” said Little Claus. “I’ll tell you the whole story—and thank you for drowning me, for now I’m on the top of the world. I am really rich! I was so frightened when I lay in the sack, and the wind whistled about my ears when you threw me from the bridge into the cold water! I sank to the bottom immediately; but I did not hurt myself, for the most beautiful soft grass grows down there. I fell on that; and immediately the sack was opened, and the loveliest maiden, with snow-white clothes and a green wreath upon her wet hair, took me by the hand, and said, ‘Are you come, Little Claus? Here you have some cattle to begin with. A mile farther along the road there is a whole herd more, which I will give to you.’ And then I saw that the river formed a great highway for the people of the sea. Along its bed they were walking and driving straight from the sea, right up onto the land, to where the river ends. It was all covered with flowers and the freshest grass; the fishes which swam in the water darted past my ears, like the birds in the air. What nice people there were there, and what fine cattle grazing in the hills and valleys!”

“But why did you come up again to us so quickly?” asked Big Claus. “I should not have done so, if it is so beautiful down there.”

“Why,” said Little Claus, “that was just good policy on my part. You heard me tell you that the sea-maiden said, ‘A mile farther along the road’—and by the road she meant the river, for she can’t go anywhere else—‘there is a whole herd of cattle for you.’ But I know what bends the stream makes—sometimes this way, sometimes that; it’s a long way to go round. No, it can be done in a shorter way by coming up to the land and cutting across the fields to the river again. I save myself almost half a mile this way, and get all the quicker to my sea-cattle!”

“Oh, you are a lucky man!” said Big Claus. “Do you think I should get some sea-cattle too if I went down to the bottom of the river?

“Yes, I think so,” said Little Claus. “But I cannot carry you in the sack as far as the river; you are too heavy for me! But if you will go there, and creep into the sack yourself, I will throw you in with a great deal of pleasure.”

“Thanks!” said Big Claus; “but if I don’t get any sea-cattle when I am down there, I promise I’ll give you a sound thrashing!”

“Oh, no; don’t be so fierce!”

And so they went together to the river. When the cattle, which were thirsty, saw the stream they ran as fast as they could to get at the water.

“See how they hurry!” cried Little Claus. “They are longing to get back to the bottom.”

“Yes, but help me first,” said Big Claus, “or else you’ll get a thrashing!”

And so he crept into the great sack, which had been laid across the back of one of the oxen.

“Put a stone in. I’m afraid I shan’t sink else,” said Big Claus.

“There’s no fear of that,” said Little Claus. Still, he put a big stone into the sack, tied the rope tightly, and gave it a push. Plump! Into the river went Big Claus, and sank at once to the bottom.

“I’m afraid he won’t find any cattle!” said Little Claus; and then he drove his own beasts homeward.

[ 1835 ]

The Emperor’s New Clothes

—

Many years ago there lived an Emperor who thought so much of new clothes that he spent all his money to obtain them. He did not care for his soldiers, nor for going to the play; or driving in the park except to show his new clothes. He had a coat for every hour of the day, and just as they say of a king, “He is in the council-room,” so they always said of him, “The Emperor is in his dressing-room.”

The great city where he lived was very gay; and every day many strangers came there. One day there came two swindlers; they gave out that they were weavers, and said they could weave the finest cloth to be imagined. Their colours and patterns, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the clothes made of their cloth possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or hopelessly stupid.

“Those must be wonderful clothes,” said the Emperor. “If I wore such clothes I should be able to find out which men in my empire were unfit for their places, and I could tell the clever from the stupid. Yes, I must have this cloth woven for me without delay.” And he gave a lot of money to the two swindlers in advance, so that they should set to work at once. They set up two looms, and pretended to be very hard at work, but they had nothing whatever on the looms. They asked for the finest silk and the most precious gold; this they put in their own bags, and worked at the empty looms till late into the night.

“I should very much like to know how they are getting on with the cloth,” thought the Emperor. But he felt rather uneasy when he remembered that he who was not fit for his office could not see it. He believed, of course, that he had nothing to fear for himself, yet he thought he would send somebody else first to see how matters stood. Everybody in the town knew what a wonderful property the stuff possessed, and all were anxious to see how bad or stupid their neighbours were.

“I will send my honest old Minister to the weavers,” thought the Emperor. “He can judge best how the stuff looks, for he is intelligent, and nobody understands his office better than he.”

So the good old Minister went into the room where the two swindlers sat working at the empty looms. “Heaven preserve us!” he thought, and opened his eyes wide. “I cannot see anything at all,” but he did not say so. Both swindlers bade him be so good as to come near, and asked him if he did not admire the exquisite pattern and the beautiful colours. They pointed to the empty looms, and the poor old Minister opened his eyes wider, but he could see nothing, for there was nothing to be seen. “Good Lord!” he thought, “can I be so stupid? I should never have thought so, and nobody must know it! Is it possible that I am not fit for my office? No, no, I cannot say that I was unable to see the cloth.”

“Well, have you got nothing to say?” said one, as he wove.

“Oh, it is very pretty—quite enchanting!” said the old Minister, peering through his spectacles. “What a pattern, and what colours! I shall tell the Emperor that I am very much pleased with it.”

“Well, we are glad of that,” said both the weavers, and they named the colours to him and explained the curious pattern. The old Minister listened attentively, that he might relate to the Emperor what they said; and he did so.

Now the swindlers asked for more money, more silk and gold, which they required for weaving. They kept it all for themselves, and not a thread came near the loom, but they continued, as before, to work at the empty looms.

Soon afterwards the Emperor sent another honest courtier to the weavers to see how they were getting on, and if the cloth was nearly finished. Like the old Minister, he looked and looked, but could see nothing, for there was nothing to be seen.

“Is it not a beautiful piece of cloth?” said the two swindlers, showing and explaining the magnificent pattern, which, however, was not there at all.

“I am not stupid,” thought the man; “is it therefore my good appointment for which I am not fit? It is ludicrous, but I must not let anyone know it”; and he praised the cloth, which he did not see, and expressed his pleasure at the beautiful colours and the fine pattern. “Yes, it is quite enchanting,” he said to the Emperor.

Everybody in the whole town was talking about the splendid cloth. At last the Emperor wished to see it himself while it was still on the loom. With a whole company of chosen men, including the two honest councillors who had already been there, he went to the two clever swindlers, who were now weaving as hard as they could, but without using any thread.

“Is it not magnifique?” said both the honest statesmen. “Will your Majesty see what a pattern and what colours?” And they pointed to the empty looms, for they imagined the others could see the cloth.

“What is this?” thought the Emperor. “I do not see anything at all. This is terrible! Am I stupid? Am I unfit to be emperor? That would indeed be the most dreadful thing that could happen to me,

“Yes, it is very fine,” said the Emperor. “It has our highest approval”; and, nodding contentedly, he gazed at the empty loom, for he did not like to say that he could see nothing. All his attendants who were with him looked and looked, and, although they could not see anything more than the others, they said, like the Emperor, “It is very fine.” And all advised him to wear the new magnificent clothes at a great procession which was soon to take place. “It is magnifique! beautiful, excellent!” went from mouth to mouth, and everybody seemed to be delighted. The Emperor gave each of the swindlers the cross of the order of knighthood and the title of Imperial Court Weavers.

All through the night before the procession was due to take place the swindlers were up, and had more than sixteen candles burning. People could see that they were busy getting the Emperor’s new clothes ready. They pretended to take the cloth from the loom, they snipped the air with big scissors, they sewed with needles without thread, and said at last: “Now the Emperor’s new clothes are ready!”

The Emperor with all his noblest courtiers then came in; and both the swindlers held up one arm as if they held something, and said: “See, here are the trousers! Here is the coat! Here is the cloak!” and so on. “They are all as light as a cobweb! They make one feel as if one had nothing on at all, but that is just the beauty of it.”

“Yes!” said all the courtiers; but they could not see anything, for there was nothing to be seen.

“Will it please your Majesty now to graciously undress?” said the swindlers. “Then we may help your Majesty into the new clothes before the large looking-glass!”

The Emperor took off all his clothes, and the swindlers pretended to put the new clothes upon him, one piece after another; and the Emperor looked at himself in the glass from every side.

“Oh, how well they look! How well they fit!” said all. “What a pattern! What colours! That is a splendid suit of clothes!”

“They are waiting outside with the canopy which is to be borne over your Majesty in the procession,” said the chief master of the ceremonies.

“Yes, I am quite ready,” said the Emperor. “Does not my suit fit me marvellously?” And he turned once more to the looking-glass, that people should think he admired his garments.

The chamberlains, who were to carry the train, fumbled with their hands on the ground as if they were lifting up a train. Then they pretended to hold something up in their hands; they dare not let people know that they could not see anything.

And so the Emperor marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and all who saw him in the street and out of the windows exclaimed: “How marvellous the Emperor’s new suit is! What a long train he has! How well it fits him!” Nobody would let others know that he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. None of the Emperor’s clothes had ever been such a success.

“But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child.

“Good heavens! hear what the little innocent says!” said the father, and then each whispered to the other what the child said. “He has nothing on—a little child says he has nothing on at all!”

“He has nothing on at all,” cried all the people at last. And the Emperor too was feeling very worried, for it seemed to him that they were right, but he thought to himself, “All the same, I must keep the procession going now.” And he held himself more proudly than ever, and the chamberlains walked on and held on tighter than ever, and carried the train which did not exist at all.

[ 1837 ]

The Princess on the Pea

—

Once upon a time there was a Prince and he wanted a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all round the world to find one, but always there was something wrong. There were princesses enough, but he found it difficult to make out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not quite right. So he came home again and was very sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. It was really dreadful! Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old King himself went to open it.

It was a Princess standing out there before the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight she was after all the rain and the dreadful weather! The water ran down from her hair and her clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.

“Yes, we’ll soon find that out,” thought the old Queen. But she said nothing, went into the bedroom, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea at the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eiderdown featherbeds on top of the mattresses.

On this the Princess was to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

“Oh, terribly badly!” said the Princess. “I have scarcely shut my eyes the whole night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It is really terrible!”

Now they knew that she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eiderdown featherbeds.

Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the Art Museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a real story!

[ 1835 ]

The Swineherd

—

There was once a Prince who was not very rich and whose kingdom was very small, but still it was big enough for him to afford to marry, and married he wanted to be.

Now, it was certainly rather bold of him to say to the Emperor’s daughter, “Will you have me?” But he did venture, for his name was famous far and wide, and there were hundreds of princesses who would have said, “Yes, thank you.” But did she say so? Well, now we shall hear.

On the grave of the Prince’s father there grew a rose-bush, a very beautiful rose-bush. It bloomed only every fifth year, and even then it bore only a single rose, but that was a rose! It was so sweet that whoever smelled it forgot all sorrow and trouble. And then he had a nightingale, which could sing as if all possible melodies dwelt in its little throat. This rose and this nightingale the Princess was to have, and so they were put into great silver caskets and sent to her.

The Emperor had the presents carried before him into the great hall where the Princess was playing at ‘visiting’ with her maids of honour—they had nothing else to do—and when she saw the silver caskets, with the presents in them, she clapped her hands for joy.

“If only it were a little pussy-cat!” she said.

But there came out only the lovely rose.

“Oh, how prettily it is made!” said all the Court ladies.

“It is more than pretty,” said the Emperor; “it is charming.”

But the Princess touched it, and then she was almost ready to cry. “Ugh, papa!” she said; “it is not artificial—it’s a natural rose!”

“Ugh!” said all the Court; “it’s a natural one!”

“Let us first see what is in the other casket before we get angry,” said the Emperor. And then the Nightingale came out; it sang so beautifully that for the moment they did not know what to say against it.

“Superbe! charmant!” said the maids of honour, for they all spoke French, each one worse than the other.

“How that bird reminds me of our late beloved Empress’s musical box!” said an old cavalier. “Ah, yes! it is the same tone, the same expression!”

“Yes,” said the Emperor; and he cried like a little child.

“I do hope it is not a real bird,” said the Princess.

“Yes, it is a real bird,” said those who had brought it.

“Yes! Then let the bird fly away,” said the Princess; and she would on no account allow the Prince to come.

But the Prince was not to be discouraged. He stained his face brown and black, drew his hat down over his brows, and knocked at the door.

“Good day. Emperor!” he said. “Could I not be taken into service here in the castle?”

“Yes,” said the Emperor, “but there are so many who wish for that. But let me see! I do want someone to look after the pigs, for we have many of them.”

And so the Prince was appointed the Imperial Swineherd. He was given a miserable little room down by the pigsty, and there he had to stay. All day long he sat and worked, and by the evening he had made a neat little pot, with bells all round it, and when the pot boiled these bells rang out prettily and played the old tune:

Ah, thou darling Augustin,

All is gone, gone, gone!

But the most artful thing about it was that, by holding one’s finger in the steam, one could at once smell what kind of dinner was being cooked at every stove in the town. That was quite another thing to the rose.

Soon the Princess came by with all her maids of honour, and when she heard the melody she stood still and looked quite pleased, for she too could play “Ah, thou darling Augustin.” It was the only tune she could play, and then she played it with one finger.

“Why, that’s what I play!” she said. “He must be a well-educated Swineherd! Listen! Go in and ask him what the instrument costs!”

So one of the maids of honour had to run in; but first she put on her clogs.

“What will you take for that pot?” said the maid of honour.

“I will have ten kisses from the Princess,” said the Swineherd.

“Heaven preserve us!” said the maid of honour.

“Well, I won’t sell it for less,” said the Swineherd.

“Well, what did he say?” asked the Princess.

“I really cannot tell you,” said the maid of honour. “It is so shocking!”

“Well, you can whisper it.” And she whispered it. “He is very rude,” said the Princess, and went away at once. But when she had gone a little way the bells sounded so prettily:

Ah, thou darling Augustin,

All is gone, gone, gone!

“Listen!” said the Princess. “Ask him will he take ten kisses from my maids of honour.”

“No, thank you!” said the Swineherd. “Ten kisses from the Princess, or I shall keep my pot.”

“How tiresome!” cried the Princess. “But at least you’ll have to stand round me, so that nobody sees.”

And the maids of honour stood round her, and spread out their skirts, and so the Swineherd had his ten kisses and she had the pot.

Then there was rejoicing! All the evening and all the day long the pot was kept boiling; there was not a kitchen in the whole town where they did not know what was being cooked, at the shoemaker’s as well as the chamberlain’s. The ladies danced with pleasure, and clapped their hands.

“We know who will have sweet soup and pancakes, and who has hasty pudding and cutlets; how interesting that is!”

“Highly interesting!” said the mistress of the robes.

“Yes, but hold your tongues, for I am the Emperor’s daughter.”

“Heaven preserve us!” they all said together.

The Swineherd—that is to say, the Prince (but, of course, they did not know that he was not a real swineherd)—let no day pass without doing something, and so he made a rattle. When anyone swung this rattle he could play all the waltzes, galops, and polkas that have been known since the beginning of the world.

“But that is superbe!” said the Princess, as she went past. “I have never heard anything finer. Listen! Just go in and ask what the instrument costs; but no more kisses!”

“He will have a hundred kisses from the Princess,” said the maid of honour who had gone in to ask.

“I think he must be mad!” said the Princess; and she went away; but when she had gone a little way she stopped. “One must encourage art,” she said. “After all, I am the Emperor’s daughter! Tell him he shall have ten kisses, like the last time, and he may take the rest from my maids of honour.”

“Ah, but we don’t like that!” said the maids of honour.

“That’s all nonsense!” said the Princess. “If I can kiss him, you can too; remember, I give you your board and wages.”

And so the maids of honour had to go down to him again.

“A hundred kisses from the Princess,” he said, “or nothing!”

“Stand round me!” she said then; and all the maids of honour stood round her while he kissed her.

“What is that crowd down by the pigsty?” asked the Emperor, who had stepped out on the balcony. He rubbed his eyes, and put on his spectacles. “Why, those are the maids of honour up to their tricks! I shall have to go down to them!”

So he pulled up his slippers at the back, for they were shoes which he had trodden down at the heels. Gracious me! how he hurried! As soon as he got down to the courtyard he went quite softly, and the maids of honour were too busy counting the kisses and seeing to fair play—the Swineherd shouldn’t have too many, but not too few either—so they didn’t notice the Emperor.

Then the Emperor stood on tiptoe.“What’s all this?” said he when he saw them kissing, and he boxed their ears with his slipper, just as the Swineherd was taking the eighty-sixth kiss.

“Be off!” said the Emperor, for he was angry.

And the Princess and the Swineherd were both banished from his empire. So there she stood and cried, and the Swineherd scolded, and the rain poured down.

“Oh, miserable wretch that I am!” said the Princess; “if only I had taken that handsome Prince! Oh, how unhappy I am!”

And the Swineherd went behind a tree, washed the black and brown stains from his face, threw away the shabby clothes, and stepped forth in his princely garments, so handsome that the Princess could not help curtsying to him.

“I have come to despise you,” he said. “You would not have an honest prince; you did not value the rose and the nightingale, but for a mere toy you kissed the Swineherd, and now you must make the best of it!”

And so he went into his kingdom and shut and locked the door in her face. So now she might stand outside and sing:

Ah, thou darling Augustin,

All is gone, gone, gone!

[ 1842 ]

The Shepherdess and the Sweep

—

Have you ever seen a really old cupboard, quite black with age, and carved with foliage and scrolls? Just such a one stood in a parlour; it was a legacy from the great-grandmother, and was covered from top to bottom with carved roses and tulips. There were the quaintest flourishes upon it, and among them little deer stuck out their heads with lots of antlers. In the middle of the cupboard an entire figure of a man had been carved. He was certainly ridiculous to look at, and he grinned (for you could not call it laughing); he had a goat’s legs, little horns on his head, and a long beard. The children in the room always called him the Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs. That was a difficult name to pronounce, and there are not many who get this title; but to have carved him—that was certainly something. And there he was!

He was always looking at the table under the looking-glass, for on this table stood a comely little shepherdess made of china. Her shoes were gilt, her dress was adorned with a red rose, and besides this she had a golden hat and a shepherd’s crook; she was lovely. Close by her stood a little chimney-sweep, as black as coal, and also made of china. He was as clean and neat as anybody, for, as to his being a sweep, that was only what he was made to represent; the china-makers might just as well have made a prince of him, if they had been so minded.

There he stood very prettily with his ladder, and his face as fair and rosy as a girl’s, and that was really a fault, for his face certainly ought to have had some black soot marks. He stood quite close to the Shepherdess. They had both been placed where they stood, but as they had been placed there they had become engaged to each other, for they suited each other well. Both were young people, they were made of the same china, were equally fragile.

Close to them stood another figure, three times as large as they were. This was an old Chinaman, who could nod. He was also made of china, and said that he was the grandfather of the little Shepherdess; but this he could not prove. He declared he had authority over her, and that therefore he had nodded to Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs, who was wooing the little Shepherdess.

“Then you will get a husband,” said the old Chinaman, “a husband who I verily believe is made of mahogany. He can make you Mrs Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs. He owns the whole cupboard full of silver plate, which he keeps hidden in secret drawers.”

“I won’t go into the dark cupboard!” said the little Shepherdess. “I have heard tell that he has eleven china wives in there.”

“Then you may become the twelfth,” said the Chinaman. “This night, as soon as it rattles in the old cupboard, you shall be married, as sure as I am an old Chinaman!” And with that he nodded his head and fell asleep.

But the little Shepherdess cried, and looked at her heart’s beloved, the china Chimney-sweep.

“I want to beg of you,” she said, “to go with me out into the wide world, for we can’t stay here!”

“I will do whatever you wish!” said the little Chimney-sweep. “Let us start directly! I think I can make a living by exercising my profession.”

“I wish we were safely down from the table!” said she. “I shall not be happy until we are out in the wide world.”

And he comforted her, and showed her how she must set her little foot upon the carved border and the gilded foliage on the leg of the table. He brought his ladder, too, to help her, and they were soon together upon the floor. But when they looked up at the old cupboard—such a commotion was going on! All the carved stags were stretching out their heads, rearing up their antlers, and turning their necks; and Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs sprang high in the air, and shouted across to the old Chinaman: “Now they’re running away! They’re running away!”

At that they were rather frightened, and jumped quickly into the drawer of the window-seat. Here there were three or four packs of cards, which were not complete, and a little dolls’ theatre, which had been built up as well as it could be managed. A comedy was being acted, and all the queens of Diamonds and Hearts, Clubs and Spades, sat in the first row, fanning themselves with their tulips, and behind them stood all the knaves, showing that they had a head both above and below, as is usual in playing-cards. The comedy was about two people who could not marry each other, and the Shepherdess cried, because it was just like her own story.

“I can’t bear it!” she said. “I must get out of this drawer.”

But when they got down on the floor, and looked up at the table, the old Chinaman was awake, and was rocking his whole body—the lower part of him was all in one piece.

“Now the old Chinaman’s coming!” cried the little Shepherdess, and she fell down upon her china knees, so frightened was she.

“I have an idea,” said the Chimney-sweep. “Shall we creep into the great Potpourri Jar which stands in the corner? There we can lie on roses and lavender, and throw salt in his eyes when he comes.”

“That will be of no use,” she said. “Besides, I know that the old Chinaman and the Potpourri Jar were once engaged to each other, and a kind of liking always remains when people have once been on such terms. No, there’s nothing left for us but to go out into the wide world!”

“Have you really the courage to go out into the wide world with me?” asked the Chimney-sweep. “Have you considered how big it is, and that we can never come back here again?”

“Yes, I have,” she said.

And the Chimney-sweep looked sternly at her, and said:

“My way lies up the chimney. Have you really courage to creep with me through the stove—through the iron fire-box, as well as up the flue pipe? Then we can get out into the chimney, and I know how to find my way there. We’ll climb so high that they can’t catch us, and at the very top there’s a hole that leads out into the wide world.”

And he led her to the door of the stove.

“It looks very black there,” she said; but still she went with him, through the box and through the pipe, where it was pitch-dark night.

“Now we are in the chimney,” he said; “and look, look! up there a beautiful star is shining!”

And it was a real star in the sky which shone straight down upon them, as if it would show them the way. And they crawled and they crept. It was a frightful way, and terribly steep, but he supported her and helped her up; he held her, and showed her the best places to place her little china feet. And so they reached the top of the chimney, and upon that they sat down, for they were desperately tired, as they well might be.

The sky with all its stars was high above, and all the roofs of the town below them. They could see far around them, far out into the world. The poor Shepherdess had never thought it would be like this. She leaned her little head against the chimney-sweep, and she wept so bitterly that all the gilt was washed off her girdle.

“This is too much,” she said. “I cannot bear it! The world is too big! If I were only back upon the little table under the looking-glass! I shall never be happy until I am there again. I have followed you out into the wide world, and now you may follow me back home again if you really love me.”

And the Chimney-sweep spoke sensibly to her, spoke of the old Chinaman and of Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs, but she kissed her little Chimney-sweep and sobbed so bitterly that he could not help giving way to her, though it was foolish.

And so with much difficulty they climbed down the chimney again. And they crept through the pipe and the fire-box. That was not pleasant at all. And at last they stood in the dark stove again. There they listened behind the door, to find out what was going on in the room. There it was quite still. They peeped out—ah! there lay the old Chinaman in the middle of the floor. He had fallen down from the table as he was pursuing them, and now he lay broken into three pieces; his back had come off all in one piece, and his head had rolled into a corner. The Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs stood where he had always stood, and meditated.

“This is terrible!” said the little Shepherdess. “The old grandfather has fallen to pieces, and it is our fault! I shall never survive it!” And then she wrung her tiny little hands.

“He can be mended!” said the Chimney-sweep. “He can easily be mended! Don’t be so hasty. If they cement his back together and give him a good rivet in his neck he will be as good as new, and may say many a disagreeable thing to us yet!”

“Do you think so?” she said.

So they climbed back upon the table where they used to stand.

“You see, this is as far as we have got,” said the Chimney-sweep; “we might well have spared ourselves all our troubles!”

“If only old Grandfather could be riveted!” said the Shepherdess. “I wonder if that costs very much!”

And mended he was. The family had his back glued and a good rivet put in his neck; and he was as good as new, only he could no longer nod.

“It seems you have become proud since you were broken to pieces,” said the Top-and-bottom-general-commander-in-chief-sergeant Billy-goats’-legs. “I don’t think there’s so much to be proud of! Am I to have her, or am I not?”

And the Chimney-sweep and the little Shepherdess looked at the old Chinaman quite piteously, for they were afraid he might nod. But he could not do that, and it was too irksome to him to have to tell a stranger that he had a rivet in his neck. So the little china people remained together, and they blessed Grandfather’s rivet, and they loved one another until they fell to pieces.

[ 1845 ]

The Flying Trunk

—

There was once a merchant who was so rich that he could pave the whole street, and almost a little lane too, with silver. But he did not do so; he knew how to employ his money differently. If he spent a penny, he got back a dollar; such a clever merchant was he—till he died.

His son now got all this money. He lived merrily, went masquerading every night, made kites out of dollar-notes, and played at ducks and drakes on the seashore with gold pieces instead of stones. In this manner the money could easily come to an end, and it did so. At last he possessed no more than fourpenny, and had no other clothes than a pair of slippers and an old dressing-gown. His friends now no longer troubled themselves about him, as they could not of course walk along the streets with him; but one of them, who was good-natured, sent him an old trunk, with the remark, “Pack up!” That was indeed very nice of him, but he had nothing to pack up, so he sat down in the trunk himself.

It was a wonderful trunk. As soon as you pressed the lock, the trunk could fly. He pressed, and away it flew with him through the chimney, high up above the clouds, farther and farther away. But because the bottom frequently creaked a little, he was in great terror lest the trunk might go to pieces; in that case he would have turned a mighty somersault.

Heaven preserve us! In this manner he arrived in the country of the Turks. He hid the trunk in the wood under the dry leaves, and then went into the town. He could do so very well, for among the Turks everybody went about like that—in a dressing gown and slippers. Meeting a nurse with a little child, he said, “I say, you Turkish nurse, what grand castle is that close by the town, in which the windows are so wide open?”

“The Sultan’s daughter lives there,” she replied. “It was prophesied that she would be very unhappy about a lover, and therefore no one may go to her, unless the Sultan and Sultana are there too.”

“Thank you,” said the Merchant’s Son; and going out into the wood, sat down in his trunk, flew up on the roof and crept through the window into the Princess’s apartments. She was lying on the sofa asleep, and was so beautiful that the Merchant’s Son could not help kissing her. At this she awoke, and was greatly terrified; but he said he was a Turkish god, who had come down to her from the sky, and that pleased her.

They sat down next to one another, and he told her little stories about her eyes: that they were the most glorious dark lakes, in which thoughts were swimming about like mermaids. And he told her of her forehead, that it was a mountain of snow with the most splendid halls and images.

They were indeed fine stories! Then he asked the Princess for her hand, and she said “Yes” at once.

“But you must come here on Saturday,” she said. “The Sultan and the Sultana will be here to tea then. They will be very proud at my marrying a Turkish god. But mind you bring a very pretty little tale with you, for my parents like them immensely. Mother likes them moral and high-flown, but father likes merry ones, so he can laugh.”

“Yes, I shall bring no other marriage gift than a story,” said he, and so they parted. But the Princess gave him a sword ornamented with gold pieces, and the latter were very useful to him.

So he flew away, bought himself a new dressing-gown, and sitting down in the wood made up a story: it was to be ready by Saturday, and that was no easy task. By the time he had got it ready Saturday had come. The Sultan, the Sultana and the whole Court were at the Princess’s to tea. He was received very graciously.

“Will you tell us a tale?” said the Sultana. “One that is deep and instructive.”

“But something to laugh at, too,” said the Sultan.

“Certainly,” he replied, and commenced. And now pay attention:

•  •  •

“Once upon a time there was a box of Matches which were very proud of their high descent. Their genealogical tree—that is to say, the great fir tree, of which each of them was a little splinter—had been a high old tree in the forest. The Matches were now lying between a Tinderbox and an old Iron Pot, and they were telling about their youth. ‘Yes,’ said they, ‘when we were upon the green branches, then we were really upon the green branches. Every morning and evening there was diamond tea, that was the dew: we had sunshine the whole day long, and when the sun shone the little birds had to tell stories. We could very well see that we were rich too, for the other trees were only dressed in summer, while our family had means for green dresses both in summer and winter.

“‘But one day the woodman came; that was the great revolution; and our family was split up. The head of the family received a post as mainmast on a splendid vessel which could sail round the world, if it wished; the other branches settled in different places, and we now hold the office of kindling a light for the common herd. That is how such grand people as we have come down to the kitchen.’”

“My fate shaped itself in another way,” said the Iron Pot which stood next to the Matches. “From the time I first came into the world, much scrubbing and cooking has gone on inside me. I look after the material wants of life, and occupy the first place in the house. My only pleasure is to be on the shelf after dinner, very nice and clean, and to carry on a sensible conversation with my comrades. But with the exception of the Pail, which now and then gets taken down into the yard, we always live within our four walls. The only one who brings us any news is the Market Basket, but it speaks very unreassuringly about the ‘government’ and the ‘people;’ indeed, only the other day an old pot fell down from fright and broke into pieces. It is a Liberal, I tell you!”

“Now you’re talking too much,” interrupted the Tinderbox, and the steel struck against the flint, so that it gave out sparks. “Had we not better have a pleasant evening?”

“Yes, let us talk about who is the grandest,” said the Matches.

“No, I don’t like to talk about myself,” objected the Pot. “Let us get up an evening’s entertainment. I will begin by telling a story of every-day life—something that anyone can take an interest in and derive pleasure from, too.

“On the Baltic by the Danish coast—”

“That’s a pretty beginning!” said all the Plates. “That will be a story which we shall like.”

“Yes, I passed my youth there, in a quiet family. The furniture was polished, the floor was scrubbed, and every fortnight clean curtains were hung up.”

“How interesting you make your story,” said the Broom. “One can hear at once that the teller is a man who has moved much among women. Something so pure runs through it all.”

“Yes, that is so,” said the Pail, and jumped for joy, so that the water splashed all over the floor.

And the Pot continued telling its story, the end of which was just as good as the beginning.

All the Plates rattled for joy, and the Broom got some green parsley out of the dust-hole and made a wreath for the Pot, for it knew that this would make the others angry. “If I present him with a wreath today,” it thought, “he will have to give me one tomorrow.”

“Now I will dance,” said the Tongs, and did so. Heavens! how high she could lift up one leg. The old chair-cushion in the corner burst when he saw it. “Shall I get a wreath too?” asked the Tongs; and she got one.

“Still, they’re only common people,” thought the Matches.

Now the Tea-urn was asked to sing; but she said she had caught cold and could not sing unless she were boiling. That was mere affectation, however; she would only sing if she were standing on the drawing-room table among the ladies and gentlemen.

By the window was stuck an old Quill Pen, with which the maid wrote. There was nothing remarkable about it, except that it had been dipped far too deep into the ink. But it was proud of that. “If the Tea-urn will sing,” it said, “let her sing. Outside there is a nightingale in a cage which can sing. It is true that it has learned nothing, but we’ll leave that out of the question this evening.”

“I don’t think it at all right,” said the Tea-kettle—he was kitchen singer and half-brother to the Tea-urn—“that such a foreign bird should be heard. Is that patriotic? Let the Market Basket decide.”

“I should only be angry,” said the Market Basket; “there is such a conflict going on within me as no one would believe. Is this a proper way in which to pass an evening? Would it not be more sensible to put the house in order? Everyone ought to go to his own place, and I would lead the game. That would be quite another thing.”

“Yes, let us make a noise,” they all said. Then the door opened, and the servant came in, at which they all stood still; not one stirred. But there was not a single pot who did not know what he could do and how grand he was. “Yes, if I had chosen,” each one thought, “we might have had a right merry evening.”

The maid took the Matches and lit the fire with them. Heavens! what sparks they threw out, and how they burst into flame!

“Now, everybody can see that we are first,” they thought. “How we shine, and with what light!” And they were burned up.

•  •  •

“Indeed you shall,” said the Sultan; “you shall marry our daughter on Monday.” And they made him feel quite one of the family.

The wedding was settled, and on the evening before it the whole city was illuminated. Biscuits and cakes were thrown among the people; the street boys stood upon their toes, shouting “Hurrah” and whistling on their fingers. It was uncommonly grand.

“Well, I suppose I shall have to treat them to something too,” thought the merchant’s son. So he bought some rockets and firecrackers, and every kind of fireworks that you can think of, put them in his trunk and flew up to the sky with them.

Bang, bang! How they went off and cracked!

All the Turks jumped so high that their slippers flew over their ears; such a display they had never yet seen. Now they could understand that it was the god of the Turks himself who was to marry the Princess.

As soon as the Merchant’s Son had come down again into the wood with his trunk, he thought, “I’ll just go into the town to hear what impression it made.” And it was natural that he should wish to know that.

What stories the people did tell! Everyone whom he asked about it had seen it in his own way; but all thought thought it beautiful.

“I saw the god of the Turks himself,” said one. “His eyes were like shining stars, and his beard like foaming water.”

“He flew in a mantle of fire,” said another. “The sweetest little cherubs peeped out of its folds.”

Indeed they were fine things that he heard, and on the following day he was to be married.

So he went back to the wood to get into his trunk; but what had become of it? The trunk was burned. A spark from the fireworks had fallen into it and had set it alight, and now the trunk lay in ashes. He could not fly any more, nor get to his bride.

She stood on the roof the whole day and waited, and is probably waiting still. But he wanders through the world telling tales, which are, however, no longer such merry ones as the one he told about the Matches.

[ 1838 ]

The Travelling Companion

—

Poor John was in great distress, for his father was very ill, and could not be cured. There was no one but these two in the little room; the lamp on the table had nearly burned out, and it was late at night.

“You have been a good son, John,” said the sick father. “The Lord will help you on in the world.” And he looked at him with his mild, earnest eyes, drew a deep breath, and died; it was just as if he had fallen asleep. But John wept; now he had no one in the whole world, neither father nor mother, sister nor brother. Poor John! He knelt down by the bed, kissed his dead father’s hand, and wept many bitter tears; but at last his eyes closed, and he went to sleep, lying with his head against the hard bedpost.

Then he dreamed a strange dream: he saw the sun and moon bowing before him, and he saw his father again alive and well, and heard him laugh as he had always laughed when he was very happy. A beautiful girl, with a golden crown upon her long shining hair, gave John her hand, and his father said, “Do you see what a bride you have won? She is the most beautiful in the whole world!” Then he awoke, and all the splendour was gone. His father was lying dead and cold in the bed, and there was no one at all with them. Poor John!

The next week the dead man was buried. John walked close behind the coffin. He could now no longer see the good father who had loved him so much. He heard how they threw the earth down upon the coffin, and watched till only the last corner could be seen; but the next shovelful of earth hid even that; then he felt as if his heart must burst into pieces, so sorrowful was he. Around him they were singing a psalm; it sounded so beautiful that the tears came into John’s eyes; he wept, and that did him good in his sorrow. The sun shone brightly on the green trees, as if it would say, “You must no longer be sorrowful, John! Do you see how beautiful the sky is? Your father is up there, and prays to the Father of all that it may always be well with you.”

“I will always do right, too,” said John; “then I shall go to heaven to my father, and what joy it will be when we see each other again! How much I shall then have to tell him! And he will show me so many things, and explain to me the glories of heaven, just as he taught me here on earth. Oh, what joy that will be!”

John saw it all so plainly that he smiled, while the tears were still running down his cheeks. The little birds sat up in the chestnut trees, and twittered, “Tweet-weet! tweet-weet!” They were joyful and merry, though they too had been at the burying. But they seemed to know that the dead man was up in heaven, and that he had wings, far larger and more beautiful than theirs, and that he was now happy, because he had been a good man upon earth, and they rejoiced at it. John saw how they flew from the green tree out into the world, and he felt a longing to fly with them. But first he carved a great cross of wood to put on his father’s grave, and when he brought it there in the evening the grave was already strewn with sand and flowers. Strangers had done this, for all loved the good father who was now dead.

Early next morning John packed his little bundle, and put in bis belt his whole inheritance, which consisted of fifty dollars and a few silver pennies; and with this he intended to wander out into the world. But first he went to the churchyard to his father’s grave, repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and said, “Farewell, my dear father! I will always try to be a good man, and so do thou beg the good God that all may go well with me.”

In the fields through which he passed all the flowers were fresh and blooming in the warm sunshine; and they nodded in the wind, as if they wished to say, “Welcome to the green wood! Is it not lovely here?” But John turned round once more to look at the old church, where he had been christened when he was a little child, and where he had been to service every Sunday with his father, and had sung his psalm. High up in one of the openings of the tower he saw the little church-goblin standing with his little pointed red cap, shading his face with his bent arm to keep the sun from shining in his eyes. John nodded a farewell to him, and the little goblin waved his red cap, laid his hand on his heart, and kissed his hand to John a great many times, to show him that he wished him well and hoped he would have a prosperous journey.

John thought what a number of fine things he would see in the great splendid world, and he went on farther and farther—farther than he had ever been before. He did not know the places he came through nor the people he met. Now he was far away in a strange country.

The first night he had to lie down on a haystack in a field to sleep, for he had no other bed. But it was very nice, he thought; the king could have no better. There was the whole field, with the brook, the haystack, and the blue sky above; it was certainly a lovely bedroom. The green grass with the little red and white flowers was the carpet, the elder-bushes and the wild-rose hedges were bouquets of flowers, and for a wash basin he had the whole brook with the clear fresh water, and the rushes bowing before him and wishing him “Good night” and “Good morning.” The moon was really a fine night-light, high up under the blue ceiling, and one that would never set fire to the curtains. John could sleep quite safely, and he did so too, and never woke until the sun rose and all the little birds round about were singing, “Good morning! good morning! Are you not up yet?”

The bells were ringing for church; it was Sunday. The people went to hear the priest, and John followed them, and sang a psalm and heard God’s word, just as if he was in his own church, where he had been christened and had sung psalms with his father.

Out in the churchyard were many graves, and on some of them the grass grew high. Then he thought of his father’s grave, which would one day look like these, as he could not weed or trim it. So he sat down and pulled up the long grass, set up the wooden crosses which had fallen down, and put back in their places the wreaths which the wind had blown away from the graves. For he thought, “Perhaps someone will do the same to my father’s grave, as I cannot do it.”

Outside the churchyard gate stood an old beggar, leaning upon his crutch. John gave him all the silver pennies he had, and then went on his way, happy and cheerful, into the wide world.

Towards evening a dreadful storm came on. He made haste to get under shelter, but very soon the dark night set in. At last he came to a little church, which stood quite by itself on the top of a hill.

“I’ll sit down in here in a corner,” he said. “I am quite tired and sorely in need of a little rest.” So he sat down, folded his hands, and said his evening prayer; and before he was aware of it he was asleep and dreaming, while it thundered and lightened outside.

When he awoke it was midnight; but the bad weather had passed away, and the moon shone in upon him through the windows. In the middle of the aisle stood an open coffin with a dead man in it, for he had not yet been buried. John was not at all afraid, for he had a good conscience, and he knew very well that the dead do not harm anyone. It is the living evil-doers who are the danger. Two such bad men were standing close to the dead man, who had been placed here in the church till he should be buried. They were evilly disposed towards him, and would not let him lie at rest in his coffin, but were going to throw him outside the church door—poor dead man!

“Why do you do that?” asked John. “It is bad and wicked. Let him rest, in Christ’s name!”

“Nonsense!” said the two bad men. “He has cheated us. He owed us money and could not pay it, and now he’s dead, and we shall never get a penny! So we mean to have our revenge; he shall lie like a dog outside the church door!”

“I have no more than fifty dollars,” said John; “that is my whole inheritance; but I will gladly give it you if you will promise me on your honour to leave the poor dead man in peace. I shall be able to get on without the money; I have sound, strong limbs, and God will always help me.”

“Yes,” said the horrible men. “If you will pay his debt we will do nothing to him, you may depend upon that!” And then they took the money he gave them, laughed aloud at his good nature, and went their way. But he laid the dead body out again in the coffin, folded its hands, took leave of it, and went away contentedly through the great forest.

All around, wherever the moon could shine between the trees, he saw the graceful little elves playing about merrily. They did not let him disturb them—they knew that he was a good, innocent man, and it is only the bad people who are never allowed to see the elves. Some of them were not bigger than a finger-breadth, and had fastened up their long yellow hair with golden combs. They were playing at see-saw, two and two, on the big dewdrops that lay on the leaves and the long grass. Sometimes the dewdrops rolled off, and then they fell down between the long grass-stalks, and that caused much laughter and noise among the other tiny creatures. It was great fun! They sang, and John recognized quite plainly the pretty songs which he had learned as a little boy. Great gay-coloured spiders, with silver crowns on their heads, were set to spin long hanging bridges and palaces from one hedge to another, and as the tiny dewdrops fell on these they looked like gleaming glass in the moonlight. This went on until the sun rose. Then the little elves crept into the flower-buds, and the wind caught their bridges and palaces, which flew through the air like great cobwebs.

John had just come out of the wood, when a man’s strong voice called out behind him, “Hullo, comrade! Where are you going to?”

“Out into the wide world!” said John. “I have neither father nor mother, and am but a poor lad; but God will help me.”

“I am going out into the wide world too,” said the stranger. “Shall we two keep company?”

“Yes, certainly,” said John, and so they went on together. Soon they became very fond of each other, for they were both good men. But John saw that the stranger was much wiser than he was. He had travelled almost all over the world, and could tell him about almost everything that existed.

The sun already stood high in the heavens when they seated themselves under a great tree to eat their breakfast; and just then an old woman came up. She was very old, and walked quite bent, leaning upon a crutch, and carrying on her back a bundle of firewood which she had gathered in the forest. Her apron was fastened up, and John saw sticking out of it three long rods made of fern and willow twigs. Just when she was quite close to them her foot slipped; she fell and gave a loud scream, for she had broken her leg, the poor old woman!

John proposed at once that they should carry her home to where she lived, but the stranger opened his knapsack, took out a little jar, and said that he had a salve in it which would immediately make her leg whole and strong, so that she could walk home herself, just as if she had never broken her leg at all. But for that he wanted her to give him the three rods that she had in her apron.

“That would be paying well!” said the old woman, and she nodded her head in a strange way. She did not like to give up the rods, but then it was not pleasant to lie there with a broken leg! So she gave him the rods, and as soon as he had rubbed the salve on her leg the old mother got up and walked much better than before—such was the power of this ointment. But then, it was not to be bought at the chemist’s.

“What do you want with the rods?” John asked his travelling companion.

“Oh, they will make capital brooms,” he said. “Just the sort I like, for I am an odd kind of fellow.”

And they went on a good way.

“See how the sky is becoming overcast,” said John, pointing straight before them. “Those are awfully thick clouds.”

“No,” said his travelling companion, “they are not clouds, they are mountains—lovely great mountains, where you can get high up above the clouds into the pure air. It is delightful, I can tell you! Tomorrow we shall be far on our way out into the world.”

But they were not so near as they looked; they had to walk for a whole day before they came to the mountains, where the black woods grew straight up towards heaven, and there were rocks almost as big as a whole town. It certainly might be hard work to get right across them, and so John and his comrade went into an inn to rest themselves well and gather strength for the morrow’s journey.

Down in the big common room in the inn a great many people were assembled, for there was a man there with a puppet-show. He had just put up his little theatre, and the people were sitting round to see the play. Right in front, a fat butcher had taken his seat in the very best place. His great bulldog—ugh! how fierce he looked—sat by his side and stared with all his might, as all the rest were doing.

Then the show began; and it was a pretty little play, with a king and a queen in it; they sat upon a beautiful throne, and had gold crowns on their heads and long trains to their clothes, for they were very rich. The prettiest of wooden dolls, with glass eyes and great moustaches, stood at all the doors, and opened and shut them so that fresh air might come into the room. It was a very pleasant play, and not at all mournful. But—goodness knows what the big bulldog can have been thinking about!—just as the queen stood up and was walking across the boards, because the fat butcher did not hold him, he made a spring onto the stage and seized the queen by her slender waist so that one heard it go ‘crick-crack.’ It was terrible!

The poor man who managed the whole show was very frightened and in great distress about his queen, for she was the most beautiful doll he had, and now the ugly bulldog had bitten her head off. But afterwards, when the people had gone away, the stranger who had come with John said that he would put her to rights again, and he brought out his little jar once more and rubbed the doll with the ointment with which he had cured the old woman when she broke her leg. As soon as the doll had been rubbed she was whole again. Yes, she could even move all her limbs by herself—it was no longer necessary to pull the strings. The doll was just like a living person, except that she could not speak. The man who owned the little puppet-show was very glad, for now he had not to hold this doll by the strings any more, for she could dance by herself. None of the others could do that.

When night came on, and all the people in the inn had gone to bed, there was someone sighing so fearfully, and it went on so long, that everybody got up to see what it could be. The showman went to his little theatre, for it was there that the sighing came from. All the wooden dolls lay mixed together, the king and all his followers; and it was they who were sighing so pitifully and staring with their glass eyes; for they wished to be rubbed with the salve as the Queen had been, so that they might be able to move by themselves. The Queen at once went down on her knees, and held out her beautiful crown, and begged, “Take this from me, but anoint my husband and my courtiers!” Then the poor man, the owner of the little theatre and the dolls, could not help crying, for he really was so sorry for them. He promised the travelling companion at once that he would give him all the money he received the next evening for the show if he would only anoint four or five of his dolls. But the travelling companion said he would not ask anything at all but the big sword the man wore by his side; and when he got it he anointed six of the dolls, who immediately began to dance so gracefully that all the girls, the living human girls who were watching, fell a-dancing too. The coachman and the cook danced, the waiter and the chambermaid, and all the strangers, and even the fire-shovel and tongs, but these last fell down flat at the very first jump they made. What a merry night it was!

Next morning John and his travelling companion went away from them all, up the high mountains and through the great pine-woods. They got so high up that the church steeples below looked at last like little red berries among all the green; and they could see very far, many, many miles away, where they had never been. John had never before seen so much of the beauty of this lovely world at once. The sun shone warm in the fresh blue air, and among the mountains he could hear the huntsmen blowing their horns so gaily and sweetly that tears of joy came into his eyes, and he could not help calling out, “How kind has Heaven been to us to give us all the loveliness that there is in the world!”

The travelling companion also stood there with folded hands, and looked out over the forest and the towns in the warm sunshine. At that moment they heard the most wonderful music over their heads: they looked up, and there was a large white swan soaring in the air, and singing as they had never heard a bird sing before. But the song became weaker and weaker; he bowed his head and sank slowly down at their feet, where he lay dead, the beautiful bird!

“Two such splendid wings,” said the travelling companion, “so white and large as those which this bird has are worth money; I will take them with me. Do you see what a good thing it was that I had a Sword?”

And so, with one blow, he cut off both the wings of the dead swan, for he meant to keep them.

They now travelled for many, many miles over the mountains till at last they saw a great town before them with hundreds of towers, which shone like silver in the sun. In the middle of the town was a splendid marble palace, roofed with pure gold, and there lived the King.

John and the travelling companion would not go into the town at once, but stopped at the inn outside the town, that they might make themselves tidy; for they wished to look neat as they went about the streets. The landlord told them that the King was a very good man, who never did harm to anyone one way or another; but as for his daughter—Heaven preserve us! she was a bad princess. Beauty enough she had indeed—no one could be so pretty and so charming as she was—but what good was that? She was a wicked witch, through whose fault many gallant princes had lost their lives. She had given everybody permission to woo her. Anyone might come, were he prince or beggar; that was all one to her. He was only to guess three things that she happened to be thinking of when she asked him. If he could do so, she would marry him, and he would be king over the whole country when her father died; but if he could not guess the three things, she had him hanged or beheaded. Her father, the old king, was very grieved about it; but he could not prevent her from being so wicked, for he had once declared that he would never have anything to do with her lovers, and that she must deal with them as she liked. Every prince who had tried to gain the Princess had failed, and then he was either hanged or beheaded—well, he had been warned in time, you know; he need never have gone a-wooing.

The old king at last was so grieved at all the sorrow and misery she caused, that he and all his soldiers spend a whole day on their knees every year, praying that the Princess might reform; but she never would. The old women who drank brandy used to colour it black before they drank it—so deeply did they mourn. And more than that they really could not do.

“The hateful Princess!” said John. “She ought really to be whipped; that would do her good. If I were only the old King, she would soon be punished!”

As he spoke they heard the people outside shouting “Hurrah!” The Princess came by; and she was really so beautiful that all the people forgot how wicked she was, and they shouted “Hurrah!” Twelve beautiful maidens, all in white silk gowns, and each with a golden tulip in her hand, rode on coal-black horses by her side. The Princess herself had a snow-white horse, decked with diamonds and rubies. Her riding-habit was all of cloth of gold, and the whip she held in her hand looked like a sunbeam; the golden crown on her head shone just like stars from the sky, and her mantle was sewn together out of more than a thousand beautiful butterflies’ wings. In spite of this, she herself was much more lovely than all her clothing.

When John saw her his face became as red as a drop of blood, and he could hardly utter a word. The Princess looked just like the beautiful maiden with the golden crown of whom he had dreamed on the night his father died. He found her so enchanting that he could not help loving her greatly. It could not be true that she was a wicked witch, who caused people to be hanged or beheaded if they could not guess the riddles she put to them.

“Everyone is free to woo her, even the poorest beggar. I will really go to the castle, I cannot help it!”

They all told him not to attempt it, for he was certain to fare as all the rest had done. His travelling companion too tried to dissuade him; but John thought it would end well. He brushed his shoes and his coat, washed his face and hands, combed his beautiful yellow hair, and then went all by himself into the town and up to the palace.

“Come in!” said the old King, when John knocked at the door.

John opened it, and the old King came to meet him in his dressing-gown and embroidered slippers. He had the crown on his head, and the sceptre in one hand and the golden orb in the other. “Wait a little!” he said, and put the orb under his arm, so that he could hold out his hand to John. But as soon as he learned that his visitor was a suitor he began to cry so violently that both the sceptre and the orb fell to the ground, and he was obliged to dry his eyes on his dressing-gown. Poor old King!

“Give it up!” he said. “You will fare as badly as all the others have done. Now come and see!”

Then he led him out into the Princess’s pleasure garden. There was a terrible sight! On every tree there hung three or four kings’ sons who had wooed the Princess, but had not been able to guess the riddles she put to them. Each time that the breeze blew all the skeletons rattled, so that the little birds were frightened, and never dared to come into the garden. All the flowers were tied up to human bones, and in the flower-pots were grinning skulls. It was a strange garden indeed for a princess.

“Now you see,” said the old King. “It will fare with you just as it has fared with all these whom you see here; therefore you had better give up the idea. You will really make me unhappy, for I take these things very much to heart.”

John kissed the good old King’s hand, and said all would be well, for he was quite enchanted by the beautiful Princess.

At that moment the Princess herself came riding into the courtyard with all her ladies, so they went to meet her and wished her good day. She was beautiful to look at, and she gave John her hand, and then he could not help loving her more than before. She could never be the cruel, wicked witch people said she was. Then they went into the hall, and the little pages offered them preserves and ginger-nuts. But the old King was so distressed that he could not eat anything at all. Besides, ginger-nuts were too hard for him.

It was settled that John should come up to the palace again the next morning; the judges and the whole council would then be assembled, and would hear how he succeeded with his answers. If it went well with him that time he would have to come twice more; but no one yet had come who had succeeded in guessing right even the first time, and so they had lost their lives.

John was not at all anxious as to how he would fare. On the contrary, he was quite merry, thought only of the beautiful Princess, and felt quite sure that God would help him, but how he did not know, nor did he want to think of it. He danced along on the highroad on his way back to the inn, where his travelling companion was waiting for him.

John could not stop telling him how gracious the Princess had been to him and how beautiful she was. He declared he already longed for the next day, when he was to go to the palace and try his luck at guessing.

But his companion shook his head and was greatly downcast. “I am so fond of you!” said he. “We might have been together a long time yet, and now I am to lose you already! You poor dear John! I should like to cry, but I will not disturb your happiness on the last evening perhaps we shall ever spend together. We will be merry, right merry! Tomorrow, when you are gone, I can weep undisturbed.”

All the people in the town had soon heard that a new suitor for the Princess had arrived, and there was great sorrow on that account. The theatre was closed; all the candy sellers tied bits of crape round their sweets, and the King and the priests were on their knees in the churches. There was great lamentation, for they all thought that John would fare no better than the other suitors.

Towards evening the travelling companion mixed a big bowl of punch, and said to John, “Now we will be very merry, and drink the health of the Princess.” But when John had drunk two glasses he became so sleepy that he found it impossible to keep his eyes open, and sank into a deep sleep. The travelling companion lifted him very gently from his chair and laid him in the bed, and when it was quite dark he took the two great wings which he had cut off the swan and bound them fast to his own shoulders, and he put in his pocket the largest of the rods he had got from the old woman who had fallen and broken her leg, opened the window and flew away over the town, straight to the palace, where he sat himself in a corner under the window which looked into the bedroom of the Princess.

Everything was quiet in the whole town. As the clock struck a quarter to twelve the window opened, and the Princess, in a long white cloak, and with long black wings on her shoulders, flew out and away over the town to a great mountain. But the travelling companion made himself invisible, so that she could not see him at all, and flew behind her, and whipped the Princess with his rod, so that the blood came at every stroke. Oh! what a journey that was through the air! The wind caught her cloak, so that it spread out on all sides like a great sail, and the moon shone through it.

“How it hails! how it hails!” said the Princess at every blow she got from the rod, and she deserved them all. At last she arrived at the mountain, and knocked. There was a noise like thunder, the mountain opened, and the Princess went in. The travelling companion followed her, for no one could see him, as he was invisible. They went through a great, long passage, where the walls glistened in a strange manner, for more than a thousand gleaming spiders were running up and down the walls and shining like fire. Then they came to a great hall built of silver and gold; flowers as big as sunflowers, red and blue, shone on the walls; but no one could pluck these flowers, for the stems were ugly poisonous snakes, and the flowers were flames darting out of their mouths. The whole of the ceiling was covered with shining glow-worms and sky-blue bats flapping their thin wings. Altogether the place had a frightful appearance.!

In the middle of the floor was a throne, borne by four skeleton horses, with harness made by fiery red spiders; the throne itself was of milk-white glass, and the cushions were little black mice, biting each other’s tails. Above it was a canopy of rose-red spiders’ web, studded with the prettiest little green flies, which shone like precious stones. On the throne sat an old troll, with a crown on his ugly head and a sceptre in his hand. He kissed the Princess on the forehead, made her sit beside him on the costly throne, and then the music began. Great black grasshoppers played on jews’-harps, and the owl beat her wings upon her body, because she hadn’t a drum. It was a ridiculous concert. Little black goblins with will-o’-the-wisps on their caps danced about the hall. But no one could see the travelling companion; he had placed himself just behind the throne, and heard and saw everything. The courtiers who now came in were very grand and noble; but anyone with common sense could see what they really were. They were nothing more than broomsticks with cabbage-heads on them, which the troll had brought to life by magic and given embroidered clothes. But that did not matter, for they were only used for show.

After there had been some dancing the Princess told the troll that she had a new suitor, and therefore she asked him what she should think of for him to guess when he should come next morning to the palace.

“Listen!” said the troll. “I will tell you something. You must choose something very easy, for then he won’t guess it. Think of one of your shoes. That he will not guess. Let him have his head cut off, but don’t forget, when you come to me tomorrow night, to bring me his eyes, for I’ll eat them.”

The Princess curtsied very low, and said she would not forget the eyes. The troll opened the mountain, and she flew home again, but the travelling companion followed her, and beat her again so hard with the rod that she groaned aloud at the heavy hailstorm, and hurried as much as she could to get back into the bedroom through the window. The travelling companion flew back to the inn, where John was still asleep, took off his wings, and lay down upon the bed, for he might well be tired.

It was very early in the morning when John awoke. The travelling companion got up too, and told him he had had a wonderful dream in the night about the Princess and one of her shoes, and he therefore begged John to ask if the Princess had not thought of her shoe. For that was what he had heard from the troll in the mountain.

“I may just as well ask that as anything else,” said John. “Perhaps it is quite right what you have dreamed, for I always believe that the Lord God will help me. But I will bid you farewell, for if I guess wrong I shall never see you more.”

Then they kissed each other, and John went into the town and to the palace. The whole hall was filled with people: the judges sat in their armchairs and had eider-down pillows behind their heads, for they had a great deal to think about. The old King stood up, and wiped his eyes with a white pocket-handkerchief. Then the Princess came in. She was much more beautiful than yesterday, and bowed to them all in a very gracious manner, but to John she gave her hand, and said, “Good morning to you.”

Then John had to guess what she had thought of. Heavens! How kindly she looked at him! But as soon as she heard him utter the word ‘shoe’ she turned deathly pale and trembled all over. But that could not help her, for he had guessed right!

Goodness! How glad the old King was! He turned a somersault—it was a joy to see, and all the people clapped their hands for him and for John, who had guessed right the first time!

The travelling companion was very glad too when he heard how well things had gone. But John folded his hands and thanked God, Who, he was sure, would help him the second and the third time, as He had helped him the first. The next day he was to guess again.

The evening passed just like that of the day before. While John was asleep the travelling companion flew behind the Princess to the mountain, and beat her even harder than the time before, for now he had taken two rods. No one saw him, and he heard everything. The Princess was to think of her glove, and this again he told to John as if it had been a dream. In this way John was able to guess right, which caused great rejoicing in the palace. The whole Court turned somersaults, just as they had seen the King do the first time; but the Princess lay on the sofa, and would not say a single word. Now the question was whether John could guess aright the third time. If he succeeded he was to have the beautiful Princess and inherit the whole kingdom after the old King’s death. If he failed he was to lose his life, and the troll would eat his beautiful blue eyes.

That evening before the third trial, John went early to bed, said his prayers, and went to sleep quite peacefully. But the travelling companion bound his wings to his back and the sword to his side, and took all three rods with him, and flew away to the palace.

It was a very dark night. The wind blew so hard that the tiles flew off the houses, and the trees in the garden on which the skeletons were hanging bent like reeds before the storm. The lightning flashed every minute, and the thunder rolled just as if it were one peal lasting the whole night. The window was thrown open, and the Princess flew out. She was as pale as death; but she laughed at the bad weather, and declared it was not bad enough yet. And her white cloak whirled round in the wind like the great sail of a ship; but the travelling companion beat her with the three rods till the blood ran down upon the ground and she could scarcely fly any farther. At last, however, she reached the mountain.

“It hails and it storms!” she said, “I have never been out in such weather.”

“One can have too much of a good thing,” said the troll.

Then she told him that John had guessed right the second time too, and if he did the same the next morning, he would have won and she would never be able to come to the mountain again, and never be able to practise her magic arts any more; and so she was in great distress.

“He shall not guess it this time,” said the troll. “I shall think of something of which he has never thought, or he must be a greater magician than I am. But now we will be merry.” And he took the Princess by both hands, and they danced about with all the little goblins and will-o’-the-wisps in the room. The red spiders jumped just as merrily up and down the walls; it looked as if fiery flowers were throwing out sparks. The owl beat the drum, the crickets piped, and the black grasshoppers played on the jews’-harps. It was a merry ball.

When they had danced long enough, the Princess had to go home, or else she might have been missed at the palace. The troll said he would go with her—then they would have each other’s company on the way.

Then they flew away through the storm, and the travelling companion broke his three rods across their backs. Never had the troll been out in such a hailstorm. Outside the palace he said goodbye to the Princess, and whispered to her at the same time, “Think of my head.” But the travelling companion heard it; and the moment the Princess slipped through the window into her bedroom, and the troll was about to turn back, he seized him by his long beard, and with his sword cut off the ugly troll’s head at the shoulders, so that the troll did not even see him. The body he threw out into the sea to the fishes; but the head he only dipped in the water, and then tied it in his silk handkerchief, took it with him to the inn, and then lay down to sleep.

Next morning he gave John the handkerchief, and told him not to untie it until the Princess asked him what she had thought of.

There were so many people in the great hall of the palace that they stood as close together as radishes in a bunch. The council sat in the chairs with their soft cushions, and the old King had new clothes on; his golden crown and sceptre had been polished, and he looked quite stately. But the Princess was very pale, and had a coal-black dress on, as though she was going to a funeral.

“What have I drought of?” said she to John. And he immediately untied the handkerchief, and was himself quite frightened when he saw the hideous troll’s head. All the people shuddered, for it was dreadful to look at; but the Princess sat just like a stone statue, and could not utter a single word. At last she stood up and gave John her hand, for he had guessed right. She did not look at anyone, but only sighed deeply and said, “Now you are my lord!—this evening we will hold our wedding.”

“Well, I am pleased!” said the old King. “And so we’ll have it!”

All the people shouted “Hurrah!” The soldiers’ band played music in the streets, the bells rang, and the candy sellers took the black crape off their sugar dolls, for now there was joy; three oxen roasted whole, and stuffed with ducks and fowls, were placed in the middle of the market-place, that everyone might cut himself a slice; the fountains ran with the finest wine; and if you asked for a penny roll at the baker’s, you got six large buns as a present—and with raisins in them, too.

In the evening the whole town was illuminated; the soldiers fired off the cannon, and the boys set off firecrackers; and there was eating and drinking, clinking of glasses, and dancing in the palace. All the noble gentlemen and pretty ladies danced with each other, and one could hear a long way off how they sang:

Here are many pretty girls,

Dancing all so gladly,

Turning like a spinning-wheel

In the maze so madly!

Dance and jump the whole night through

Till the sole falls from your shoe.

But the Princess was still a witch and did not at all like John. The travelling companion had thought of that; and so he gave John three feathers from the swan’s wings and a little bottle with a few drops in it, and told him that he must have a large tub of water put near the bridal bed; and when the Princess was about to get into bed he must give her a little push, so that she should fall into the tub; and then he must duck her three times, after he had cast the feathers in and the drops; and she would then be free from her enchantment and love him very much.

John did everything the travelling companion had advised him. The Princess screamed loudly while he ducked her under the water and struggled in his hands in the form of a great coal-black swan with fiery eyes. When she came the second time out of the water the swan was white, with the exception of a black ring round her neck. John prayed devoutly to Our Lord and let the water close for the third time over the bird, and the same moment she was changed again to the beautiful Princess. She was more beautiful even than before, and thanked him with tears in her lovely eyes for having freed her from the magic spell.

The next morning the old King came with his whole Court, and there were congratulations till late in the day. Last of all came the travelling companion; he had his staff in his hand and his knapsack on his back. John kissed him many times, and said he must not go: he must stay with the friend of whose happiness he was the cause. But the travelling companion shook his head, and said mildly and kindly: “No, my time is up. I have only paid my debt. Do you remember the dead man whom the wicked men wanted to ill-treat? You gave all you possessed in order that he might rest in his grave. I am that man.”

And the next moment he had vanished.

The wedding festivities lasted a whole month. John and the Princess loved each other truly, and the old King lived to see many happy days, and to let their little tiny children ride on his knee and play with his sceptre.

And in time John became king over the whole country.

[ 1835 ]

The Tinderbox

—

A Soldier was marching along the highroad—left, right! left, right! He had a knapsack on his back and a sword at his side. He was returning from war, and was now on his way home.

When he had gone some distance he met an old Witch. She was dreadfully ugly; her underlip was hanging down upon her breast.

She said, “Good evening, Soldier! What a fine sword you have, and what a big knapsack! You are a true soldier! Now you shall have as much money as ever you wish for.”

“Thank you, old Witch,” replied the Soldier.

“Do you see that big tree?” said the Witch, pointing out a tree which stood not far from them. “It is hollow inside! You must climb right up to the top, and then you will see a hole; through this hole you can let yourself down and get deep into the tree. I will tie a rope round your waist, so that I can pull you up when you call out to me.”

“What shall I do down in the tree?” asked the Soldier.

“Fetch money!” said the Witch. “You must know that you will find a great hall at the bottom of the tree; it is quite light, for there are more than a hundred lamps burning down there. You will then see three doors; you can open them—the keys are in the locks. If you enter the first room you will find in the middle of the floor a large wooden chest and a dog sitting on it that has a pair of eyes as big as teacups. Never mind him! I will give you my blue-checked apron, which you must spread on the floor; then go quickly, seize the dog and place him on my apron, open the chest, and take out of it as much money as you like. It is all copper; if you would rather have silver, you must go into the second room. There you will see a dog with eyes as big as mill-wheels. But do not be afraid: put him on my apron and take the money. If, however, you wish to have gold, you can have that too, and as much as you can carry, if you go into the third room. But the dog sitting on that box has eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen: he is a dog, I can tell you, but you need not fear him. Only put him on my apron and he will not hurt you, and you can take as much gold as you like out of the chest.”

“That is not so bad,” said the soldier. “But what do you expect me to give you in return? For you will not do all this for nothing, I’ll be bound.”

“Yes,” replied the Witch. “I shall not ask you for a single penny. I only want you to bring up for me an old Tinderbox which my grandmother forgot last time she was down there,”

“Well, then, tie the rope round my waist,” said the Soldier.

“Here it is,” said the Witch, “and here is my blue-checked apron.”

The Soldier then climbed up the tree, let himself down into it by the rope, and found himself, as the Witch had told him, in the great hall where the many lamps were burning.

He opened the first door. Ugh! there sat the dog with the eyes as big as teacups staring at him.

“You are a fine fellow,” said the Soldier, placed him on the apron of the Witch, and took as many coppers as his pockets would hold. Then he locked the chest, put the dog upon it, and went on to the second room. Aha! there was the dog with the eyes as large as mill-wheels.

“Don’t you stare at me so hard,” said the Soldier; “you might strain your eyes,” and he put the dog on the Witch’s apron. When he saw the silver in the chest he threw away all the coppers he had taken, and filled his pockets and his knapsack with silver. Then he went into the third room. That was dreadful! The dog there really had two eyes as big as the Round Tower, and they went round in his head like wheels.

“Good evening,” said the Soldier, and touched his cap, for he had never in his life seen a dog like this. When he had looked at him for a bit he thought, “That’ll do,” lifted him down on to the floor, and opened the chest. Good heavens! what a lot of gold there was! There was enough gold to buy the whole of Copenhagen and all the sweets from the candy shops, as well as all the tin soldiers, whips, and rocking-horses in the world. Yes, there was plenty of money there, sure enough! The Soldier quickly threw away all the silver with which he had filled his pockets and his knapsack, and took gold instead. He crammed his pockets and his knapsack and even his cap and his boots with gold, so that he could scarcely walk. Now he really had a lot of money.

He placed the dog again on the chest, shut the door, and called up through the tree:

“Now pull me up, old Witch.”

“Have you found the Tinderbox?” asked the old Witch.

“Upon my soul,” said the Soldier, “I had really forgotten it.” And he went back and fetched it. The old Witch pulled him up, and soon he was again standing on the highroad, with his pockets, boots, knapsack, and cap full of gold.

“What will you do with the Tinderbox?” asked the Soldier.

“That’s no business of yours,” retorted the Witch. “You have got your money. Give me the Tinderbox.”

“Snik-snak!” replied the Soldier. “Tell me quick what you are going to do with it, or I’ll draw my sword and cut your head off!”

“No,” said the Witch.

Then the Soldier cut her head off. There she lay! And he tied all his gold up in her apron, slung it like a bundle on his shoulders, put the Tinderbox into his pocket, and went straight to the town.

It was a fine town. He put up at the best inn, asked for the very best rooms and for his favourite dishes; for he was rich, now he had so much gold.

The servant who had to clean his boots thought they were rather shabby old things for such a rich gentleman, for he had not yet bought a new pair. Next day, however, he bought decent boots and fine clothes. And now our Soldier had become a fine gentleman, and people told him all about the grand things in their town, and about the King, and what a beautiful Princess1 his daughter was.

“Where can one see her?” asked the Soldier.

“She cannot be seen at all,” they all said. “She lives in a strong copper castle with many towers, surrounded by high walls! Nobody but the King himself can go in and out, for it has been foretold that she will marry a private soldier, and that the King will not hear of!”

“I should very much like to see her,” thought the Soldier, but there was no way of getting permission for that.

He began to lead a merry life, went to the plays, drove in the royal park, and gave largely to the poor, and that was very good of him, for well he knew from former days what it meant to be without a single penny. He was now rich, had fine clothes, and soon found many friends, who all told him that he was a splendid fellow and a true gentleman; all this pleased the Soldier greatly. But, since each day he spent a good deal of money without receiving any, he had soon nothing but twopence left. So he had to give up the elegant rooms which he occupied and live at the top of the house in a little garret, he had to black his own boots, and to mend them himself with a darning-needle, and none of his former friends came to see him, for there were so many stairs to climb.

One dark evening he could not even buy a candle—when suddenly he remembered that there was a little stump of candle in the Tinderbox which he had fetched out of the hollow tree with the help of the Witch. He got out the Tinderbox with the candle-end in it, and the instant he struck the flint and the sparks began to fly, the door burst open and the dog with the eyes as large as teacups which he had seen down under the tree stood before him, and asked: “What are your lordship’s commands?”

“What’s this?” said the Soldier. “That is an excellent Tinderbox if I can get whatever I wish for with it. Get me some money,” he said to the dog. The dog was gone like lightning; but in a moment he was back again, with a large bag of coppers in his mouth.

In this way the Soldier learned what a wonderful Tinderbox he had. If he struck once, there came the dog from the chest containing the copper; if he struck twice, the dog who had the silver came; and if he struck three times, the dog who sat on the chest containing the gold made his appearance. So the Soldier moved back into the elegant rooms, and wore his fine clothes again. All his former friends knew him once more, and made much of him.

One day the Soldier thought, “It is very strange that nobody can get a sight of the Princess! All agree in saying that she is so beautiful; but what is the use of that if she has to stay forever in the big copper castle with its many towers? Can I never manage to get to see her? Where is my Tinderbox?” And he struck a spark, and there at once stood the dog with a pair of eyes as big as teacups.

“It is midnight, I know,” said the Soldier, “but I should very much like to see the Princess just for one moment.”

The dog was out of the room in an instant, and before the Soldier had time to think he was back again with the Princess. There she was, fast asleep on the dog’s back, and she was so lovely that nobody could help seeing at once that she was a real princess. The Soldier could not help it—he had to kiss her, for he was a thorough soldier.

Then the dog ran back with the Princess; but next morning, when the King and Queen were having their cup of tea, she told them that she had had a very strange dream during the night of a dog and a soldier; she had been riding on the dog and the soldier had kissed her.

“That’s a pretty tale,” said the Queen.

So next night one of the old Court ladies had to watch by the bed of the Princess to see whether it was really a dream, or what else it could be.

The Soldier had such a longing to see the Princess again that at night he again sent for the dog, who went and fetched her and ran off with her as fast as he could. But the old lady put on water-boots and followed, running as fast as he did. When she saw them disappear into a large house she took a piece of chalk and made a large white cross on the door, and thought, “Now I shall know the house again.” Then she returned home and went to bed. The dog soon brought the Princess back; and when he saw the white cross on the house where the Soldier lived he took a bit of chalk too and made crosses on all the doors in the town. And that was very clever of him, for now the lady could not find the right door, as there were crosses on all of them.

Early next morning, the King, the Queen, the lady, and all the officers of the Court went to see where the Princess had been.

“There is the house,” said the King, when he saw the first door with a white cross.

“No; there it is, my dear husband,” said the Queen, who saw a second door with a white cross.

“But there is one, and there is another,” said all, and wherever they looked they saw white crosses on the doors. They soon saw that it would be useless to search any more.

But the Queen was a very clever woman; she could do more than merely ride in a carriage. She took her big golden scissors, cut a large piece of silk into squares, and made a nice little bag of it, and this she filled with buckwheat flour. Then she tied it to the Princess’s back, and cut a little hole in it, so that the flour could run out all along the road the Princess was taken.

That night the dog came again, took the Princess on his back, and ran with her to the Soldier, who was deeply in love with her, and who only wished that he was a prince, that he might make her his wife.

The dog did not notice how the flour was strewn all the way from the castle up to the Soldier’s window, where he climbed up the wall with the Princess. Next morning the King and Queen saw well enough where their daughter had been taken, and the Soldier was at once arrested and thrown into prison.

There he sat, and found it awfully dark and dull. He was told, “Tomorrow you will be hanged.” That was not pleasant to hear, and the worst of it was that he had left his Tinderbox at the inn.

In the morning he could see through the iron bars how the people were hurrying out of the town to see him hanged. He heard the drums and saw the soldiers march past. All the world was going, and among them was a shoemaker’s apprentice in his leather apron and slippers, who ran so fast that one of his slippers came off and flew against the wall, close under the window where the Soldier sat behind the iron bars.

“You need not hurry so, boy!” cried the Soldier. “They can’t do anything until I arrive. But if you would run to the place where I used to live and fetch me my Tinderbox I will give you twopence! But you must put your best foot foremost!”

The boy, who was very anxious to have the money, fetched the Tinderbox, handed it to the Soldier, and—yes, now we shall see what happened.

Outside the town they had erected a high gallows; soldiers and many thousands of people stood round it. The King and the Queen were sitting on a magnificent throne opposite the judges and Council.

The Soldier was already standing on the top of the ladder, and they were just going to put the rope round his neck when he said he knew that it was the custom to grant a last request to a poor criminal before he suffered death, and he should very much like to smoke a pipe—the last he would ever have a chance of smoking in this world.

The King would not refuse this favour, and the Soldier took up his Tinderbox and struck—“One, two, three.” And suddenly there stood all the dogs—the first with eyes as big as teacups, the second with eyes as big as mill-wheels, and the third with eyes as big as the Round Tower.

“Help me now, so that I shan’t be hanged!” said the Soldier.

Then the dogs rushed at the judges and the councillors, took one up by the legs, another by the nose, and threw them many fathoms high into the air, so that they fell down and were smashed to pieces.

“Let me be!” said the King; but the biggest of the dogs seized both him and the Queen and threw them up after the others.

Then the soldiers became frightened, and all the people cried out, “Good Soldier, you shall be our King and marry the beautiful Princess!”

Then they seated the Soldier in the King’s carriage, and the three dogs danced in front of it and cried, “Hurrah!” The boys whistled on their fingers, and the soldiers presented arms. The Princess came out of the copper castle and became Queen, and she liked it very much.

The wedding festivities lasted eight days; and the dogs sat at table and stared with all their eyes.

[ 1835 ]

The Elfin Hill

—

Some large lizards were running nimbly about in the clefts of an old tree; they could understand each other very well, for they spoke lizard language.

“How it is rumbling and buzzing in the old Elfin hill!” said one Lizard. “I’ve not been able to close my eyes for two nights because of the noise! I might just as well have had the toothache all the time, for I don’t get any sleep then either.”

“There’s something going on in there!” said another Lizard. “They propped up the top of the hill on four red posts till cock-crow, to have it thoroughly aired, and the Elfin girls have learned new dances with some stamping in them! There’s something going on.”

“Yes, I have talked with an earthworm of my acquaintance,” said the third Lizard. “The Earthworm came straight out of the hill, where he had been grubbing in the ground night and day: he had heard a great deal. He can’t see, poor creature, but he understands how to wriggle about and listen. They expect visitors in the Elfin hill—visitors of rank, but who they are the Earthworm would not say, and perhaps, indeed, he did not know. All the Will-o’-the-Wisps are ordered to hold a torchlight procession, as it is called; and the silver and gold, of which there is plenty in the Elfin hill, is to be polished and put out in the moonlight.”

“Who may these strangers be?” asked all the lizards. “What can be going on? Hark, how it hums and how it rumbles!”

At that very moment the Elfin hill opened, and an elderly Elfin damsel, hollow at the back, [02] but for the rest very respectably dressed, came tripping out. She was the old Elfin King’s housekeeper. She was a distant relative of the family, and wore an amber heart on her forehead. Her legs moved so rapidly—trip, trip! Gracious!—how she could trip!—straight down to the marsh, to the Night Raven. [03]

“You are invited to the Elfin hill this evening,” she said, “but will you do me a great service and undertake the invitations? You ought to do something, as you don’t keep house yourself. We shall have some very distinguished friends, troll-folk who have something to say; and so the old Elfin King wants to make a display.”

“Who’s to be invited?” asked the Night Raven.

“All the world may come to the grand ball, even human beings, if they can talk in their sleep, or can do something in our way. But for the banquet the company is to be strictly select; we shall only have the most distinguished. I had a dispute with the Elfin King, for in my opinion we should not even admit ghosts. The Merman and his daughters must be invited first. They may not be much pleased to come on dry land, but they shall have a wet stone to sit upon, or something still better, and I think they won’t refuse for this once. All the old Trolls of the first class, with tails, and the Wood Demon and his Gnomes we must have. And then I think we must not leave out the Grave Pig, the Death Horse, and the Church Brownie. [04] Properly speaking, they belong to the clergy, who are not of our class. But that’s only their vocation; they are closely related to us and frequently pay us visits.”

“Caw!” said the Night Raven, and flew off at once to give the invitations.

The Elfin girls were already dancing on the Elfin hill, and they danced with long shawls woven of mist and moonshine, and that looks very pretty for those who like that sort of thing. In the middle of the Elfin hill was the great hall, splendidly decorated. The floor had been washed with moonshine, and the walls rubbed with witches’ fat, so that they shone in the light like tulips. In the kitchen plenty of frogs were roasting on the spit, stuffed snakeskins with little children’s fingers in them, and salads of mushroom spawn, wet mouse-snouts, and hemlock; beer brewed by the Marsh Witch, sparkling saltpetre wine from grave cellars—all very substantial eating. Rusty nails and church window glass were among the sweets.

The old Elfin King had his golden crown polished with powdered slate pencil; it was slate pencil from the first form, and it’s very difficult for the Elfin King to get first form slate pencil! In the bedroom, curtains were hung up, and fastened with snail-slime. Yes, there was indeed a rumbling and jostling there!

“Now we must perfume the place by burning horsehair and pig’s bristles, and then I think I shall have done my part,” said the old Elfin maiden.

“Father dear,” said the youngest daughter, “may I hear now who our distinguished guests are to be?”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I must tell you now. Two of my daughters must be prepared to be married! Two will certainly be married. The old Goblin from Norway, who lives in the old Dovrefield, and possesses many strong castles on the rocky hills, and a gold mine which is better than anyone thinks, is coming with his two sons, who both want to choose a wife. The old Goblin is a true old honest Norwegian veteran, merry and straightforward. I know him from old days, when we drank with one another. He came here to fetch his wife; now she is dead—she was a daughter of the King of the Chalk-cliffs of Moen. He took his wife on tick, as the saying is. Oh, how I do want to see the old fellow! His sons, they say, are rather rude, forward youngsters, but perhaps people do them wrong, and they’ll be right enough when they grow older. Let me see if you can teach them manners!”

“And when will they come?” asked one of his daughters.

“That depends on wind and weather,” said the Elfin King. “They travel economically: they’ll come when there’s a chance of a ship. I wanted them to come overland across Sweden, but the old fellow did not like that way. He does not keep up with the times, and I don’t hold with that.”

Just then two will-o’-the-wisps came hopping up, one quicker than the other, and so of course one arrived first.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” they cried.

“Give me my crown, and let me stand in the moonlight,” said the Elfin King.

And the daughters gathered up their trains and curtseyed down to the ground.

There stood the old Goblin from Dovre, with a crown of hardened icicles and polished fir-cones. Moreover, he wore a bearskin and great warm boots. His sons, on the contrary, went bare-necked, and with no braces, for they were strong men.

“Is that a hill?” asked the younger of the boys, and he pointed to the Elfin hill. “Up in Norway we should call it a hole.”

“Boys!” said the old man, “a hole goes in, a hill goes up. Have you no eyes in your heads?”

The only thing they wondered at down here, they said, was that they could understand the language without difficulty.

“Don’t give yourself airs!” said the old man. “One would think you were not full-fledged.”

And then they went into the Elfin hill, where the really grand company were assembled, and in such a hurry that one might almost say they had been blown together. But it was nicely and prettily arranged to suit everyone’s taste. The sea folk sat at table in big wash-tubs: they said it was just as if they were at home. Everyone had good table manners except the two young Northern Goblins: they put their feet up on the table, but they thought that everything they did was right.

“Feet off the table!” said the old Goblin, and they obeyed, but not immediately. The ladies who sat next to them they tickled with pine cones that they had brought with them, and then took off their boots to be more comfortable, and gave them to the ladies to hold, but their father, the old Dovre Goblin, was quite different; he told such fine stories of the imposing Norwegian rocks, and of the waterfalls which rushed down white with foam with a noise like thunder and the sound of organs; he told of the salmon that leap up the rushing streams when the nixie plays upon her golden harp; he told of shining winter nights, when the sleigh bells are jingling, and the lads skate with burning torches over the clear ice, which is so transparent that they can see the fishes dart beneath their feet. Yes, he could tell it so finely that one saw and heard what he described. It was just as if the sawmills were going, as if the servants and maids were singing songs and dancing the Halling dance. Hurrah! All at once the old Goblin gave the old Elfin girl a smacking kiss! That was a kiss! And yet they were not related to each other at all!

Then the Elfin maidens had to dance, first in the usual way and then with stamping steps, and that suited them well; then came the artistic and solo dance. Gracious! How they could stretch their legs! Nobody knew where they began and where they ended, which were their arms and which their legs—they were all mixed up like wood shavings; and then they whirled round till the Death Horse turned giddy and was obliged to leave the table.

“Brrrr!” said the old goblin. “That’s good fun for the legs! But what else can they do besides dancing, stretching their legs, and making a whirlwind?”

“That you shall soon know!” said the Elfin King.

And he called out the youngest of his daughters. She was as dainty and light as moonshine; she was the most delicate of all the sisters. She took a white shaving in her mouth, and disappeared—that was her art.

But the old goblin said he should not like his wife to possess this gift, and he did not think that his boys would either.

The second one could walk by her own side just as if she had a shadow, which is a thing Elves never have.

The third daughter was of quite another kind; she had learned in the brewhouse of the Marsh Witch, and understood how to lard elder-tree logs with glow-worms.

“She will make a good housewife,” said the old goblin; and then he winked a health to her with his eyes, for he did not want to drink too much.

Next came the fourth Elfin girl; she had a big golden harp to play upon, and when she struck the first string all lifted up their left feet, for the Goblins are left-legged, and when she struck the second chord all had to do what she wished.

“That’s a dangerous woman!” said the old Goblin; but both his sons had gone out of the hill, for they were tired of it all.

“And what can the next daughter do?” asked the old Goblin.

“I have learned to love everything that is Norwegian,” she said, “and I will never marry unless I can go to Norway.”

But the youngest sister whispered to the old King, “That’s only because she has heard in a Norwegian song that when the world sinks down, the cliffs of Norway will remain standing like monuments, and so she wants to get there, because she is afraid of sinking down too.

“Ho! ho!” said the old Goblin. “Is that the meaning of it? But what can the seventh and last do?”

“The sixth comes before the seventh!” said the Elfin King, for he could count. But the sixth would not come out.

“I can only tell people the truth!” she said. “Nobody cares for me, and I have enough to do to get my grave-clothes ready.”

Now came the seventh and last, and what could she do? Why, she could tell stories, as many as ever she wished!

“Here are all my five fingers,” said the old Goblin. “Tell me one for each!”

And she took him by the wrist, and he laughed till he nearly choked, and when she came to the ring finger, which had a golden ring round its waist, just as if it knew there was to be a wedding, the old Goblin said:

“Hold fast what you have: the hand is yours; I’ll have you for a wife myself!”

And the Elfin girl said that the story of the ring finger and of little Peter Playman, the fifth, were still to be told.

“We’ll hear those in winter,” said the Goblin, “and we’ll hear about the pine tree, and the birch, and the fairies’ presents, and the crackling frost. You shall tell your tales, for no one up there knows how to do that well; and then we’ll sit in the stone rooms where the pine logs burn, and drink mead out of the golden horns of the old Norwegian kings—the Neckan has given me a couple; and when we sit there, and the nixie comes on a visit, she’ll sing you all the songs of the herd-girls. That will be merry. The salmon will leap in the waterfall against the stone walls, but they cannot come in. Yes, it’s very good living in dear old Norway; but where are my boys?”

Yes, where were the boys? They were running about in the fields, and blowing out the Will-o’-the-Wisps, which had come so kindly for the torch dance.

“What’s all this romping about?” said the old Goblin. “I have taken a mother for you, and now you may take one of the aunts.” But the lads said that they would rather make a speech and drink to good fellowship—they did not want to marry. Then they made speeches, and drank to brotherhood, and tipped up their glasses to show they had emptied them. Afterwards they took their coats off and lay down on the table to sleep, for they did not stand on ceremony. But the old Goblin danced about the room with his young bride, and he exchanged boots with her, for that’s more fashionable than exchanging rings.

“The cock is crowing,” said the old Elfin girl who kept house. “Now we must shut the shutters, so that the sun may not burn us.” And the hill shut itself up.

But outside, the Lizards ran up and down in the cleft tree, and one said to the other:

“Oh, how much I like that old Norwegian Goblin!”

“I like the boys better,” said the Earthworm. But then, he could not see, the poor wretch!

[ 1845 ]

Soup from a Sausage Skewer

—

I

“That was an excellent dinner yesterday,” said an old Mouse of the female sex to another who had not been present at the festive meal. “I sat number twenty-one from the old Mouse King; that was not such a bad place! Would you like to hear the menu? The courses were very well arranged: mouldy bread, bacon-rind, tallow candles, and sausage—and then the same things over again. It was just as good as having two banquets. Everything went on as jovially and as good-humouredly as at a family gathering. There was absolutely nothing left but the sausage skewers. The conversation turned upon these, and at last the expression ‘soup from sausage skins,’ or, as the proverb runs in the neighbouring country, ‘soup from a sausage skewer,’ was mentioned. Now everyone had heard of this, but no one had tasted such soup, much less prepared it. A very pretty toast to the inventor was drunk; it was said that he deserved to be made a Poor-Law Guardian. That was very witty, wasn’t it? And the old Mouse King rose and promised that the young lady mouse who could prepare the said soup in the most tasty way should be his queen; he gave her a year and a day for the trial.”

“That wasn’t bad!” said the other Mouse. “But how is the soup prepared?”

“Ah! how is it prepared?” That was just what all the other lady mice, both young and old, were asking. They would all have liked to be queen, but they did not want to take the trouble to go out into the wide world to learn how to prepare the soup, and yet that was what would have to be done. But everyone is not ready to leave home and family; and out in the world cheese-rinds are not to be had for the asking, nor is bacon to be smelled every day. No, one must suffer hunger, perhaps even be eaten up alive by a cat.

Such were probably the considerations by which the majority allowed themselves to be deterred from going out into the world in search of information. Only four mice gave in their names as being ready to start. They were young and active, but poor; each of them intended to proceed to one of the four quarters of the globe, and it would then be seen to which of them fortune was favourable. Each of the four took a sausage skewer with her, so that she might be mindful of her object in travelling; the sausage skewer was to be her pilgrim’s staff.

They set out at the beginning of May, and not till the May of the following year did they return, and then only three of them; the fourth did not report herself, nor did she send any word or sign, notwithstanding that the day of trial had arrived.

“Yes, every pleasure has its drawback,” said the Mouse King. Then he gave orders that all the mice for many miles round should be invited. They were to assemble in the kitchen, and the three travelled mice should stand in a row alone; a sausage skewer, hung with black crape, was erected in memory of the fourth, who was missing. No one was to give his opinion before the Mouse King had said what was to be said.

Now we shall hear!

II

WHAT THE FIRST LITTLE MOUSE
HAD SEEN AND LEARNED ON HER TRAVELS

“When I went out into the wide world,” said the little Mouse, “I thought, as a great many do at my age, that I already knew all there was to be known. But that was not so; years must pass before one gets as far as that. I went straight to the sea. I went off in a ship that sailed to the north. I had been told that a ship’s cook must know how to make the best of things at sea, but it is easy to make the best of things if one has plenty of sides of bacon and great tubs of salt pork and mouldy flour; one has delicate living there, but one does not learn how to make soup from a sausage skewer. We sailed on for many days and nights; the ship rocked fearfully, and we did not get off without a wetting, either. When we at last reached our destination I left the vessel; it was up in the far north.

“It is a strange thing to leave one’s own corner at home, to sail in a ship which is only a kind of corner too, and then suddenly to find oneself more than a hundred miles away in a strange land. I saw great trackless forests of pines and birches that smelled so strong that I sneezed and thought of sausages. There were great lakes there too. The waters when looked at quite close were clear, but from a distance they appeared black as ink. White swans lay upon them; they lay so still I thought they were foam, but when I saw them fly and walk I recognized them. They belong to the same race as the geese; one can easily see that by their walk—no one can deny his family descent.

I kept to my own kind. I associated with the forest and field mice, who, by the way, know very little, especially as regards cooking, and yet that was just what I had gone abroad for. The idea that soup might be made from a sausage skewer seemed to them so extraordinary that it at once spread from mouth to mouth through the whole wood. That the problem could ever be solved they thought an impossibility, and least of all did I think that there, and the very first night too, should I be initiated into the manner of preparing it. It was the height of summer, and that, said the mice, was why the forest smelled so strongly, why the herbs were so fragrant, why the lakes with the swans floating upon them were so clear and yet so dark.

“On the edge of the wood, surrounded by three or four houses, a pole as high as the mainmast of a ship had been set up, and from the top of it hung wreaths and fluttering ribbons—it was a Maypole. Lads and lasses danced round the tree, and sang as loudly as they could to the music of the fiddler. All went merrily in the sunset and by moonlight, but I took no part in it—what has a little mouse to do with a May-dance? I sat in the soft moss and held my sausage skewer fast. The moon threw its rays just upon a spot where stood a tree covered with such exceedingly fine moss that I may almost say it was as fine and soft as the Mouse King’s fur; but it was green, and that is good for the eyes.

“All at once the most charming little people came marching out. They did not reach higher than my knee, and though they looked like human beings they were better proportioned. They called themselves elves, and wore fine clothes of flower-leaves trimmed with the wings of flies and gnats, which did not look at all bad. Directly they appeared they seemed to be looking for something—I did not know what; but at last some of them came up to me, the chief among them pointing to my sausage skewer, and saying, ‘That is just the kind of one we want! It is pointed—it is excellent!’ And the more he looked at my pilgrim’s staff the more delighted he became.

“‘To lend,’ I said, ‘but not to keep.’

“‘Not to keep!’ they all cried; then they seized the sausage skewer, which I let go, and danced off with it to the spot with the fine moss, where they set it up in the midst of the green. They wanted to have a Maypole too, and the one they had now seemed cut out for them. Then it was decorated, and what a sight that was!

“Little spiders spun golden threads round it, and hung it with fluttering veils and flags, so finely woven and bleached so snowy white in the moonshine that it dazzled my eyes. They took the colours from the butterflies’ wings and strewed these over the white linen, and flowers and diamonds gleamed upon it so that I could not recognize my sausage skewer at all; there was certainly not another Maypole in the whole world like that which had been made out of it. And now at last came a great party of elves. They wore no clothes at all—it could not have been more genteel. I was invited to witness the festivities, but only at a certain distance, for I was too big for them.

“Then began a wonderful music! It seemed as if thousands of glass bells were ringing, so full, so rich that I thought it was the singing of the swans; I even thought I heard the voice of the cuckoo and the blackbird, and at last the whole wood seemed to join in. There were children’s voices, the sound of bells, and the song of birds; the most glorious melodies and all that was lovely came out of the elves’ Maypole—it was a whole peal of bells, and yet it was my sausage skewer. That so much could have been got out of it I should never have believed, but it no doubt depends upon what hands it gets into. I was deeply moved; I wept, as a little Mouse can weep, for pure joy.

“The night was far too short, but up yonder they are not any longer about that time of year. In the morning dawn the light breezes sprang up, the surface of the woodland lake became ruffled, and all the dainty floating veils and flags floated in the air. The waving garlands of spiders’ web, the hanging bridges and balustrades, or whatever they are called, vanished as if they were nothing. Six elves carried my sausage skewer back to me, asking me at the same time whether I had any wish that they could fulfil. So I begged them to tell me how to make soup from a sausage skewer.

“‘How we do it?’ asked the chief of the elves, smiling. ‘Why, you have just seen it. You hardly knew your own sausage skewer again.’

“‘They only mean that for a joke,’ I thought, and I told them straight away the object of my journey, and what hopes were entertained at home respecting this brew. ‘What advantage,’ I asked, ‘can accrue to the Mouse King and to the whole of our mighty kingdom by my having witnessed this splendour? I can’t shake it out of the sausage skewer and say, “Look, here is the sausage skewer; now comes the soup!” That would be a kind of dish that could only be served up when people had had enough.’

“Then the elf dipped his little finger in the cup of a blue violet and said to me, ‘Pay attention! Here I anoint your pilgrim’s staff, and when you return home and enter the Mouse King’s castle, touch the warm breast of your king with it, and violets will spring forth and cover the whole of the staff, even in the coldest wintertime. And with that I think I have given you something to take home with you, and even a little more!’

But before the little Mouse said what this “a little more” was, she touched the king’s breast with her staff, and in truth the most beautiful bunch of violets burst forth. They smelled so strongly that the Mouse King immediately ordered the mice who stood nearest the chimney to put their tails into the fire to make a smell of burning, for the scent of the violets was not to be borne—it was not of the kind they liked.

“But what was the ‘more’ of which you spoke?” asked the Mouse King.

“Well,” said the little Mouse, “that is, I think, what is called ‘effect.’” And thereupon she turned the staff round, and, behold, there was no longer a single flower to be seen upon it; she held only the naked skewer, and this she lifted like a conductor’s baton.

“‘Violets,’ the elf told me, ‘are to look at, to smell, and to touch. Hearing and taste, therefore, still remain to be considered.’” Then the little Mouse beat time, and music was heard—not such as rang through the forest at the elves’ party, but such as is to be heard in the kitchen. What a sound of cooking and roasting there was! It came suddenly, as if the wind were rushing through all the victuals, and as if the pots and kettles were boiling over. The fire-shovel hammered upon the brass kettle, and then—suddenly all was quiet again. The low subdued singing of the tea-kettle was heard, and it was wonderful to listen to: they could not quite tell whether the kettle was beginning to boil or leaving off. The little pot bubbled and the big pot bubbled, and each took no notice of the other, and it seemed as if there was no rhyme nor reason in the pots. Then the little Mouse waved her baton more and more wildly—the pots foamed, threw up big bubbles, boiled over; the wind roared and whistled through the chimney—oh! it became so alarming that the little Mouse dropped her stick.

“A very odd soup!” said the Mouse King. “Will it not be served up now?”

“That was all,” answered the little Mouse, with a bow.

“That was all! Well, then, let us hear what the next has to say!” said the king.

III

WHAT THE SECOND LITTLE MOUSE
HAD TO TELL

“I was born in the castle library,” said the second Mouse. “I and several members of our family have never had the good fortune to get into the dining-room, let alone the larder; it was only on my travels and here today that I saw a kitchen. Indeed, we often had to suffer hunger in the library, but we got a great deal of knowledge. The rumour of the royal prize offered to those who could make soup from a sausage skewer reached our ears, and then my old grandmother brought out a manuscript that she could not read herself, but which she had heard read out, and in which was written: ‘If one is a poet, one can make soup from a sausage skewer.’ She asked me whether I was a poet. I felt that I was innocent in that respect, and she said that then I must go out and manage to become one. I again asked what I was to do, for that seemed quite as difficult as to learn how to make the soup. But my grandmother had heard a good deal read out, and she said three things above all were necessary: ‘Understanding, imagination, and feeling. If you can manage to attain these three you are a poet, and then the matter of the sausage skewer will be an easy one for you.’

“I departed, and marched towards the west, out into the wide world, to become a poet.

“Understanding is of the most importance in everything—that I knew; the other two qualities are held in much less esteem, and I therefore went in quest of understanding first. Yes, where does it dwell? ‘Go to the ant and learn wisdom,’ said a great King of the Jews; I had learned that in the library. So I did not stop till I came to the first great ant-hill, and there I set myself to watch, that I might become wise.

“The ants are a very respectable little people; they are understanding all through. Everything with them is like a well-worked sum in arithmetic that comes right. To work and to lay eggs, they say, means both to live and to provide for posterity, and so that is what they do. They divide themselves into clean and dirty ants. The rank of each is indicated by a number, and the Ant Queen is number one, and her opinion the only correct one. She contains the wisdom of all the world, and it was important for me to know that. She spoke so much, and it was so clever, that it seemed to me like nonsense. She said that her ant-hill was the highest thing in the world, though close beside it stood a tree which was higher, much higher—it was not to be denied, and so nothing was said of that. One evening an ant had lost herself on the tree and had crawled up the trunk—not so far up as the crown, but still higher than any ant had reached till then; and when she turned round and came home again, she told of something far higher that she had come across out in the world. But this all the ants thought an insult to the community, and the ant was therefore condemned to be muzzled and to be kept in solitary confinement for life. But shortly afterwards another ant came across the same tree and made the same journey and the same discovery. She spoke about it cautiously, but unintelligibly, as they called it; and as she was, besides, a much-respected ant and one of the clean ones, she was believed; and when she died an eggshell was erected to her memory, for they had a great respect for the sciences. I saw,” continued the little Mouse, “that the ants always ran about with their eggs on their backs. Once I saw one of them, who had dropped her load, try very hard to raise it again, but she did not succeed. Two others came up and tried with all their strength to help her, till they nearly dropped their own eggs. Then they were obliged to stop a moment, for everyone must think of himself first. The ant-queen remarked that their conduct that day showed that they possessed kind hearts and good understanding. ‘These two qualities,’ she said, ‘give us ants a place in the first rank among all reasoning beings. We all possess understanding in a high degree, and I have the most of all.’ And with that she raised herself on her hind legs, so that she could not fail to be recognized. I could not be mistaken: I swallowed her. ‘Go to the ants to learn wisdom’—now I had the queen!

“I now went closer to the large tree I have already mentioned several times. It was an oak, with a tall trunk and a full, wide-spreading crown, and was very old. I knew that here dwelt a living being, a woman called a dryad, who is born with the tree and dies with it. I had heard of this in the library. Now I beheld such a tree, and one of these oak-maidens. She uttered a terrible cry when she saw me so close to her. Like all women, she was very much afraid of mice; but she had more cause to be so than others, for I could have gnawed the tree through on which her life depended. I spoke to the maiden in a friendly, cordial way, and inspired her with courage; she took me in her dainty hand, and when I had told her why I had gone out into the wide world she promised me that very evening I should probably have one of the two treasures of which I was still in quest. She told me that Phantasy, the genius of imagination, was her intimate friend, that he was as handsome as the God of Love, and that he rested many an hour under the leafy branches of the tree, which then rustled more strongly than ever over the two. He called her his dryad, she said, and the tree his tree; the beautiful gnarled oak was just to his taste, the roots spread themselves deeply and firmly in the ground, and the trunk and the crown rose high up into the fresh air; they knew the driving snow, the keen winds, and the warm sunshine, as these should be known. ‘Yes,’ continued the Dryad, ‘the birds up there in the crown sing and tell of foreign countries they have visited, and on the only dead bough the stork has built his nest—that is very ornamental, and one hears a little, too, about the land of the pyramids. All this pleases Phantasy, but it is not enough for him; so I myself have to tell him about the life in the woods, and have to go back to my childhood’s days when I was young and the tree was frail, so frail that a stinging-nettle overshadowed it; and I have to tell everything till now that the tree has grown big and strong. Now sit you down under the green thyme yonder and pay attention; and when Phantasy comes I’ll find some opportunity to tweak his wings and pull out a little feather. Take the feather—no better one has been given a poet for a pen—and it will suffice you!’

“And when Phantasy came, the feather was pulled out, and I seized it,” said the little Mouse. “I put it in water and held it there till it got soft. It was very hard to digest even then, but still I nibbled it up at last. It is very easy to gnaw oneself into being a poet, though there are many things that one has to swallow. Now I had two—understanding and imagination—and through these two I knew that the third was to be found in the library; for a great man has said and written that there are novels which exist purely and solely to relieve people of their superfluous tears, and are therefore a kind of sponge to suck up the feelings. I remembered a few of those books which had always looked particularly appetizing, and were well thumbed and greasy; they must have absorbed an infinite quantity of emotion.

“I betook myself back to the library, and devoured, so to speak, a whole novel—that is, the soft or essential part of it; but the crust, the binding, I left. When I had digested it, and another one besides, I noticed what a stirring there was inside me, and I devoured a piece of a third novel. And now I was a poet. I said so to myself, and told it to others too. I had headache and stomach-ache, and I don’t know what aches I didn’t have. Then I began to think what stories might be made to refer to a sausage skewer, and a great many pegs and sticks and staves and splinters came into my thoughts—the Ant Queen had possessed an extraordinary understanding. I remembered the man who put a white stick into his mouth by which he could make both himself and the stick invisible. I thought of wooden hobby-horses, of staves of rhymes, of breaking a staff over a man’s back, and of goodness knows how many expressions of that kind concerning staves, sticks, and pegs. All my thoughts ran upon pegs, sticks, and staves, and if one is a poet—and that I am, for I have tortured myself till I have become one—one must be able to make poetry on these things too. I will therefore be able to serve you up a peg—that is, a story—every day in the week; yes, that is my soup!”

“Let us hear what the third one has to say!” ordered the Mouse King.

“Squeak! squeak!” was heard at the kitchen door, and a little Mouse—it was the fourth of the mice who had competed for the prize, the one whom the others believed to be dead—shot in like an arrow. She knocked the sausage skewer with the crape right over.

She had been running day and night, had travelled on the railway in the goods train, having watched her opportunity, and yet she had arrived almost too late. She pressed forward, looking very rumpled. She had lost her sausage skewer, but not her voice, for she began to speak at once, as if they had been waiting only for her and wanted to hear her only—as if everything else in the world was of no consequence whatever. She spoke at once, and went on till she had said all she had to say. She appeared so unexpectedly that no one had time to object to her speech before she began. Let us hear what she said.

IV

WHAT THE FOURTH MOUSE
HAD TO TELL, BEFORE THE THIRD ONE HAD SPOKEN

“I immediately betook myself to the largest town,” she said; “the name has escaped me—I have a bad memory for names. From the railway station I was taken with some confiscated goods to the town hall, and when I arrived there I ran into the gaoler’s dwelling. The Jailer was talking of his prisoners, especially of one who had uttered some hasty words. About these words other words had been spoken, and then again others, and these again had been written down and recorded.

“‘The whole thing is soup from a sausage skewer,’ said the Jailer; ‘but the soup may cost him his neck!’

“Now this gave me some interest in the prisoner,” said the little Mouse, “so I seized an opportunity and slipped in to him—for there is a mouse-hole to be found behind every locked door! The prisoner looked very pale, and had a long beard and large sparkling eyes. The lamp flickered and smoked, and the walls were so used to that that they grew no blacker for it. The prisoner was scratching pictures and verses in white upon the black, but I did not read them. I believe he was finding it very dull, and I was a welcome guest. He lured me with bread-crumbs, and with whistling and gentle words. He was very glad to see me; I gradually began to trust him, and we became friends. He shared his bread and water with me, gave me cheese and sausage, and I lived well; but I must say that after all it was principally the good company that kept me there. He let me run about on his hand, on his arm, and right up his sleeve; he let me creep about in his beard, and called me his little friend, I really began to like him—such things are mutual! I forgot what I had gone out into the wide world to seek, and left my sausage skewer in a crack in the floor; it lies there still. I wanted to stay where I was; if I went away the poor prisoner would have no one at all, and that is too little in this world. I stayed, but he did not. He spoke to me very sadly the last time, gave me twice as much bread and cheese as usual, and threw me kisses; he went and never came back. I know nothing more of his history.

“‘Soup from a sausage skewer,’ the Jailer had said, and to him I now went. He certainly took me in his hand, but he put me into a cage, into a treadmill. That’s awful! One runs and runs and gets no farther, and is only laughed at.

“The Jailer’s Granddaughter was a most charming little girl, with a head of curls like the finest gold, and such joyous eyes and such a smiling mouth! ‘You poor little mouse,’ she said, and, peeping into my hateful cage, she drew out the iron pin, and I sprang down upon the windowsill and so out upon the gutter of the roof. Free! free! I thought only of that, and not of the object of my travels,

“It was dark—night was drawing near, I took up my lodgings in an old tower where a watchman and an owl dwelt. I trusted neither, and least of the two the owl. That animal is like a cat, and possesses the great failing of eating mice; but one may be mistaken, and that I was. She was a respectable, highly educated old owl; she knew more than the watchman, and quite as much as I. The owl children made a fuss about everything. ‘Don’t make soup from a sausage skewer,’ the old one would say; those were the harshest words she could bring herself to utter, such tender affection did she cherish for her own family. Her behaviour inspired me with such confidence that I sent her a ‘peep’ from the crack where I sat. This confidence pleased her very much, and she assured me that I should be under her protection, and that no animal would be allowed to do me harm. She would eat me herself in winter, she declared, when food got scarce.

“She was in every way a clever woman; she explained to me that the watchman could only shriek through the horn that hung loose at his side, saying, ‘He is terribly conceited about it, and thinks he is an owl in the tower. He wants to look big, but is very little! Soup from a sausage skewer!’

“I begged the Owl to give me the recipe for the soup, and then she explained it to me, ‘Soup from a sausage skewer,’ she said, ‘is only a human expression, and can be used in different ways. Everyone thinks his own way is the most correct, but the whole thing really means nothing.’

“‘Nothing!’ I exclaimed. I was struck. The truth is not always agreeable, but truth is above everything, and the old Owl said so too. So I thought it over, and soon perceived that if I brought home that which is above everything, I should bring far more than soup from a sausage skewer. And thereupon I hastened away, so that I might get home in time and bring the highest and best, that which is above everything—namely, the truth. The mice are an enlightened little people, and the Mouse King is above them all. He is capable of making me queen—for the sake of truth!”

“Your truth is a lie!” said the Mouse who had not yet spoken. “I can prepare the soup, and I will prepare it too.”

V

HOW IT WAS PREPARED

“I didn’t travel,” said the third Mouse; “I remained in the country, and that’s the right thing to do. There is no necessity to travel—one can get everything just as good here. I remained; I did not get my information from supernatural beings, did not gobble it up, nor yet learn it from owls. I have evolved mine from my own thoughts. Now just you set the kettle upon the fire. That’s it. Now some water poured into it! Quite full—up to the brim! So—now more fuel! Let it burn up, so that the water boils—it must boil over and over! That’s it! Now throw in the skewer. Will the king now be pleased to dip his tail into the boiling water and stir it with that tail? The longer the king stirs, the stronger the soup will become. It costs nothing. It requires no other ingredients—only stirring!”

“Can’t someone else do that?” asked the King.

“No,” said the Mouse. “It is only the royal tail that contains the power.”

And the water boiled and spluttered, and the Mouse King placed himself close to the kettle—it seemed almost dangerous! He put out his tail, as the mice do in the dairy when they skim a pan of milk and then lick their creamy tails. But he only put his tail in as far as the hot steam, then he quickly sprang down from the hearth.

“It’s understood, of course, that you are to be my Queen!” he cried; “but we’ll leave the soup till our golden wedding. In this way the poor of my kingdom, who will have to be fed then, will have something to look forward to with pleasure, and for a long time, too.”

Then they held the wedding. But several of the mice said, as they were returning home, “That was really not to be called soup from a sausage skewer after all, but rather soup from a mouse’s tail.” This and that of what had been told they thought very good; but the whole thing might have been different. “Now I would have told it so—and so—and so!”

These were the critics, and they are always so wise—afterwards.

* * * *

This story went out all over the wide world, and opinions differed about it, but the story itself remained as it was. And that is the best result in affairs both great and small, even with soup from a sausage skewer. But don’t expect any thanks for it.

[ 1858 ]

The Galoshes of Fortune

—

I

A BEGINNING

It was in Copenhagen at a house in East Street, not far from the King’s New Market, that a very large party was being given, for you must give a party now and then, and get it over, and then you can expect to be invited in return. Half of the company already sat at the card-tables, while the other half seemed to be waiting for the answer to their hostess’s question, “What shall we do now?” They had progressed so far, and conversation was going on as best it could. Among other subjects the conversation turned on the Middle Ages. Some held the opinion that the Middle Ages were much more interesting than our own time; Councillor Knap, indeed, upheld this opinion so warmly that the lady of the house sided with him at once, and both eagerly declaimed against Oersted’s treatise in the Almanac on ancient and modern times, in which the preference is given to our own age. The Councillor held that the times of the Danish King Hans [05] were the best and most prosperous.

While this is the subject of the conversation, which was only interrupted for a moment by the arrival of a newspaper containing nothing worth reading, let us look into the anteroom, where the overcoats, sticks, umbrellas, and galoshes had been left. Here sat two maids, one young, the other old. One might have thought they were servants who had come to fetch their mistresses, some old maiden lady or widow, but, on looking more closely, one soon saw that they were not common servant-girls—their appearance was too dignified, their hands too delicate, and their dresses too uncommon. They were two fairies; the younger was not Fortune herself, it is true, but lady’s maid to one of her ladies in waiting, who brings round the smaller gifts of Fortune. The elder one looked somewhat gloomy; she was Care, who goes about her business herself in her own exalted person, for only then does she know that it is well done.

They were telling each other where they had been during the day. The lady of the bedchamber’s maid, who was also Fortune’s messenger, had only carried out some unimportant commissions: for instance, she had saved a new hat from a shower of rain, procured an honest man a bow from a titled nobody, and so forth; but she had now something of greater consequence to do. “I must also tell you,” she said, “that today is my birthday, and in honour of it a pair of galoshes have been entrusted to me, which I am to give to mankind. These galoshes have the property that whoever puts them on is instantly transported to the place and the time where he most desires to be; every wish regarding time or place is at once realized, and so for once a man can be happy here below.”

“Believe me,” said Care, “he will be most unhappy, and bless the moment when he is once more rid of the galoshes!”

“That is your opinion!” replied the other. “Now I shall put them down near the door; someone will take them, and become the fortunate man!”

You see, that’s what they were talking about.

II

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COUNCILLOR

It was late; Councillor Knap, deep in thought about the times of King Hans, wished to go home; but fate so arranged that, instead of his own galoshes, he put on those of Fortune, and walked out into East Street.

The magic power of the galoshes instantly carried him back to the times of King Hans, and his feet sank deeply into the mud and mire of the street, which was not paved in those days.

“This is dreadful! How dirty it is here,” said the Councillor. “Why, the pavement’s all gone, and all the lamps are out!”

The moon had not yet risen high enough, and it was rather foggy, so that all around was buried in the darkness. When he came to the next corner he found a lamp before a picture of the Madonna, but the light it gave was so small that he only noticed it when he was passing beneath it, and his eyes fell upon the painted figures of the Mother and Child.

“That is evidently an art dealer’s,” he thought, “and they have forgotten to take in their sign.”

Several people in the costume of a former age passed by him.

“How oddly they are dressed up! They must be coming from a masquerade!”

Suddenly there was a sound of drums and fifes. The Councillor saw the flaring light of torches, and stopped, and an extraordinary procession passed by him. First marched a band of drummers, beating their instruments with great skill. They were followed by attendants with longbows and cross-bows. The principal person in the procession was a clergyman. The astonished Councillor asked what all this meant, and who the clergyman was.

“The Bishop of Zealand,” was the answer.

“Good Lord!” sighed the Councillor. “What on earth has come over the Bishop?” Then he shook his head; he could not believe it possible that the man was the Bishop.

Still puzzling over this, he passed through East Street and over High Bridge Place. The bridge which he used to cross in order to reach Castle Square was nowhere to be found. He at last reached the bank of a shallow river, where he saw two men with a boat.

“Would the gentleman like to cross over to the Holm?” they asked him.

“To the Holm?” said the Councillor, who was quite unconscious that he lived in a different age. “I wish to go to Christian’s Haven in Little Turf Street.”

The two men stared at him.

“Only tell me where the bridge is!” he said. “It is scandalous that they have not lighted the lamps here, and it is as muddy as if it was a marsh!”

The more he talked to the boatmen, the less intelligible their language became to him.

“I do not understand your outlandish jargon,” he said at last in an angry voice, and turned his back on them. He could not find the bridge, nor was there any fence. “It is a scandal how things are here,” he said. He had never thought his own times more miserable than this evening. “I think it will be best for me to take a droshky [cab],” he thought. But where were the droshkies? None were to be seen. “I shall have to return to the King’s New Market to find one, or I shall never reach Christian’s Haven.” Then he went back to East Street, and had nearly come to the end of it when the moon broke through the clouds.

“Good Lord! What strange building have they put up here!” he said, when he saw the East Gate, which in those days stood at the end of East Street. One of the wickets was still open, however, and he passed through it, in the hope of reaching what is now the King’s New Market; but there he found there were wide meadows before him, with a few bushes here and there, and a broad canal or river streaming through them. A few wretched wooden huts, belonging to Dutch sailors, stood on the opposite bank. “Either what I see is a mirage, or I am tipsy,” lamented the Councillor. “If I only knew what all this means!” He returned again, firmly believing that he was ill. Walking back through the same streets, he looked more closely at the houses, and noticed that most of them were only built of lath and plaster, and that many had only thatched roofs.

“No, I do not feel at all well,” he sighed, “and yet I only drank one glass of punch. But punch does not agree with me, and it is altogether wrong to serve punch with hot salmon. I shall say so to our hostess—the agent’s lady. I wonder whether to go back now, and let them know how I feel. No, no, it would look too ridiculous; and then, after all, the question is whether they are still up.” He looked about for the house, but was unable to find it.

“This is dreadful! I cannot even recognise East Street again. I do not see a single shop; there are only wretched old houses, as if I were in Roeskilde or Ringsted. There is no doubt about it; I am ill, and it is useless to stand on ceremony. But where in all the world is the agent’s house? It is no longer the same; but in the house over there I see some people are up still. Alas! I am very ill!” He soon reached a half-open door, and saw the light inside. It was an inn of that period, a sort of public-house. The room looked very much like a Dutch bar: a number of people—sailors, citizens of Copenhagen, and a few scholars—sat there in lively conversation, with their mugs before them, and paid little attention to the Councillor coming in.

“I beg your pardon,” said the Councillor to the landlady. “I have been suddenly taken ill. Would you kindly send for a cab to drive me to Christian’s Haven?”

The woman stared at him and shook her head. Then she addressed him in German. The Councillor, supposing that she could not speak Danish, repeated his request in German. This, in addition to his dress, made the woman feel sure that he was a foreigner; but she understood that he was unwell, and brought him a jug of water. It tasted very much of sea-water, although it had been fetched from the well outside.

The Councillor rested his head upon his hand, drew a deep breath, and thought over all the strange things around him.

“Is that this evening’s ‘Daily News’?” he asked when he saw the woman putting aside a big sheet of paper.

She did not know what he meant, but she gave him the paper. It was a woodcut representing a strange appearance in the air that had been seen in the city of Cologne.

“That is very old,” said the Councillor, and became quite cheerful at the sight of this old curiosity. “How did you get this rare cut? It is highly interesting, although the whole is but a fable. These phenomena are now explained as polar lights; they probably are caused by electricity.”

Those who sat next to him, and heard what he said, looked at him with great surprise, and one of them rose, politely raised his hat, and said in a serious tone, “You are certainly a very learned man, Monsieur.”

“Not at all,” replied the Councillor. “I can only talk about things that everybody is supposed to understand.”

“Modestia is a fine virtue,” said the man. “Moreover, I have to add to your explanation mihi secus videtur; yet in the present case I willingly suspend my judicium.”

“May I ask with whom I have the honour to speak?” replied the Councillor.

“I am a Bachelor of Divinity,” said the man.

This answer was enough for the Councillor; for the title agreed with the dress. Some old village schoolmaster, he thought, an odd fellow, such as one still may find in Jutland.

“Although here we are not in a locus docendi,” began the man again, “I beg you to take the trouble to give us a speech. You are surely well read in the ancients.”

“Oh, yes,” replied the Councillor, “I am very fond of reading old and useful books, but I am also interested in new ones—with the exception of the Everyday Stories, [06] of which we have enough in real life.”

“‘Everyday stories?’” asked the Bachelor of Divinity.

“Why, yes—I mean the modern romances.”

“Oh!” said the man, smiling, “they certainly contain a great deal of wit, and are read at Court. The King especially likes the romance of Messieurs Iffven and Gaudian (Sir Yvain and Sir Gawain), which tells of King Arthur and his valiant knights of the Round Table. He has made jokes about it to his courtiers.” [07]

“This one certainly I have not read yet,” said the Councillor. “It must be quite a new one, published by Heiberg.” [08]

“No,” replied the man, “Heiberg is not the publisher, but Gotfred von Ghemen.” [09]

“Is he the author?” asked the Councillor. “That is a very old name. Was it not the name of the first Danish printer?”

“Yes, he is our first printer,” said the scholar.

So far everything went fairly well; but now one of the citizens began to speak of the dreadful plague which had raged a few years ago, meaning that of the year 1484. The Councillor thought he spoke of the cholera outbreak in 1831, [10] and so the discourse went on quite satisfactorily. The war against the freebooters in 1490 had happened so lately that it was unavoidably mentioned; the English pirates, they said, had seized some ships that were in the harbour. The Councillor, in the belief that they meant the events of 1801, [11] joined in quite appropriately with his denunciations of the English. The rest of the conversation, however, did not go off so smoothly; they could not help contradicting each other every moment; the good Bachelor of Divinity was dreadfully ignorant, so that the simplest remarks of the Councillor seemed to him too daring or too fantastic. They often looked at each other in astonishment, and when matters became too complicated the scholar began to talk Latin, hoping to be better understood, but it was of no use.

“How do you feel now?” asked the landlady, pulling the Councillor’s sleeve. Only then his memory returned; in the course of the conversation he had forgotten all that had happened.

“Good heavens! Where am I?” he said, and he felt quite dizzy when he thought of it.

“Let us have some claret, or mead, or Bremen beer!” cried one of the guests. “And you shall drink with us!”

Two girls came in; one had on a cap of two colours. They poured the wine out, and made curtsies. The Councillor felt a cold shiver run down his back. “What does all this mean?” he said. But he had to drink with them, they asked him so politely. He was quite in despair, and when one of them said that he was tipsy, he did not doubt it for a moment, and only requested them to get him a droshky. Then they thought he was speaking the Muscovite language. Never in his life had he been in such rough and vulgar company. “One would think that the country had gone back to paganism!” he thought. “This is the most terrible moment in all my life.”

Just then the idea struck him that he would stoop under the table and creep towards the door. He carried this out, but when he was near the door the others discovered his intention; they took hold of his feet, and, to his great good fortune, pulled off the galoshes, and at once the whole enchantment vanished.

The Councillor now distinctly saw a street lamp burning, and behind it a big house; it all seemed familiar to him. He was in East Street, as we know it now, and was lying on the pavement with his legs towards the door, and opposite to him sat the watchman, asleep.

“Goodness gracious! Have I really been lying here in the street dreaming?” he said. “Yes, this is East Street. How beautifully light and pleasant! That glass of punch must have had a dreadful effect upon me.”

Two minutes later he sat in a cab, and drove to Christian’s Haven. He thought of all the anguish he had suffered, and praised the present, his own age, with all his heart, as being, in spite of its shortcomings, much better than the age in which he had found himself a little while ago. And that, you know, was very sensible of the Councillor.

III

THE WATCHMAN’S ADVENTURES

“Why, there’s a pair of galoshes!” said the Watchman. “They must belong to the Lieutenant who lives up there. They are close to his door.” The honest man would gladly have rung the bell and returned them to their owner, for there was still a light upstairs, but he did not wish to wake up the other people in the house; so he left them there. “I am sure a pair of such things must keep one’s feet very warm,” he said. “How nice and soft the leather is!” They fitted his feet exactly. “How strange things are in this world! This man, now, might go into his warm bed, and yet he does not do so, but walks up and down in his room. He is a fortunate man. He has neither wife nor child; he is out every evening. I wish I were in his place, I should certainly be happy.”

No sooner had he uttered this wish than the galoshes he had put on brought it about; the Watchman became the Lieutenant in body and mind.

There he was, standing upstairs in his room, holding a sheet of pink note-paper between his fingers, on which was written a poem—a poem from the Lieutenant’s own pen. Who has not had, once in his life, a poetical moment? Then, if one writes down one’s thoughts, they are poetry.

OH, WERE I RICH!

Were I but rich! This was my constant prayer

When scarce an ell in length—without a care.

Were I but rich, a captain I would be,

With sabre, plume, and coat so brave to see.

Then came the day when fortune smiled on me:

A captain was I—but a poor man still!

For such was heaven’s will.

In youth’s first flash I sat at eventide,

A sweetheart maid of seven by my side;

For I had many fairy tales to tell,

And legends rare; but as for wealth—ah, well!

She cared not but for elf or goblin’s spell.

Then was I rich, but not—heaven knows!—in gold.

Or silver coins untold.

Were I but rich is still my prayer to heaven.

Though now grown tall, I love the maid of seven,

So good is she, so sweet, so fair to see.

Would that she knew my heart’s wild fantasy!

Would that she, as of yore, could care for me!

But I am poor, and so my lips are sealed.

My love is unrevealed.

Were I but rich in comfort and repose,

My pain I would not to the world disclose.

If you, my love, can understand, then read

This as a mem’ry of the past. Yet heed!

’Twere best, perhaps, your heart were hard indeed!

I’m poor, alas! my future dark and drear.

But may God bless you, dear!

Such poems people only write down when they are in love, but a prudent man never has them printed. To be a Lieutenant, poor and in love—that’s a triangle; or one might better describe it as the half of a broken square of happiness. That is just what the Lieutenant thought at this moment, and so he leaned his head against the window frame and sighed. “The poor watchman down in the street is much happier than I. He does not know what I call want. He has a home, a wife and children, who share his joys and sorrows. I should be much happier if I could change places with him, and live with only his hopes and expectations. I am sure he is much happier than I.”

Instantly the Watchman became a watchman again, for, through the galoshes of Fortune, he had become, body and soul, the Lieutenant; but as such he felt less contented than before, and preferred to be what he had despised a short time ago. And so the Watchman was a watchman again.

“That was a hideous dream,” he said, “but very curious. I felt as if I were the Lieutenant up there, and it was by no means a pleasure. I missed my wife and children, who are always ready to smother me with their kisses.”

He sat down again and nodded; he could not quite get over the dream; the galoshes were still on his feet. A shooting star passed over the sky.

“There it goes,” he said, “and yet there are plenty left. I should like to look a little more closely at these things, especially at the moon, for she would not slip so easily out of one’s hands. The student my wife does washing for says that when we are dead we shall fly from one planet to another. That’s a story, although it would not be at all bad. I wish I could take a little leap up there. I should not mind leaving my body here on the steps.”

There are some things in this world that must be spoken of with caution, and one ought to be still more careful when one has the galoshes of Fortune upon one’s feet. Now, let us see what happened to the Watchman.

Everybody knows how quickly one can move from one place to another by steam: we have done it either on a railway or a steamboat. But this speed is not more than the crawl of the sloth or creeping of a snail in comparison to the swiftness with which light travels. It flies nineteen million times faster than the quickest railway engine. Death is an electric shock to our hearts: the liberated soul flies away on the wings of electricity. Sunlight requires about eight minutes and a few seconds to perform a journey of more than ninety-five millions of miles; the soul travels as quickly on the wings of electricity. The distance between the various celestial bodies is not greater to it than we should find the distance between the houses of friends living in the same town quite close together. The electric shock to our hearts costs us our bodies, unless we have by chance the galoshes of Fortune on our feet, like the Watchman.

In a few seconds the Watchman had traversed the distance of two hundred and sixty thousand miles to the moon, which consists, as everybody knows, of much lighter material than our earth—something like new-fallen snow, as we should say. He had arrived on one of the numerous circular mountains which one sees on Dr Mädler’s large map of the moon. [12]  The inside was a basin of about half a mile in depth. Down below was a town; to get an idea of its appearance the best thing would be to pour the white of an egg into a glass of water. The substance here was just as soft, and formed similar transparent towers, domes, and terraces, floating in the thin air like sails. Our planet hung above his head, like a dark red ball.

He soon noticed a great many beings, surely intended to be what we call ‘men,’ but they were very different from us. A more fantastical imagination than Herschel’s [13] must have discovered these. They also had a language, but how could the soul of a watchman be expected to understand it? Nevertheless, it did understand the language of the inhabitants of the moon very well. They were discussing our earth, and had doubts as to its being inhabited; they asserted the air there must be too thick for any moon-being to live in. They were of the opinion that only the moon was inhabited; that it was the celestial body where the ancient inhabitants of the world lived.

They also talked politics; but let us leave them, and return to East Street, and see what happens to the Watchman’s body. He was still sitting motionless on the steps; his Morning Star [14] had fallen out of his hand, while his eyes looked fixedly towards the moon, where his honest soul was rambling about.

“What o’clock, Watchman?” asked one of the passers-by. But the Watchman gave no answer. Then the man gently tweaked his nose, which caused him to lose his balance and fall, full length, on the ground, like a dead man. His comrades were frightened—the Watchman was dead, and dead he remained. The death was reported, and later on in the morning the body was taken to the hospital.

It would have been a good joke if the soul had come back and looked for its body in East Street, without being able to find it. Probably it would first go to the police station, from thence to the lost property office, to make inquiries, and finally to the hospital. But we need not trouble our minds about that, for souls are cleverest when they act on their own responsibility; only the bodies make them stupid.

As I have stated, the Watchman’s body was carried to the hospital. There it was taken to the room where the bodies were washed, and, naturally, the first thing they did was to take off the galoshes. Whereupon the soul was obliged to return to the body. It at once started straight for the body, and in a few moments the man was alive again. He declared that he had never in all his life passed such a dreadful night, and not if he were paid half a dollar would he go through such an experience again; but he got over it all right.

He was able to leave the hospital the same day, but the galoshes remained there.

IV

A CRITICAL MOMENT:
A MOST EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY

Everyone who comes from Copenhagen knows the entrance to Frederick’s Hospital in Copenhagen, but, as probably some people who do not come from Copenhagen will read this story, it will be well to give a short description of it.

The hospital is separated from the street by an iron railing of considerable height, the thick bars of which stand so far apart that sometimes, so the story goes, some of the thinnest young medical students have squeezed themselves through and paid little visits to town. The part of the body most difficult to get through was the head, and so in this case, as often happens in this world, the smallest heads were the luckiest. This will do for an introduction.

One of the students, of whom one could say that he had a big head in one sense only, was on duty one evening; the rain was pouring down; but in spite of these two obstacles he wished to go out.

Just for a quarter of an hour, he thought; he need not trouble the porter, especially if he could slip through the bars. He noticed the galoshes which the Watchman had forgotten; it never occurred to him in the least that they were those of Fortune. They would do him good service in the bad weather, he thought, and so he put them on. The point now was, could he squeeze himself through the bars?—he had never tried before. There he stood.

“I wish to goodness I had my head outside,” he said, and instantly, although it was very thick and big, it slipped smoothly and easily through the bars; the galoshes seemed to know how to do that very well. Then he tried to get his body through too, but this was impossible.

“I am too fat,” he said. “I thought my head was the thickest; but it is my body that I can’t get through.”

Now he tried to pull his head back again, but he couldn’t; he could move his neck about comfortably, and this was all. At first he felt very angry, but soon became discouraged. The galoshes of Fortune had placed him in this awkward position, and unluckily it never came into his mind to wish himself free again. Instead of wishing, he could only struggle, but all his attempts were in vain. The rain was pouring down; not a soul was to be seen in the street; he could not reach the bell at the porter’s lodge. How could he get out? He felt certain he would have to stay there until the next morning. Then they would be obliged to send for a blacksmith to file through the iron bars. But all this would take time; all the charity children would be going to their school opposite, all the inhabitants of the adjoining sailors’ quarter would flock together to see him in the stocks—there would be a large crowd, no doubt! “Ugh!” he cried, “the blood is rushing to my head! I shall go mad! Yes, I am going mad! Oh, I wish I was free! Then perhaps I might feel better.” He ought to have said this sooner, for the thought was scarcely expressed when his head was free, and he rushed up to his room, quite upset by the fright the galoshes had caused him.

Now we must not think it was all over for him. No—the worst was still to come.

The night and the following day passed; nobody claimed the galoshes.

In the evening an entertainment was to take place in the little theatre in Kannike Street. The house was filled in every part; the Student from the hospital was among the audience, and seemed to have entirely forgotten what had happened to him the night before. He had put on the galoshes, as no one had claimed them, and they were very useful to him, for the streets were very dirty.

A new poem, entitled Granny’s Spectacles, was being recited, in which the spectacles were described as enabling the person who wore them to read people like cards, and to foretell from them all that would happen in the coming year.

Let us listen now:

GRANNY’S SPECTACLES

My Granny’s wisdom’s known to great and small:

In olden days, I have no doubt at all,

They would have burned her for a witch. For she

Knows everything that happens; she can see

Right into next year—aye, and farther, too:

But, tell you all she knows—no, that she will not do.

I wonder what will happen here next year!

The great events I’d like to see—to hear

All that’s in store for me, for Art, for King,

And Country; but, alas! one cannot bring

My Granny to disclose such things as these.

Yet one day I did plague her so, and tease,

That she relented, after I had got

A scolding (for she loves me!) which was rather hot!

“For once your wish I’ll gratify,” said she.

And handed me her spectacles. “Now see!

You must find out a place—no matter where—

A place where many people go, and there

Stand where you best can overlook the throng.

Put on my glasses; then you’ll see ere long

The people like a pack of cards laid out.

From them you may foretell the future, without doubt.”

I thanked my Granny, and ran off to see

If I could find where that strange place could be.

“Where many people go?” The Promenade?

’Tis chilly there! The High Street’s quite as bad

And muddy too! The Theatre, then? Why, this

Is just the thing for me—an evening’s bliss!

Well, here I am! I first salute all here.

Permit me through my Granny’s “specs” to peer.

That I may see—no, do not run away!—

If like a pack of cards you look. I may

Foretell the future thus. Do you assent?

No answer! Then your silence is consent.

By way of recompense, with you I’ll share

The hidden secrets which the wondrous cards lay bare.

Now we shall see what fate the cards foretell

For you, for me, for King and Country. Well!

(He puts on the spectacles.)

Yes, it’s quite true!—Ah, that’s a funny sight!

I only wish that you could see it quite

As well as I! But what a lot of beaux.

And Queens of Hearts! Of these there are long rows.

The black ones over there are Clubs and Spades—

I soon shall see them all, both men and maids!

The Queen of Spades, I see, has only eyes

For one, the Knave of Diamonds—a prize!

Oh, this inspection makes my head turn, quite!

There’s such a heap of money here tonight.

And strangers, too, from far across the seas!

Yes, but we do not wish to know such things as these

Of Nobles and of Commons!—Well, “The Times”—

But that I must not breathe of in my rhymes!

To injure that great paper I’ve no wish,

So I’ll not take the best bone from the dish!

The theatre, then? The latest play? But no!

The manager’s my friend: ’tis better so!

The future that awaits me? Ah! one’s fate

Concerns oneself: one learns it soon or late.

What’s this I see? In truth, I hardly know;

You’ll see it when it happens. On I go!

Who’s happiest among us here just now?

That I can tell you easily. I trow

The happiest is —— No, it might embarrass,

And possibly the others it might harass!

Well—will this gentleman live longer than

The lady? That ’twere ruder still to scan!

Shall I, then, tell of ——? No! of ——? No! of ——? No!

Of ——? Ah! I hardly know myself what I should show!

So easy ’tis to wound, I’m quite put out.

Yet wait! I’ll tell you what you think about

My powers of prophecy—no pains I’ll spare!

You think—I beg your pardon? Everywhere

You think that, as my promise I have broke,

My undertaking only ends in smoke.

And so I hold my peace, most honoured sirs and dames:

I’ll own you may be right—but trust that no one blames.

The idea took the Student’s fancy; he thought he would like to have a pair of spectacles of that sort. He thought, one might perhaps be able to look straight into people’s hearts if one made good use of them, and that surely would be much more interesting than to see what would happen in the coming year; for future events would be sure to show themselves, but the hearts of people—never.

“I think if I could look into the hearts of the ladies and gentlemen in the first row they would seem to me to form a sort of large shop. Oh, how my eyes would wander about in it! In the heart of that lady, sitting there, I am sure I should find a milliner’s shop; in the next one the shop is empty, but a cleaning out would do it no harm. Would there not also be some shops where real solid articles are to be found? Yes, yes,” he sighed. “I know one in which everything is genuine, but there is already a clerk in it, and that, in fact, is the only thing I have to find fault with. One might be invited to come into various others and inspect them. I wish I could pass like a little thought through these hearts!”

That was the word of command for the galoshes; the Student shrunk to nothing, and at once began a most extraordinary journey through the hearts of the spectators in the first row. The first heart through which he passed belonged to a lady. It seemed to him that he was in one of the rooms of an orthopaedic hospital, where the plaster casts of deformed limbs are arranged on the walls, with this difference: at the hospital the casts are taken when the patients arrive, but in this heart they were taken and preserved after the worthy people had gone. These were casts of the bodily and mental deformities of the lady’s friends, carefully preserved.

Quickly he slipped into another lady’s heart. It appeared to him to be like a big holy church; the white dove of innocence fluttered over the high altar. He would have gladly knelt down, but he had no time—he had to go on into the next heart. The sound of the organ was still ringing in his ears, and he felt he had become a new and better man, so that he did not feel unworthy to enter the next sanctuary, where he saw a sick mother in a miserable garret. But God’s bright sun was shining through the window, splendid roses were growing in the little flower-box on the roof, and two heavenly blue birds were singing of the joys of childhood, while the sick mother prayed to God to bless her daughter.

Then he crept on all fours through an overcrowded butcher’s shop; wherever he turned there was nothing but meat. It was the heart of a rich and respectable man, whose name you will certainly find in the directory.

Thence he came into the heart of this gentleman’s wife; it was nothing but an old dilapidated pigeon-house. The husband’s portrait served as a weathercock, and was connected with the doors, so that they opened and shut whenever he turned his head.

In the next heart he found a cabinet of mirrors, like those one sees in the castle of Rosenburg. But the mirrors magnified in an incredible degree. The insignificant I of the proprietor sat in the centre of the floor, like the Dalai Lama, admiringly contemplating his own greatness.

Next he thought he had entered a narrow needle-case, full of sharp needles, and said, “No doubt, this is the heart of an old maid.” But such was not the case; it belonged to a young officer who wore several medals, whom people considered a man of intellect and heart. The poor student was quite dizzy when he came out of the last heart in the row; he could not collect his thoughts, and fancied his too strong imaginative powers had run away with him.

“Good heavens!” he sighed. “I have a strong tendency to go mad, without doubt, and it is intolerably hot in here; the blood is rushing to my head.” Just then he remembered his critical situation the evening before, when he had stuck fast between the bars of the hospital railing.

“Surely that was when I caught it!” he thought. “I must do something for it in time. Perhaps a steambath would do me good. I wish I was already on the top-shelves.”

And there he lay on the top-shelf of the vapour bath, fully dressed, with boots and galoshes still on, and the water dropped down from the ceiling on his face.

“Ugh!” he cried, and jumped down to take a plunge bath.

The attendant cried out loudly in his surprise at seeing a man with all his clothes on.

The Student fortunately had enough presence of mind to whisper in his ear, “It is for a bet!”

Upon arriving home he at once placed a large mustard plaster on his neck and another on his back, to draw out the madness.

The next morning he had a very sore back, and that was all he gained through the galoshes of Fortune.

V

THE CLERK’S TRANSFORMATION

The Watchman, whom we surely have not yet forgotten in the meantime, remembered the galoshes which he had found and carried with him to the hospital.

He went to fetch them, and when neither the Lieutenant nor anybody else in the same street recognized them as their property, he took them to the police office.

“They look exactly like my own galoshes,” said one of the clerks, [15] looking at the galoshes, and placing them by the side of his own. “It requires more than a shoemaker’s eye to distinguish the difference—”

“Mr Clerk,” said an attendant, who entered the room with some papers. The clerk turned round and spoke to him. Afterwards, when he looked at the galoshes again, he was uncertain which pair was his. “The wet ones must be mine,” he thought; but in this he was wrong—they were the galoshes of Fortune; and after all, it is not so wonderful, for a police clerk can make mistakes, like anybody else.

He put the galoshes on, thrust some papers into his pocket, took some others under his arm (the latter he was to read at home, and make summaries of their contents), and went out. By chance it was Sunday morning, and splendid weather. “A trip to Fredericksberg would do me good,” he thought, and thither he bent his steps.

No one could be more quiet and steady than this young clerk. We will not grudge him the little walk: after so much sitting it will no doubt be beneficial to him. At first he walked on mechanically, without thinking of anything at all, and therefore gave the galoshes no opportunity of proving their magic powers. In the avenue he met an acquaintance, a young Danish poet, who told him that he intended to start the next day for a summer tour.

“Are you really off again?” asked the Clerk. “You are indeed a luckier and freer man than one of us. You can go wherever you like, but we always have a chain to our feet.”

“But it is fastened to the bread-tree,” replied the Poet. “You need not have a care for the morrow, and when you grow old you will receive a pension.”

“But you are better off, after all,” said the Clerk. “It must be a pleasure to sit down and write poetry. Everybody has something pleasant to say to you, and you are your own master. Come and try what it is like to be obliged to sit in court and listen to all sorts of frivolous cases.”

The Poet shook his head; the Clerk did the same, and so they parted, each retaining his own opinion.

“They are peculiar people, these poets,” thought the Clerk. “I should very much like to try and enter into such a nature, and become a poet myself, for I am certain I should not write such lamentations as the others. Today is a splendid spring day for a poet! The air is exceptionally clear, the clouds look beautiful, and the green grass has such a fragrance! For many years I have not felt as I do now!”

From these remarks we see that he had already turned a poet. To express such feelings would in most cases be considered ridiculous. It is foolish to think a poet is a different being from other men. There may be some among the latter who have far more poetical minds than professional poets. But a poet has a better memory—he can retain ideas and thoughts until they are clearly fixed and expressed in words; and that others cannot do. But the transition of an ordinary nature to a poetical one must needs be noticeable, and so it was with the Clerk.

“What a delicious fragrance!” he said. “How much it reminds me of the violets at Aunt Laura’s! That was when I was a small boy. Dear me! I have not thought of that for a long time. Good old lady! She used to live near the canal. She always kept a green branch or a few green shoots in water, however hard the winter was. The violets smelled sweet when I was putting hot pennies against the frozen windowpanes to make peep-holes. And I had a fine view through them. There lay the ships out in the canal, frozen in and deserted by their crews; a lonely crow was the only living thing on board. But when spring came all came alive; with cries and shouting the ice was broken, the ships were tarred and rigged, and then they started for distant lands. I have always remained here, and shall always be obliged to do so, and sit in a police office, while other people take passports for abroad. That’s my fate.” And he sighed deeply. Suddenly he stopped. “Good heavens! What can be the matter with me? I have never thought and felt like this. The spring air must be the cause of it. It alarms me, and yet it is not disagreeable!” He felt in his pockets for his papers. “They will soon make me think of something else,” he said, and his eyes glided over the first page:

“Mrs Sigbirth: Original Tragedy, in Five Acts,” he read. “What’s this? It’s my own handwriting! Have I written this tragedy? The Intrigue on the Promenade; or, Fast Day: a Vaudeville. But wherever have I got these things? Somebody must have put them into my pocket! And here is a letter!”

It was from a theatrical manager; the plays were refused, and the letter was written in not over-polite language.

“Hm! Hm!” said the Clerk, and seated himself on a bench. His thoughts were very elevated, and his nerves highly strung. Involuntarily he plucked a flower growing near him; it was a common daisy. What botanists tell us in many a lecture this flower tells us in a minute. It told the story of its birth, of the power of the sunlight, which, spreading out the fine petals, compels them to breathe forth sweet fragrance. Then he thought of the struggle of life, which in the same way awakens feelings in our breast. Air and light are the flower’s lovers, but light is the favoured one. It turns towards the light, and when light vanishes it folds its petals and sleeps in the arms of the air.

“Light adorns me,” said the Flower.

“But the air enables thee to breathe,” whispered the Poet.

A little way off a boy was splashing with a stick in the water of a marshy ditch, so that the drops of water flew up to the green branches. The Clerk thought of the millions of animalculae which were thrown up in each drop of water, which, considering their size, must produce in them the same feeling as if we were thrown up high into the clouds. When the Clerk thought of the great change that had taken place in him, he smiled.

“I am asleep and dreaming! It is strange how naturally one can dream, and all the time one knows that one is only dreaming! I hope I may be able to remember this dream tomorrow when I am awake. I feel unusually excited. What a clear perception I have of everything, and how free I feel! But I am sure, should I remember anything of it tomorrow, it will seem stuff and nonsense; something the same has happened to me before. All the clever and beautiful things one hears of and speaks about in dreams are like the elves’ buried gold: when one receives it it looks rich and beautiful, and in the daylight it is only stones and dead leaves. Ah!” he sighed, and looked at the singing birds hopping merrily from branch to branch. “They are much better off than I! Flying is a fine art. Happy is he who has been born with wings. If I could transform myself into a bird I should choose to be a lark.”

Immediately his coat-tails and sleeves became wings, his clothes feathers, and the galoshes claws. He noticed it, and smiled to himself. “Well, now! I see that I am dreaming, but I never had such a foolish dream!”

He flew up into the green branches and sang, but there was no poetry in his song; the poetical mind was gone. The galoshes, like anybody else who wishes to do a thing well, could only do one thing at a time. He wished to be a poet; he became one. Then he desired to be a little bird, and by becoming one his former character disappeared.

“This is charming indeed!” he said. “In the daytime I sit at the police office among the most uninteresting official papers; at night I can dream, and fly about as a lark in the park of Fredericksberg! One might really write a popular comedy about all this!”

Then he flew down into the grass, turned his head from side to side, and pecked the flexible blades of grass with his beak, which, in proportion to his present size, appeared to him as large as palm-leaves in North Africa.

The next moment all became as dark as night around him. Something, as it seemed to him, of enormous size was thrown over him—it was a sailor boy’s cap. A hand then came underneath the cap, and seized the Clerk by the back and wings so tightly that he cried out. In his fright he instinctively shouted out, “You rascal, I am a Clerk in the police office.” But this only sounded to the sailor boy like “Tweet! tweet!” He tapped the bird on its beak and walked off.

In the avenue he met two schoolboys of the upper class—that is, from the social point of view; for as far as their abilities were concerned they belonged to the lowest class in the school. They bought the bird for a small sum, and so the Clerk was brought back to Copenhagen.

“It is a good thing that I am dreaming!” said the Clerk. “Otherwise I should certainly feel very angry! First I was a poet, now I am a lark! Surely the poetical nature has transformed me into this little bird! It is a very poor story, especially if one falls into boys’ hands. I should very much like to know how it will end.”

The boys took the bird into a very elegantly furnished room; a stout, amiable-looking lady received them. She was not at all pleased to see that they had brought home such a common field bird, as she called the lark. She would only allow them to keep it for the day, and they had to put the bird into an empty cage near the window.

“Perhaps it will please Polly,” she added, and nodded to a large green Parrot which was proudly rocking itself in its ring in a beautiful brass cage. “Today is Polly’s birthday,” she said foolishly. “The little field bird wants to congratulate it.”

Polly did not reply a single word, and continued to rock itself, but a pretty Canary, which had been brought away from its warm native country only the last summer, began to warble sweetly.

“Squaller!” cried the lady, and threw a white cloth over the cage.

“Tweet! tweet!” it sighed. “This is a terrible snowstorm.” And then became silent.

The Clerk, or, as the lady called him, the field bird, was put into a small cage close by the Canary and not far from the Parrot. All that Polly could say (and it sounded sometimes most comical) was, “No, let us be men!” What it said besides was no more intelligible than the warbling of the Canary; but the Clerk, Being now a bird himself, understood his comrades very well.

“I flew about beneath green palms and flowering almond trees,” sang the Canary. “I used to fly with my brothers and sisters over the beautiful flowers and smooth, clear lakes, at the bottom of which one could see the plants waving their leaves. I also saw many fine-looking parrots, who could tell the most amusing tales.”

“They were wild birds,” replied the Parrot; “they were not educated. No, let us be men! Why don’t you laugh? When the lady and all the other people laugh, you ought to do so also. It is a great shortcoming not to be able to appreciate fun. No, let us be men!”

“Do you remember the handsome girls who used to dance in the tents near the flowering trees?” asked the Canary. “Have you forgotten the sweet fruit, and the cooling juice of the wild herbs?”

“Oh, yes, I remember it all,” replied the Parrot; “but I am much more comfortable here. I have good food, and am well treated; I know I am clever, and I do not ask for more. Let us be men! You are a poet, as men call it; I possess sound knowledge and wit; you are a genius, but you lack discretion. You rise up to those high notes of yours, and then they cover you over. They dare not treat me like that. I was more expensive. My beak gains me consideration, and I can be witty. No, let us be men!”

“Oh, my warm native country!” sang the Canary. “I will sing of your dark green trees, your calm bays, where the branches kiss the smooth, clear water, I will sing of all my shining comrades’ joy, where the plants grow by the desert springs.”

“Leave off those mournful strains!” said the Parrot. “Sing something that makes one laugh. By laughing you show that you possess the highest mental accomplishments. Have you ever seen a horse or a dog laugh? No, they can cry out; but laugh—only man has the gift of laughing.” Then it laughed “Ha! ha! ha!” and added, “Let us be men!”

“You poor little grey bird of the North,” said the Canary, “you are a prisoner here, like us. Although it is cold in your woods, you have freedom there. Fly away!—they have forgotten to close the door of your cage, and the top window is open. Fly away!”

The Clerk instinctively obeyed, and hopped out of the cage. At the same moment the half-open door leading into the next room creaked, and stealthily, with green, shining eyes, the cat came in and chased him. The Canary fluttered in the cage, the Parrot opened its wings and cried, “Let us be men!” The Clerk felt a mortal fright and flew out through the window, over houses and streets, until he was obliged to rest himself a little.

The house opposite his resting-place seemed familiar to him; the windows stood open; he flew in—it was his own room.

He perched himself on the table and said, “Let us be men!” involuntarily imitating the Parrot. Instantly he became the Clerk again, but he was sitting on the table.

“Oh, dear!” he said; “I wonder how I came up here and fell asleep! That was a disagreeable dream. After all, it was nothing but stuff and nonsense.”

VI

THE BEST THING THE GALOSHES DID

The next day, early in the morning, when the Clerk was still in bed, somebody knocked at his door. His neighbour, a young student of theology, walked in.

“Lend me your galoshes,” he said; “it is damp in the garden, but the sun shines so brightly that I should like to smoke a pipe out there.” He put on the galoshes and was soon in the garden below, in which a plum tree and a pear tree were growing. Even such a small garden is considered a wonderful treasure in the centre of big cities.

The Student walked about in the garden; it was only six o’clock, and from the street he heard the sound of a post-horn.

“Travelling! travelling!” he exclaimed. “That is the most desirable thing in the world; that is the aim of all my wishes. The restlessness which I often feel would be cured by travelling. But I ought to be able to go far away. I should like to see beautiful Switzerland, to travel through Italy, and—”

It was well that the galoshes acted instantly; otherwise he might have gone too far, not only for himself, but for us too.

He was travelling in the heart of Switzerland, closely packed with eight others in a diligence. He had a headache; his neck was stiff with fatigue; the blood had ceased to circulate in his feet; they were swollen; and his boots pinched. He was half asleep and half awake. In his right-hand pocket he carried his letters of credit; in his left the passport; and some gold coins sewn in a little bag he wore on his chest. Whenever he dozed off he woke up imagining he had lost one or other of his valuables, and started up suddenly; then his hand would move in a triangle from the right over the breast to the left, to feel if they were still in their places. Umbrellas, sticks, and hats were swinging in a net in front of him, and almost entirely deprived him of the view, which was very imposing. He looked at it, but his heart sang what, at least, one poet we know of has sung in Switzerland, although he had not yet printed it:

I dreamt of beauty, and I now behold it:

Mont Blanc doth rise before me, steep and grey!

Were my purse full I should esteem it

The greatest joy in Switzerland to stay.

Grand, serious, and dark was all Nature around him. The pine-woods looked as small as heather on the high rocks, the summits of which towered into the misty clouds; it began to snow; an icy wind was blowing.

“Ugh!” he shivered. “I wish we were on the other side of the Alps! There it would be summer, and I should have raised money on my credit notes. I am so anxious about my money that I do not enjoy Switzerland. Oh! I wish I had already come to the other side!”

And there he was on the other side, in Central Italy, between Florence and Rome. The lake Thrasymene lay before his eyes, and looked in the evening light like fiery gold between the dark blue mountains. Here, where Hannibal defeated Flaminius, vines were peacefully growing; by the wayside lovely, half-naked children watched over a herd of swine under the flowering laurel trees. If we could describe this picture correctly all would exclaim, “Beautiful Italy!”

But neither the Student nor any of his travelling companions in the carriage of the vetturino said anything of the sort. Poisonous flies and gnats flew into the carriage by thousands; they tried to drive them away with myrtle branches, but in vain; the flies stung them nevertheless. There was not one among them whose face was not swollen from their painful stings. The poor horses looked dreadful; the flies covered them in swarms, and it was only a momentary relief when the coachman dismounted and swept the flies off.

Then the sun set, and a sudden icy cold pervaded all Nature—much like the cold air in a tomb when we enter it on a hot summer day; the mountains round about appeared wrapped in that peculiar green which we see in some old oil paintings, and which, if we have not witnessed it in the South, we believe to be unnatural. It was a superb spectacle, but the travellers’ stomachs were empty and their bodies exhausted with fatigue; all they were longing for were good night quarters, but what could they find? They looked more longingly for this than they did at the magnificent scenery before them.

The road led through an olive grove, much like a road between pollard willow trees at home. Here was at last a lonely inn. A dozen crippled beggars were lying down before it; the liveliest of them looked, to use one of Marryat’s phrases, “like the eldest son of Hunger having just come of age.” [16] The others were either blind or had paralysed feet, and crept about on their hands, or they had crippled arms and fingerless hands. That was misery in rags, indeed!

“Excellenza, miserabili!” they sighed, and stretched out their crippled limbs. The landlady herself, barefooted and with disorderly hair and a soiled blouse, received the guests.

The doors were fastened with strings; the floors of the rooms consisted of bricks, and were broken in many places; bats flew about under the ceilings, and there was a vile odour within.

“Lay the table down in the stable,” said one of the travellers. “There, at least, we know what we breathe.”

The windows were opened let in a little fresh air, but quicker than the air, in came the withered arms and the ever-lasting whines, “Miserabili, excellenza.” came in quicker than the air. There were many inscriptions on the walls, many of them uncomplimentary to “La bella Italia.”

Supper, when served, consisted of watery soup, with pepper and rancid oil. The latter was the chief ingredient in the salad. Musty eggs and fried cocks-combs were the best dishes; even the wine had a peculiar taste; it was a nauseous mixture.

At night the travellers’ boxes were placed against the door, and one of them had to watch while the others slept. It was the Student’s turn to watch. Oh, how unbearably close the room was! The heat was oppressive; the gnats buzzed and stung; the miserabili outside groaned in their dreams.

“Travelling,” said the Student, “would be a pleasure if one had no body. If the body could rest and the mind fly about. Wherever I go I feel a want that oppresses me. I wish for something better than the moment can give me; something better—nay, the best! But where and what is it?”

No sooner had he uttered this wish than he was at home again. The long white curtains were hanging before the window, and in the middle of the room stood a black coffin; in it he slept the sleep of death. His wish was fulfilled: his body rested, his spirit was free to travel.

“Consider no man happy until he rests in the grave,” were the words of Solon. [17] In this case their truth was confirmed. Every dead body is a sphinx of immortality. The sphinx in the black coffin answered the questions which the student two days before had written down:

O Death, thou stern dark angel, do we find

Nought but the tombs that thou dost leave behind!

Will not the soul on Jacob’s ladder upward pass.

Or only rise as sickly churchyard grass?

The world doth seldom see the greatest woes—

Ye lonely suffering ones! Ye now repose!

Your hearts were often more oppressed by care

Than by the earth your coffin-lid doth bear.

Two beings were moving about in the room; we know them already. One was the fairy Care, the other was the messenger of Fortune. They bent over the dead man.

“Now you see,” said Care, “what happiness your galoshes have brought to mankind!”

“They, at least, brought a lasting gift to him who slumbers here,” answered Fortune’s messenger.

“Oh, no,” said Care. “He passed away at his own wish; he was not summoned. His mental power was not strong enough to discern the treasures Fate had destined him to discover. I will render him a good service now.”

And she pulled the galoshes from his feet; the sleep of death was at once ended; the awakened man raised himself. Care disappeared, and with her the galoshes. Probably she considered them her property.

[ 1838 ]

The Court Cards

—

How many beautiful things may be cut out of and pasted on paper! Thus a castle was cut out and pasted, so large that it filled a whole table, and it was painted as if it were built of red stones. It had a shining copper roof, it had towers and a draw-bridge, water in the canals just like plate glass, for it was plate-glass, and in the highest tower stood a wooden watchman. He had a trumpet, but he did not blow it.

The whole belonged to a little boy, whose name was William. He raised the draw-bridge himself and let it down again, made his tin soldiers march over it, opened the castle gate and looked into the large and elegant drawing-room, where all the court cards of a pack—Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, and Spades—hung in frames on the walls, like pictures in real drawing rooms. The kings held each a sceptre, and wore crowns; the queens wore veils flowing down over their shoulders, and in their hands they held a flower or a fan; the knaves had halberds and nodding plumes.

One evening the little boy peeped through the open castle gate, to catch a glimpse of the court cards in the drawing room, and it seemed to him that the kings saluted him with their sceptres, that the Queen of Spades swung the golden tulip which she held in her hand, that the Queen of Hearts lifted her fan, and that all four queens graciously recognized him. He drew a little nearer, in order to see better, and that made him hit his head against the castle so that it shook. Then all the four knaves of Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, and Spades, raised their halberds, to warn him that he must not try to get in that way.

The little boy understood the hint, and gave a friendly nod; he nodded again, and then said: “Say something!” but the knaves did not say a word. However, the third time be nodded, the Knave of Hearts sprang out of the card, and placed himself in the middle of the floor.

“What is your name?” the knave asked the little boy. “You have clear eyes and good teeth, but your hands are dirty: you do not wash them often enough!”

Now this was rather coarse language, but, of course, not much politeness can be expected from a knave. He is only a common fellow.

“My name is William,” said the little boy, “and the castle is mine, and you are my Knave of Hearts!”

“No, I am not. I am my king’s and my queen’s knave, not yours!” said the Knave of Hearts. “I am not obliged to stay here. I can get down off the card, and out of the frame too, and so can my gracious king and queen, even more easily than I. We can go out into the wide world, but that is such a wearisome march; we have grown tired of it; it is more convenient, more easy, more agreeable, to be sitting in the cards, and just to be ourselves!”

“Have all of you really been human beings once?” asked little William.

“Human beings!” repeated the Knave of Hearts. “Yes, we have; but not so good as we ought to have been! Please now light a little wax candle (I like a red one best, for that is the colour of my king and queen); then I will tell the lord of the castle—I think you said you were the lord of the castle, did you not?—our whole history; but for goodness’ sake, don’t interrupt me, for if I speak, it must be done without any interruption whatever. I am in a great hurry! Do you see my king, I mean the King of Hearts? He is the oldest of the four kings there, for he was born first—born with a golden crown and a golden apple. He began to rule at once. His queen was born with a golden fan; that she still has. They both were very agreeably situated, even from infancy. They did not have to go to school, they could play the whole day, build castles, and knock them down, marshal tin soldiers for battle, and play with dolls. When they asked for buttered bread, then there was butter on both sides of the bread, and powdered brown sugar, too, nicely spread over it. It was the good old time, and was called the Golden Age; but they grew tired of it, and so did I. Then the King of Diamonds took the reins of government!”

The knave said nothing more. Little William waited to hear something further, but not a syllable was uttered; so presently he asked, “Well, and then?”

The Knave of Hearts did not answer; he stood up straight, silent, bold, and stiff, his eyes fixed upon the burning wax candle. Little William nodded; he nodded again, but no reply. Then he turned to the Knave of Diamonds; and when he had nodded to him three times, up he sprang out of the card, in the middle of the floor, and said only—

“Wax candle!”

Little William understood what he meant, and immediately lighted a red candle, and placed it before him. Then the Knave of Diamonds presented arms, for that is a token of respect, and said: “Then the King of Diamonds succeeded to the throne! He was a king with a pane of glass on his breast; also the queen had a pane of glass on her breast, so that people could look right into her. For the rest, they were formed like other human beings, and were so agreeable and so handsome, that a monument was erected in honour of them, which stood for seven years without falling. Properly speaking, it should have stood forever, for so it was intended; but from some unknown reasons, it fell.” Then the Knave of Diamonds presented arms, Out of respect for his king, and he looked fixedly on his red wax candle.

But now at once, without any nod or invitation from little William, the Knave of Clubs stepped out, grave and proud, like the stork that struts with such a dignified air over the green meadow. The black clover-leaf in the corner of the card flew like a bird beyond the knave, and then flew back again, and stuck itself where it had been sticking before.

And without waiting for his wax candle, the Knave of Clubs spoke:

“Not all get butter on both sides of the bread, and brown powdered sugar on that. My king and queen did not get it. They had to go to school, and learn what they had not learned before. They also had a pane of glass on their breasts, but nobody looked through it, except to see if there was not something wrong with their works inside, in order to find, if possible, some reason for giving them a scolding! I know it; I have served my king and queen all my lifetime; I know everything about them, and obey their commands. They bid me say nothing more tonight. keep silent, therefore, and present arms!”

But little William was a kind-hearted boy, so he lighted a candle for this knave also, a shining white one, white like snow. No sooner was the candle lighted, than the Knave of Spades appeared in the middle of the drawing-room. He came hurriedly; yet he limped, as if he had a sore leg. Indeed, it had once been broken, and he had had, moreover, many ups and down in his life. He spoke as follows:

“My brother knaves have each got a candle, and I shall also get one; I know that. But if we poor knaves have so much honour, our kings and queens must have thrice as much. Now, it is proper that my King of Spades and my Queen of Spades should have four candles to gladden them. An additional honour ought to be conferred upon them. Their history and trials are so doleful, that they have very good reason to wear mourning, and to have a grave-digger’s spade on their coat of arms. My own fate, poor knave that I am, is deplorable enough. In one game at cards, I have got the nickname of ‘Black Peter!’ [18]  But alas! I have got a still uglier name, which, indeed, it is hardly the thing to mention aloud.” And then he whispered, “In another game, I have been nicknamed ‘Dirty Mads!’ [19] I, who was once the King of Spades’ Lord Chamberlain! Is not this a bitter fate? I will not relate the history of my royal master and queen; they don’t wish me to do so! Little lord of the castle, as he calls himself, may guess it himself if he chooses, but it is very lamentable—Oh, no doubt about that! Their circumstances have become very much reduced, and are not likely to change for the better, until we are all riding on the red horse higher than the skies, where there are no haps and mishaps!”

Little William now lighted, as the Knave of Spades had said was proper, three candles for each of the kings, and three for each of the queens; but for the King and Queen of Spades he lighted four candles apiece, and the whole drawing-room became as light and transparent as the palace of the richest emperor, and the illustrious kings and queens bowed to each other serenely and graciously. The Queen of Hearts made her golden fan bow; and the Queen of Spades swung her golden tulip in such a way, that a stream of fire issued from it. The royal couples alighted from the cards and frames, and moved in a slow and graceful minuet up and down the floor. They were dancing in the very midst of flames, and the knaves were dancing too.

But alas! the whole drawing-room was soon in a blaze; the devouring flames roared up through the roof, and all was one crackling and hissing sheet of fire; and in a moment little William’s castle itself was enveloped in flames and smoke. The boy became frightened, and ran off, crying to his father and mother, “Fire, fire, fire! my castle is on fire!“ He grew pale as ashes, and his little hands trembled like the aspen-leaf The fire continued sparkling and blazing, but in the midst of this destructive scene, the following words were uttered in a singing tone:

“Now we are riding on the red horse, higher than the skies! This is the way for kings and queens to go, and this is the way for their knaves to go after them!“

Yes, that was the end of William’s castle, and of the court cards. William did not perish in the flames; he is still alive, and he washed his small hands, and said: “I am innocent of the destruction of the castle.” And, indeed, it was not his fault that the castle was burned down.

[ 1869 ]

In the Nursery

—

Father, and mother, and brothers, and sisters, were gone to the play; only little Anna and her grandpapa were left at home.

“We’ll have a play too,” he said, “and it may begin immediately.”

“But we have no theatre,” cried little Anna, “and we have no one to act for us; my old doll cannot, for she is a fright, and my new one cannot, for she must not rumple her new clothes.”

“One can always get actors if one makes use of what one has,” observed Grandpapa.

“Now we’ll go into the theatre. Here we will put up a book, there another, and there a third, in a sloping row. Now three on the other side; so, now we have the side scenes. The old box that lies yonder may be the back stairs; and we’ll lay the flooring on top of it. The stage represents a room, as everyone may see. Now we want the actors. Let us see what we can find in the plaything-box. First the personages, and then we will get the play ready. One after the other; that will be capital! Here’s a pipe-head, and yonder an odd glove; they will do very well for father and daughter.”

“But those are only two characters,” said little Anna. “Here’s my brother’s old waistcoat—that play in our piece, too?”

“It’s big enough, certainly,” replied Grandpapa. “It shall be the lover. There’s nothing in the pockets, and that’s very interesting, for that’s half of an unfortunate attachment. And here we have the nut-cracker’s boots, with spurs to them. Row, dow, dow! how they can stamp and strut! They shall represent the unwelcome wooer, whom the lady does not like. What kind of a play will you have now? Shall it be a tragedy, or a domestic drama?”

“A domestic drama, please,” said little Anna, “for the others are so fond of that. Do you know one?”

“I know a hundred,” said Grandpapa. “Those that are most in favour are from the French, but they are not good for little girls. In the meantime, we may take one of the prettiest, for inside they’re all very much alike. Now I shake the pen! Cock-a-lorum! So now, here’s the play, brin-bran-span new! Now listen to the play-bill.”

And Grandpapa took a newspaper, and read as if he were reading from it:

THE PIPE-HEAD
AND THE GOOD HEAD

A Family Drama in One Act

CHARACTERS

MR. PIPE-HEAD, a father.

MR. WAISTCOAT, a lover.

MISS GLOVE, a daughter.

MR. DE BOOTS, a suitor.

“And now we’re going to begin. The curtain rises. We have no curtain, so it has risen already. All the characters are there, and so we have them at hand. Now I speak as Papa Pipe-head! He’s angry today. One can see that he’s a coloured meerschaum.

“‘Snik, snak, snurre, bassellurre! I’m master of this house! I’m the father of my daughter! Will you hear what I have to say? Mr. de Boots is a person in whom one may see one’s face; his upper part is of morocco, and he has spurs into the bargain. Snikke, snakke, snak! He shall have my daughter!’

“Now listen to what the Waistcoat says, little Anna,” said Grandpapa. “Now the Waistcoat’s speaking. The Waistcoat has a laydown collar, and is very modest; but he knows his own value, and has quite a right to say what he says:

“‘I haven’t a spot on me! Goodness of material ought to be appreciated. I am of real silk, and have strings to me.’

“‘—On the wedding day, but no longer; you don’t keep your colour in the wash.’ This is Mr. Pipe-head who is speaking. ‘Mr. de Boots is water-tight, of strong leather, and yet very delicate; he can creak, and clank with his spurs, and has an Italian physiognomy—’”

“But they ought to speak in verses,” said Anna, “for I’ve heard that’s the most charming way of all.”

“They can do that too,” replied Grandpapa; “and if the public demands it, they will talk in that way. Just look at little Miss Glove, how she’s pointing her fingers!

“‘Could I but have my love,

Who then so happy as Glove!

Ah!

If I from him must part,

I’m sure ’twill break my heart!’

‘Bah!’

The last word was spoken by Mr. Pipe-head; and now it’s Mr. Waistcoat’s turn:

“‘O Glove, my own dear,

Though it cost thee a tear,

Thou must be mine,

For Holger Danske has sworn it!’

“Mr. de Boots, hearing this, kicks up, jingles his spurs, and knocks down three of the side-scenes.”

“That’s exceedingly charming!” cried little Anna.

“Silence! silence!” said Grandpapa. “Silent approbation will show that you are the educated public in the stalls. Now Miss Glove sings her great song with startling effects:

“‘I can’t see, heigho!

And therefore I’ll crow!

Kikkeriki, in the lofty hall!’

“Now comes the exciting part, little Anna. This is the most important in all the play. Mr. Waistcoat undoes himself, and addresses his speech to you, that you may applaud; but leave it alone—that’s considered more genteel.

“‘I am driven to extremities! Take care of yourself! Now comes the plot! You are the Pipe-head, and I am the good head—snap! there you go!’

“Do you notice this, little Anna?” asked Grandpapa. “That’s a most charming comedy. Mr. Waistcoat seized the old Pipe-head and put him in his pocket; there he lies, and the Waistcoat says:

“‘You are in my pocket; you can’t come out till you promise to unite me to your daughter Glove on the left. I hold out my right hand.’”

“That’s awfully pretty,” said little Anna.

“And now the old Pipe-head replies:

“‘Though I’m all ear,

Very stupid I appear:

Where’s my humour? Gone, I fear,

And I feel my hollow stick’s not here,

Ah! never, my dear,

Did I feel so queer.

Oh! pray let me out,

And like a lamb led to slaughter

I’ll betroth you, no doubt,

To my daughter.’”

“Is the play over already?” asked little Anna.

“By no means,” replied Grandpapa. “It’s only all over with Mr. de Boots. Now the lovers kneel down, and one of them sings:

“‘Father!’

and the other,

‘Come, do as you ought to—

Bless your son and daughter.’

And they receive his blessing, and celebrate their wedding, and all the pieces of furniture sing in chorus,

“‘Klink! clanks!

A thousand thanks;

And now the play is over!’

“And now we’ll applaud,” said Grandpapa. “We’ll call them all out, and the pieces of furniture too, for they are of mahogany.”

“And is not our play just as good as those which the others have in the real theatre?”

“Our play is much better,” said Grandpapa. “It is shorter, the performers are natural, and it has passed away the interval before teatime.”

[ 1865 ]

The Pen and the Inkstand

—

In the room of a poet, where his inkstand stood upon the table, the following words were spoken: “It is wonderful how much can be got out of an inkstand! I wonder what the next thing will be! It is indeed wonderful!”

“It is indeed! It’s inconceivable that’s what I always say!” said the Inkstand, addressing the Pen and the other things on the table that were close enough to hear. “It’s wonderful how much can be got out of me! Indeed it’s quite incredible. I really don’t know myself what the next thing will be when the man once begins to dip into me. A drop from me is sufficient to cover half a page of paper, and what a deal can be got into that space! I am something perfectly marvellous! From me issue all the poet’s works—all those characters so lifelike that people fancy they have met them—those inner feelings, that humour, and those delightful descriptions of nature. I myself don’t understand it, for I am unacquainted with nature, but it just happens to be in me. From me have issued and still issue those troops of graceful charming damsels, of bold knights on prancing steeds, of blind and lame, and goodness knows what else—I assure you I don’t think of any of it.”

“You’re right there,” said the Pen, “you don’t think at all, for if you did, you would understand that you only furnish the fluid. You give the fluid so that I may write with it and put upon paper the thoughts that dwell in me. It is the pen that writes; no one has any doubt about that, and I should think that most people know as much about poetry as an old inkstand.”

“You have but little experience,” answered the Inkstand; “you have been scarcely a week in use, and are already half worn out. Do you imagine you are the poet? You are only a servant, and before you came I had a good many of the same kind, both of the goose family and of English make—I know quill pens as well as steel pens. I have had a great many in my service, and shall have many more still, when the man comes who makes the movements for me, and writes down what he gets out of me. I should like to know what he will take out of me next!”

“Ink-tub!” said the Pen.

Late in the evening the Poet came home. He had been to a concert where he had heard an eminent violinist, and was quite enchanted with his wonderful performance. The artiste drew a marvellous wealth of tone from his instrument; first it sounded like the trickling of drops of water, and like a shower of pearls, then like a chorus of twittering birds, and then again it roared like the wind through the pine forests. He almost fancied he could hear the moaning of his own heart, but in melodious tones, like the sound of a woman’s voice. It seemed as if not only the strings of the violin gave forth sound, but even the bridge and the screws and the sounding-board too. It was a marvellous performance! And though it was a difficult piece, it really seemed like play—just as if the bow were merely passing to and fro over the strings, and as though anyone could have done it. It seemed as if both did all between them; the master who led them and breathed life and soul into them was forgotten, but the poet remembered him, named him, and wrote down his thoughts about it all.

“How foolish it would be of the violin and the bow to boast of their performance! And yet mankind so often does—the poet, the artist, the scientist, the general-—they all do so. We are all only instruments upon which the Lord our Master plays; to Him be all the glory. We have nothing of which we may be proud.”

Yes, that is what the Poet wrote. He wrote it in the form of a parable and called it: “The Master and the Instruments.”

“That’s one for you, madam,” said the Pen to the Inkstand, when they were both alone again. “I suppose you heard him read what I wrote down?”

“Yes, what I gave you to write,” retorted the Inkstand. “That was a knock for you, for your conceit. That you don’t even see when you’re being made fun of! I gave you a knock from my very inside—I ought to know my own sarcasm!”

“Miserable ink-holder!”

“Wretched writing-stick!”

And both felt convinced that they had made a clever retort, and that is a very agreeable feeling—one on which you sleep well, and sleep they did. But the Poet did not sleep. Thoughts welled up from within him like the tones from the violin, rolling along like pearls and roaring like the wind through the forests. He recognised the feelings of his own heart in these thoughts; they were as a ray from the Great Master of all minds.

To Him be all the honour!

[ 1860 ]

The Money-Pig

—

In the nursery a number of toys lay strewn about; high up on the wardrobe, stood the Money-box, made of clay in the shape of a little pig; the pig had by nature a slit in its back, and this slit had been so enlarged with a knife that whole dollar pieces could slip through; and, indeed, two such lad slipped into the box, beside a number of pence. The Money-pig was stuffed so full that it could no longer rattle, and that is the highest point of perfection a Money-pig can attain. There it stood upon the cupboard, high and lofty, looking down upon everything else in the room. It knew very well that what it had in its stomach would have bought all the toys, and that’s what we call having self-respect.

The others thought of that too, even if they did not say it, for there were many other things to speak of. One of the drawers was half pulled out, and there lay a great handsome Doll, though she was somewhat old, and her neck had been mended. She looked out and said:

“Now we’ll play at men and women, for that is always something!”

And now there was a general uproar, and even the framed prints on the walls turned round and showed that there was a wrong side to them; but that was not because they objected to the proposal.

It was late at night; the moon shone through the window frames and afforded the cheapest light. The game was now to begin, and all, even the children’s Go-cart, which certainly belonged to the coarser playthings, were invited to take part in the sport.

“Each one has his own peculiar value,” said the Go-cart; “we cannot all be noblemen. There must be some who do the work, as the saying is.”

The Money-pig was the only one who received a written invitation, for he was of high standing, and they were afraid he would not accept a verbal message. Indeed, he did not answer to say whether he would come, nor did he come: if he was to take a part, he must enjoy the sport from his own home; they were to arrange accordingly, and so they did.

The little toy theatre was now put up in such a way that the Money-pig could look directly in. They wanted to begin with a comedy, and afterwards there was to be a tea-party and a discussion for mental improvement, and with this latter part they began immediately. The Rocking-horse spoke of training and race, the Go-cart of railways and steam power, for all this belonged to their profession, and it was quite right they should talk of it. The Clock talked politics—ticks—ticks—and knew what was the time of day, though it was whispered he did not go correctly; the Bamboo Cane stood there, stiff and proud, for he was conceited about his brass ferule and his silver top, for being thus bound above and below; and on the sofa lay two worked Cushions, pretty and stupid. And now the play began.

All sat and looked on, and it was requested that the audience should applaud and crack and stamp according as they were gratified. But the Riding-whip said he never cracked for old people, only for young ones who were not yet married.

“I crack for everything,” said the Cracker.

“There will be one good place at any rate,” thought the Sawdust Box, and that was what each one in the comedy was thinking.

And these were the thoughts they had while the play went on. The piece was worthless, but it was well played; all the characters turned their painted side to the audience, for they were so made that they should only be looked at from that side, and not from the other; and all played wonderfully well, coming out quite beyond the lamps, because the wires were a little too long, but that only made them come out the more. The mended Doll was quite exhausted with excitement—so thoroughly exhausted that she burst at the darned place in her neck; and the Money-pig was so enchanted in his way that he formed the resolution to do something for one of the players, and to remember him in his will as the one who should be buried with him in the family vault, when matters were so far advanced.

It was true enjoyment, such true enjoyment that they quite gave up the thoughts of tea. and only carried out the idea of an exercise of wits. That’s what they called playing at men and women; and there was no malice in it, for they were only playing; and each one thought of himself and of what the Money-pig might think; and the Money-pig thought farthest of all, for he thought of making his will and of his burial. And when might this come to pass? Certainly far sooner than was expected. Crack! it fell down from the cupboard—fell on the ground, and was broken to pieces; and the pennies hopped and danced in comical style: the little ones turned round like tops, and the bigger ones rolled away, particularly the one great Silver Dollar who wanted to go out into the world. And he came out into the world, and so did they all. And the pieces of the Money-pig were put into the dustbin; but the next day a new money-pig was standing on the cupboard: it had not yet a farthing in its stomach, and therefore it could not rattle, and in this it was like the other. But that was a beginning—and with that we will make an end.

[ 1855 ]

The Flax

—

The Flax stood in full bloom; it had pretty blue flowers, as smooth as the wings of a moth, and even more delicate. The sun was warming it with his rays, the rain-clouds watered it; and that was as good for the Flax as it is for little children to be washed and afterwards kissed by their mothers. It makes them look much brighter. So it did the Flax.

“People say I am standing uncommonly tall,” said the Flax; “that I have a good length to make a piece of strong linen. Oh, I am so very happy! I am certainly the happiest of all plants! How well I am cared for! And I shall be useful! How much I enjoy the warm sun, how much the rain refreshes me. I am exceedingly happy—nay, I am the happiest of all beings.”

“That is all very well,” said a Fence-Post; “you do not know the world as well as I, for I have plenty of knots in me.” And then it groaned quite piteously:

“Snip, snap, snurre—

Bassellurre!

Ended is the song.”

“No, it is not ended,” said the Flax, “the sun will shine to morrow, or the rain will refresh us. I feel how I am growing. I see that I am in full flower, I am the happiest of all beings.”

One day people came, seized the Flax and pulled it out by the roots; that was very painful! They placed it in water as if they intended to drown it, and afterwards hung it over a fire, as if they wished to fry it. It was dreadful!

“One can’t always be happy,” said the Flax; “one must also suffer in order to become experienced.”

And things much worse happened to it. The Flax was steeped, roasted, broken, and hackled. How could it possibly know the names of the various operations they performed upon it? Afterwards the Flax was put on the spinning-wheel. “Whirr, whirr,” the wheel turned so rapidly round that the Flax was not able to gather its thoughts.

“How very happy I was,” it thought, whilst it suffered agonies of pain; “one must be contented with the good one has enjoyed in the past. Contented, contented!” Thus the Flax still said, when it was put on the loom. A large piece of beautiful linen was woven from it, and all the Flax, to the very last stalk, was used up for this one piece.

“But this is marvellous; I should never have thought it! Fortune favours me very much indeed. The fence-post knew something after all when it sang:

“Snip, snap, snurre—

Bassellurre!

“The song is by no means ended. No, on the contrary, now it only begins. That is very extraordinary. I have suffered a great deal, no doubt, but now I have turned out something useful. I am the happiest of all beings! How strong and fine, how white and long I am. It is something very different from being only a plant, although it bears flowers; as a plant, one is not so much looked after, and gets water only when it rains. Now I am well cared for; the maid turns me over every morning, and at night she gives me a shower-bath with the watering-pot; the pastor’s wife has even made a speech in praise of me; she said that I was the best piece of linen in the whole parish. I cannot possibly be happier than I am now!”

The Linen was taken into the house and operated upon with scissors. How they cut and tore it, and pricked it with sewing needles; it was by no means a pleasure! They made twelve garments of it of a kind which people do not like to mention, although nobody can get on without them; they made a whole dozen out of one piece of linen.

“Look at me now,” said the Flax, “only now I have become something really useful, and clearly understand what I am destined for in this world. What a blessing! Now I am useful, and so everybody ought to be, for that is the only true happiness in the world. Although they have cut twelve pieces of me, all the twelve are one and the same; we just make up the dozen. What an exceptional luck!”

Years and years passed: the garments were so much worn that they began to fall to pieces.

“There must be an end one day,” said each piece. “I should have very much liked to last a little longer, but one must not expect impossibilities.”

Then they were torn into rags and tatters. “It is all over now,” they thought, when they were ground in a mill, soaked, and boiled, and went through various processes they were unable to remember. And then they became beautiful white paper.

“That is a surprise indeed, and what a pleasant one,” said the Paper. “Now I am finer than before, and now they will write upon me. That is an extraordinary good fortune.”

And really the most interesting stories and beautiful stanzas were written upon the paper; and there was only one ink-blot, and that was certainly remarkable good fortune. And the people heard what was written upon it; it was good and clever, and made them better and enlightened them. Thus the words written on this paper produced a great blessing.

“That is more than I ever dreamed of, when I was a little blue flower in the field. How could it come into my mind that I should be destined to give mankind pleasure and knowledge? I can hardly believe it, and yet it is true. God knows that I have myself done nothing more with my weak powers to do for my own preservation, and yet I have been promoted from one joy and honour to another. Whenever I think, ‘Now the song is ended, I pass into something better and higher. Now I shall probably travel about in the world, that all people may read what is written upon me. It can’t be otherwise; it is most likely. I have so many great thoughts written upon me as I had formerly blue flowers. I am indeed the happiest of all beings.”

The Paper, however, was not sent on travels—nay, it was taken to the printer’s, and there the whole manuscript was set up in type, and a book, or rather many hundreds of books were made of it, so that many more might have pleasure and profit from the writing than was possible if the paper on which it was written had been sent about in the world; no doubt it would have fallen to pieces before it had gone half its journey.

“Certainly, this is the wisest thing that could be done,” thought the Written Paper, “although it never struck me. I shall remain at home, and be honoured like an old grandfather. It was on me the writing was done; the words flowed from the pen right into me. I remain here and the books run about. Now something can really be done. I am the happiest of all!”

Then the Paper was tied up in a bundle, and put on a shelf.

“When the work is done, it is pleasant to rest,” said the Paper. “It is wise to collect one’s thoughts and to reflect on all that lives in one. It is only now that I thoroughly understand all that is written upon me. I wonder what will happen now? Surely there will be progress again; one always advances—that I know by my own experience.”

One day all the Paper and placed on the hearth; it was to be burned, for people said it must not be sold to tradesmen to wrap up butter or sugar. All the children of the house were standing round the fireplace, for they wished to see the paper burning; it flamed up so beautifully, and afterwards one could see so many red sparks flying about in the ashes: one after another of the sparks disappeared as quickly as the wind. They called it “seeing the children coming out of school”, and the last spark was the schoolmaster. They thought they knew all about it, but that was a mistake. We, however, shall soon know.

All the old Paper, the whole bundle of it, was put on the fire and was soon ablaze. “Ugh,” it said, and flamed up high. “Ugh, that is not at all pleasant;” but when all was alight the bright flames reached much higher than the flax would ever have been able to stretch its little blue flowers, and the flames shone more brightly than the linen could ever have done. All the written letters turned red for a moment, and all the words and thoughts they expressed vanished in the flames. “Now I am flying straight up to the sun,” said a voice in the flame; and it seemed as if a thousand voices repeated it, and the flames came out of the chimney-top.

And finer than the flames, invisible to human eyes, there were rising up many little beings, as many as there had been blossoms on the Flax. They were still lighter than the flame that had borne them, and when it was extinguished and nothing left of the Paper but black ashes, they danced once more over the ashes, and wherever they touched it red sparks leapt up. “The children came out of school, and the last was the schoolmaster.” That was fun! And the children sang:

“Snip, snap, snurre—

Bassellurre!

Ended is the song.”

But all the little invisible beings said: “The song is never ended—that is the best of all. We know it, and therefore we are the happiest of all.”

Of course the children could neither hear nor understand it, and that was quite right, for children must not know everything.

[ 1849 ]

The Shirt Collar

—

There was once a fine gentleman, the whole of whose equipment existed of a boot-jack and a comb, but he had the finest Shirt Collar in the world, and it is about this Collar that we are to hear the history. He was now of an age to think of marrying, and it so happened that at the wash he met with garter.

“Dear me,” said the Collar; “never have I seen anyone so slender, so refined, so soft or so charming. Might I ask your name?”

“That I shall not tell you,” said the Garter.

“Where do you reside?” asked the Collar.

But the Garter was very shy, and thought the question an awkward one to answer.

“You must be a girdle,” said the Collar; “a sort of inner girdle! I see, I see; you serve both for use and ornament, little lady.”

“You must not address me,” said the Garter. “I do not think I have given you any encouragement to do so.”

“Oh, if anyone is as beautiful as you,” said the Collar, “that is encouragement enough.”

“Do not come too near me,” said the Garter; “you look so much like a man.”

“Well, yes, I am a fine gentleman,” said the Collar. “I own a boot-jack and a comb.” Now this was really not the truth; it was his master who owned them, but he was boasting.

“Don’t come near me!” said the Garter. “I’m not accustomed to it.”

“Miss Prim!” said the Collar.

They were then taken out of the tub, starched, and hung on a chair in the sun, and afterwards laid on the ironing board. Then came the hot iron.

“Lady!” said the Collar. “Little widow lady, I’m getting quite hot, a change is coming over me! All my folds are being flattened out. You’ll burn a hole in me. Will you be mine?”

“Rag!” said the iron, passing proudly over the collar; she fancied herself a steam engine travelling along the rails and dragging a train. “Rag!” said she.

The Collar had become frayed at the corners, so now came the Scissors, to cut the ravelling off.

“Oh!” said the Collar. “You are, of course, the Première Danseuse. How you do stretch your legs; the most charming thing I ever saw. No human being can do the like.”

“I know that,” said the Scissors.

“You deserve to be a countess,” said the Collar. “My whole property consists of a fine gentleman, a boot-jack and a comb. Oh, were I but a count!”

“Are you proposing to me?” said the Scissors, much annoyed, and gave him a smart cut; so he was dismissed from service.

“I suppose I must try the comb,” said the Collar. “It’s very remarkable how you keep all your teeth, little lady! Have you never thought of becoming engaged?”

“Yes, to be sure I have,” said the comb. “I’m engaged to the boot-jack.”

“Engaged?” said the Collar. There was nobody left to propose to, so he took to despising the whole business.

A long time passed by, and the Collar found himself in a box, at the paper mill, with a vast collection of rags, the fine ones by themselves and the coarse by themselves, as is right and proper. All of them had a great deal to tell, but the Collar most of all, for he was a braggart and a boaster.

“I’ve had a terrible lot of sweethearts,” he said; “I hadn’t a moment’s peace. In my time I was a fine gentleman—starched, too. I had a boot-jack and a comb, which I never used. You ought to have seen me then; seen me when I was laid aside. I shall never forget my first love! A girdle she was, most delicate and soft and charming. She threw herself into a washing-tub for love of me. Yes, and there was a widow, who was burning hot, but I let her alone and she turned black. And there was a première danseuse; she gave me the scar I carry now—she was so jealous. My own comb, too, fell in love with me, and lost all her teeth from unrequited affection. Yes, I’ve had many such experiences; but what caused me most pain is the Garter—I should say the girdle—who went into the washing-tub. I’ve a great deal on my conscience, and I’m really desirous of being made into white paper.”

And so they were; all the rags were made into white paper, but the Collar was made into precisely this bit of white paper you see here, on which this story is printed; and that’s because he boasted so fearfully in his later days of what never happened. And we must take care not to behave like that, for we really can never be sure that we shan’t get into the rag box, one of these days, and be turned into white paper and the whole of our story printed on us, even the most private bits, and be obliged to run about telling it, like the Collar.

[ 1848 ]

The Darning Needle

—

There was once a Darning Needle who was such a fine lady that she imagined she was an embroidery needle. “Mind you take care what you’re holding,” said the Darning Needle to the Fingers, when they picked her up. “Don’t drop me! If I fall on the floor, I should very likely never be found again, I’m so fine.” “Moderately so,” said the Fingers, taking her firmly round the waist.

“Look, here I come with my train,” said the Darning Needle, as she drew a long thread after her; but it had no knot on it.

The Fingers pointed the needle straight at the kitchen-maid’s slipper, where there was a tear in the upper leather that had to be sewn up.

“This is menial work,” said the Darning Needle. “I shall never get through it! I shall break! I shall break!” And break she did. “Didn’t I say so?” she said; “I’m so fine.”

“Now, she’s good for nothing,” said the Fingers. However, they had to keep hold of her, for the kitchen-maid dropped some sealing-wax on her, and stuck her in the front of her neckerchief.

“Look, now I’m a breast-pin,” said the Darning Needle. “I knew I should come to the front. Be something and you’ll become something.” And she laughed, to herself, for you can’t see on the face of it when a darning needle is laughing. Now she sat there as proud as if she was driving in her own carriage, and looked all about her.

“May I have the honour of inquiring whether you are made of gold?” she asked a pin who was beside her. “You make a handsome appearance, and have a head of your own, though a small one. You should take pains to make it grow, for we can’t all have sealing-wax on the end of us.” With these words the Darning Needle drew herself up so proudly that she fell out of the neckerchief into the waste-tub, just as the kitchen-maid emptied it out. “So I’m going on my travels,” said the Darning Needle; “I only hope I don’t get lost.” But she was lost. “I’m too fine for this world,” said she, as she lay in the drain. “Well, I have a good conscience, and that’s always some little comfort”; and she held herself stiff and didn’t lose her temper.

Every sort of thing went sailing along over her; sticks and straws and bits of newspaper. “Look at them sailing along,” said the Darning Needle; “they don’t know what’s sticking fast just beneath them. It’s I! Here I sit. Look! There goes a stick, thinking of nothing in the world but ‘stick’, that’s himself. There goes a straw! Just look how it zig-zags about and turns round and round. Don’t think quite so much about yourself! You may run up against the culvert! There’s a newspaper; everything that’s on it is forgotten, but it’s spreading itself out all the same. I sit here patient and calm; I know what I am, and what I am I remain.”

One day there came something close by that shone very finely, and the Darning Needle thought it must be a diamond, but it was really a bit of bottle. And as it shone the Darning Needle addressed it, introducing herself as a Breast Pin. “You are no doubt a diamond?” “Yes, I am something of the kind.” So each believed that the other was something really valuable, and they talked about how conceited the world was.

“Ah, yes! I used to live in a casket owned by a young lady,” said the Darning Needle; “and the young lady was a kitchen-maid. She had five fingers on each hand, but anything so self-centred as those five fingers I never knew, and yet they were only there to hold me and take me out of the casket and put me back again.”

“Had they any brilliance about them?” asked the Bit Of Glass. “Brilliance!” said the Darning Needle. “No, it was all conceit. They were five brothers, all born fingers; they held themselves close up to each other, though they were of different lengths. The outermost, Tom Thumb, was short and stout, and was outside the rank. He had only one joint in his back, and could only bow in one place, but he said that if he was cut off a man, that man was entirely unfitted for war service. Lick Pot was dipped in sweet and sour, and would point at the sun and moon, and he it was who held tight when they wrote. Longman looked over the heads of the rest. Gold Band wore a gold ring round his stomach, and little Peter Playman had nothing to do and was proud of it. The whole thing was brag, and brag it remained. So I went into the tub.”

“And now here we sit and glitter,” said the Bit Of Glass. Just then some more water was poured into the drain and overflowed all the edges, and washed away the Bit Of Glass with it.

“Ah! Now he is gone abroad,” said the Darning Needle, “and I stay here! I’m too fine! Still, that’s my pride, and it’s an honourable one.” So there she sat stiffly, and thought many thoughts.

“I could almost believe I was born of a sunbeam, I’m so fine; doesn’t it seem, too, as if the sun were always looking for me under the water? Ah me! I’m so fine that my mother can’t find me. If I had my old eye that broke I really think I should cry, and yet no, I wouldn’t—crying isn’t refined.”

One day there were some street boys lying and poking about in the gutter, where they found old nails, coppers and such things; it was messy work, but they enjoyed it.

“Ow!” said one of them, who had pricked himself with the Darning Needle. “Here’s another chap!”

“I’m not a chap, I’m a young lady!” said the Darning Needle, but nobody heard her. The sealing-wax had come off her, and she had turned black, but being black makes you look thinner, so she thought she was even finer than before.

“There comes an eggshell sailing along,” said the boys. Whereupon they stuck the Darning Needle into the shell.

“White walls, and myself black,” said the Darning Needle; “that suits well! People can see me, anyhow. I only hope I shan’t be seasick; if I am I shall break.” But she wasn’t seasick and didn’t break: it’s good for seasickness to have a steel stomach, and always to remember that one is somewhat more than ordinary. “My illness is over now. Yes, the finer one is the more one can bear.”

Crack! went the eggshell; a loaded wagon had gone over it. “Ugh, what a squeeze!” said the Darning Needle. “I shall be seasick! I shall break! I shall break!” But she didn’t, though the loaded wagon did go over her. She lay there at full length—and there she may lie still!

[ 1846 ]

The Sweethearts

—

The Top and the Ball lay in a drawer along with the other toys, and the Top said to the Ball: “Mightn’t we be engaged? We lie in the same drawer.” But the Ball, who was covered with morocco and thought as much of herself as any fine young lady, wouldn’t reply to any such question as that.

Next day the little boy to whom the toys belonged came and painted the Top red and yellow, and drove a copper nail into it, which made a splendid appearance when the Top spun humming round.

“Look at me,” said he to the Ball, “what do you say now? Mightn’t we be an engaged couple—we suit each other so well. You jump and I dance; nobody could be happier than we two together.”

“Oh, indeed, do you think so?” said the Ball. “You don’t realize that my father and mother were morocco slippers, and that I have a Spanish cork in my body.” “Well, but I’m made of mahogany,” said the Top. “The Mayor himself turned me; he’s got his own lathe, and he enjoyed doing it very much.”

“Can I rely upon that statement?” said the Ball.

“May I never be whipped again if it’s not true,” answered the Top.

“You give a very good account of yourself,” said the Ball; “still, I can’t consent. I’m as good as half engaged to a swallow. Whenever I go up in the air he puts his head out of his nest and says ‘Will you? Will you?’ and recently I said ‘Yes’ to myself, and that’s as good as a half engagement, but I promise never to forget you.”

“A lot of good that is,” said the Top; after which they had no further conversation.

Next day the Ball was taken out. The Top saw it flying high up in the air like a bird till at last it went right out of sight. Eight times it came down again, but always bounded high when it touched the ground; and this was due either to its aspirations or to its having a cork in its body. The ninth time the Ball disappeared and didn’t come back. The boy looked and looked for it, but it was gone.

“I know well enough where it is,” sighed the Top. “It’s in the swallow’s nest, married to the swallow.”

The more the Top thought about it, the more absorbed he became in the Ball: for the very reason that he couldn’t get at it, his affection for it increased. That it should have accepted another—that was the strange thing.

The Top danced round and hummed, but went on thinking of the Ball, which in his fancy grew more and more beautiful.

Thus several years went by—and the attachment was a thing of the past. The Top was now no longer young, but one fine day he was gilded all over. Never had he looked so splendid; he was now a Top of gold, and jumped about till his hum re-echoed again. That was indeed a triumph: but all at once he gave too high a jump and was gone. They searched and searched, even down in the cellar, but he couldn’t be found.

Where was he? Why, he had jumped into the dustbin where there lay all manner of things; cabbage stalks, sweepings and rubbish that had fallen down from the gutter.

“Here’s a nice place to be lying! The gilding will very soon come off me! And what sort of shabby creatures are these that I’ve got among?” he said, looking askance at a long cabbage stalk that had been stripped of its last leaf, and at an odd round object that looked like an old apple—but it wasn’t an apple; it was an old ball which had lain for years up in the gutter, soaked through with water. “Thank heaven! At last here is someone of one’s own class that one can speak to,” said the Ball, looking at the gilt Top. “As a matter of fact, I am made of morocco, sewn together by a young lady’s hands, and I have a cork in my body, though no one would think so to look at me. At one time I was about to be married to a swallow, but I fell into the gutter, and there I have lain for five years, soaking: a long long time, as you may imagine, for a young lady.”

But the Top said nothing; he thought of his old love, and the more he heard the plainer it became to him that this must be she.

Now came the maid to empty the dustbin. “Aha!” said she. “Here’s the gold Top.”

So the Top got back into the house, and enjoyed great honour and attention; but nobody heard anything of the Ball, and the Top never said a word more of his old attachment. That’s apt to disappear when the beloved object has lain for five years in a gutter and soaked—indeed, if one meets her in the dustbin, one doesn’t attempt to recognize her.

[ 1844 ]

The Jumpers

—

The Flea, the Grasshopper, and the Spring-goose toy [20] once wanted to see which of them could jump highest, and so they invited the whole world and everybody else who might care to see that kind of sport. When the three entered the room, all thought they were splendid specimens of jumpers.

“Well, I’ll give my daughter to the one who jumps highest!” said the King; “for it would look so mean to let these people jump for nothing!”

The Flea stepped forward first; he had such nice manners and bowed on every side, for he had the blood of grand ladies in his veins, and had been accustomed to associate only with human beings, which means a great deal.

Next came the Grasshopper; he was certainly very much bigger, but he bore himself fairly well for all that, and wore a green uniform, the one he was born with. Moreover, as he said, he was connected with a very old family in the land of Egypt, and was highly esteemed here at home. He had been taken straight from the fields and put into a house of cards, three storeys high, all made with court-cards, with the coloured side turned in; there were both doors and windows, all cut out in the waist of the Queen of Hearts. “I sing so well,” he said, “that, on hearing me, sixteen native crickets, that had been chirping since they were born, but never had a house of cards, fretted themselves even thinner than they were!”

Both the Flea and the Grasshopper were thus able to give a good account of themselves, and saw no reason why they should not marry a princess.

The Spring-goose did not say anything; people said of him that he thought all the more, and as the Palace Dog only sniffed at him, it was a guarantee that the Spring-goose was of good family. The old Alderman, who had got three medals for holding his tongue, assured them that he knew the Spring-goose possessed the gift of prophesying; one could tell by his back, whether the winter would be mild or severe, and that was more than you could see by the back of the man who writes the almanacs.

“Well, I shan’t say anything!” said the old King; “but I generally go about and have my own opinion of things.”

Everything now depended upon the jumping. The Flea jumped so high that no one could see him, so they said he had not jumped at all, which was rather mean.

The Grasshopper jumped only half as high, but he jumped right onto the King’s face, which, the king declared, was most disagreeable.

The Spring-goose stood still a long time, thinking to himself; the people at last began to believe that he could not jump at all.

“I only hope he isn’t ill!” said the Palace Dog, and sniffed at him again, when—wh’st! with a jump, a little sideways, he sprang right into the lap of the Princess, who was sitting on a low, golden footstool.

Then the King said; “The highest jump is to jump at my daughter, for that’s just the clever part of it. It requires brains to get an idea like that, and the Spring-goose has shown that he has brains. He has a mind of his own!”

And so he got the Princess.

“I jumped highest, after all!” said the Flea. “But it doesn’t matter! Let her keep that stuck-up bit of a goose with the peg and the cobblers’ wax! I jumped highest, anyhow; but I find it is necessary in this world to have substance, if one is to be noticed!”

And so the Flea went abroad and enlisted, and there they say he was killed.

The Grasshopper settled down in a ditch just outside, and pondered over the way things were really managed in this world, and he said too: “Yes, substance is the thing, substance is the thing!” And then he went on singing his own melancholy ditty; and it is from that we have taken this story, which may not be true, although it is printed here in black and white.

[ 1845 ]

The Racers

—

A prize—in fact, two prizes—were offered, a large and a small one, for the greatest speed attained, not in a single race, but for running during the whole year.

“I got the first prize,” said the Hare. “Justice is sure to be done if one’s own family and good friends are the judges; but that the Snail should have got the second prize I consider almost a personal insult.”

“No”, insisted the Gatepost, who had been a witness of the award, “account must also be taken of hard work and good intentions. That was what several respectable persons said, and I took the same view. The Snail, it is true, took half a year to get over the doorstep, but he fractured his thigh in his hurry, and that was in his favour. He has lived wholly and solely for this race, and he ran with his house on his back. All this is most creditable to him, and therefore he got the second prize.”

“I might well have been considered too,” said the Swallow. “No one, I believe, showed himself swifter in flight and in turning than I did; and then where haven’t I been? Far! Far! Far!”

“Yes, that’s just your misfortune,” said the Gatepost. “You gad about too much. You’re always off out of the country the moment the frost begins here. You have no love for your native land; you can’t be considered.”

“But if I was to lie out in the marsh the whole winter,” said the Swallow, “if I was to sleep the whole time, should I be considered then?”

“Well, get a certificate from the Marshwoman that you slept half the time in your own country, and you will be.”

“I did really deserve the first prize, not the second,” said the Snail. “I know for a fact that the Hare ran purely out of cowardice, whenever he thought there was danger in the offing. I, on the other hand, made my race the task of my life, and have become a cripple in the service. If anyone ought to have the first prize, it is I: but I don’t make a fuss about it, I’d scorn to do so,” with which he spat.

“I can affirm in the plainest manner that each prize—or at least my vote for it—was given with honest intention,” said the old Sign-post in the wood, who was a member of the deciding body of judges. “I always proceed with method, consideration, and calculation. Seven times I have enjoyed the privilege of taking part in the award, but never before today have I managed to get my view accepted: at every prize-giving I have started with a definite principle. I have always gone through the alphabet from the beginning for the first prize and from the end for the second, and will you now be good enough to observe that reckoning from the beginning the eighth letter from A is H—there we have the Hare, so I voted for the Hare for the first prize—and the eighth letter from the end (I don’t reckon the modified A, it’s an ugly sound, and ugly things I always pass over) is S. I therefore voted for the Snail for the second premium. On the next occasion the I will be the first and R the second. There must be order in everything; one must have something to hold fast to.”

“I should really have voted for myself had I not been one of the awarders,” said the Donkey, who was also on the committee. “Account ought to be taken, not only of the rate of speed in progressing, but of what other qualities the candidate may possess; for instance, what weight he can pull. For my part, however, I should not have raised the point on this occasion—nor again the cleverness of the Hare in his flight—his trick of suddenly leaping to one side to lead people on a wrong track away from his hiding-place: no, there is yet another quality to which many pay attention and which, in fact, deserves not to be neglected. It is what is called the Beautiful. To this I paid heed in this case, and looked at the beautiful, well-grown ears of the Hare—it is a pleasure to see how long they are. I really thought I was looking at myself when I was little, and so I voted for him.”

“Buzz,” said the Fly, “no—I don’t want to talk, I merely want to say a word. I know this, that I have overrun more than one Hare. The other day I broke the hind legs of a young one. I was seated on the locomotive at the head of a train. I often do: it’s the best position for observing one’s own pace. A young Hare was running in front, not guessing that I was there. At last he was obliged to turn aside—but the engine broke his hind legs, for I was sitting on it. There lay the Hare; I went rushing on. That, I imagine, is beating him? But I don’t press for the prize.”

“It does seem to me,” thought the Wild Rose (but didn’t say it; it isn’t her nature to speak out, though it would have been a good thing if she had), “it does seem to me that the Sunbeam ought to have had the first prize and the second too. It flies in an instant all that immense way from the Sun down to us, and comes with such a power in it that all Nature wakens up at it. It has such beauty that all we roses blush and give out sweetness. But the supreme authorities, the judges, don’t seem to have noticed it at all. If I were the Sunbeam I should give every one of them a sunstroke—but that would only make them mad, and they’re perfectly mad as it is. I shan’t say anything,” thought the Wild Rose. “Let’s have peace in the forest: it’s very pleasant to bloom and smell sweet and refresh everyone, and to live in story and song. The Sunbeam will last us all out.”

“What is the first prize?” asked the Earthworm, who had overslept himself, and only now came up.

“A free pass to a cabbage garden,” said the Donkey. “It was I who proposed the prize. The Hare was bound to win it, and therefore I, as a thoughtful and practical member, took into careful consideration the best interests of the person who was to have the prize. The Hare is now provided for. The Snail has the privilege of sitting on the stone wall and licking up moss and sunshine, and also is appointed one of the principal judges for the next award for speed. It is a very good thing to have an expert as a member of what mankind call a committee. I must say I hope great things from the future, now that we have made such an excellent beginning.”

[ 1858 ]

The Farmyard Cock and the Weathercock

—

There were two cocks—one on the dunghill, the other on the roof. Both were conceited; but which of the two did most? Tell us your opinion; but we shall keep our own, nevertheless.

The poultry-yard was divided by a partition of boards from another yard, in which lay a manure heap, and on it lay and grew a great cucumber, which was fully conscious of being a forcing-bed plant.

“That’s a privilege of birth,” the Cucumber said to herself “Not all can be born cucumbers: there must be other kinds too. The fowls, the ducks, and all the cattle in the neighbouring yard are creatures too. I now look up to the Yard Cock on the partition. He certainly is of very much greater consequence than the Weathercock, who is so highly placed, and who can’t even creak, much less crow; and he has neither hens nor chickens, and thinks only of himself, and perspires verdigris. But the Yard Cock—he’s something like a cock! His gait is like a dance, his crowing is music; and wherever he comes, it is known directly. What a trumpeter he is! If he would only come in here! Even if he were to eat me up, stalk and all, it would be quite a blissful death,” said the Cucumber.

In the night the weather became very bad. Hens, chickens, and even the Cock himself sought shelter. The wind blew down the partition between the two yards—with a crash the tiles came tumbling down, but the Weathercock sat firm. He did not even turn round—he could not turn round; and yet he was young and newly cast, but steady and sedate. He had been “born old,” and did not at all resemble the birds that fly beneath the vault of heaven, such as the sparrows and swallows. He despised those, considering them piping birds of trifling stature—ordinary song birds. The pigeons, he allowed, were big and shining, and gleamed like mother-of-pearl, and looked like a kind of weathercock; but then they were fat and stupid, and their whole endeavour was to fill themselves with food.

“Moreover, they are such tedious things to converse with,” said the Weathercock.

The birds of passage had also paid a visit to the Weathercock, and told him tales of foreign lands—of airy caravans, and exciting robber stories; of encounters with birds of prey; and that was interesting for the first time, but the Weathercock knew that afterwards they always repeated themselves, and that was tedious.

“They are tedious, and all is tedious,” he said. “No one is fit to associate with, and one and all of them are wearisome and stupid. The world is worth nothing,” he cried. “The whole thing is a stupidity.”

The Weathercock was what is called “used up;” and that quality would certainly have made him interesting in the eyes of the Cucumber, if she had known it; but she had only eyes for the Yard Cock, who had now actually come into her own yard.

The wind had blown down the plank, but the storm had passed over.

“What do you think of that crowing?” inquired the Yard Cock of his hens and chickens. “It was a little rough—the elegance was wanting.”

And hens and chickens stepped upon the muck-heap, and the Cock strutted to and fro upon it like a knight.

“Garden plant!” he cried out to the Cucumber; and in this one word she understood his deep feeling, and forgot that he was pecking at her and eating her up—a happy death!

And the hens came, and the chickens came, for where one of them runs the rest run also; they clucked and chirped, and looked at the Cock, and were proud that he was of their kind.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” he crowed. “The chickens will grow up to be large fowls if I cry it out in the poultry-yard of the world.”

And hens and chickens clucked and chirped, and the Cock told them a great piece of news:

“A cock can lay an egg; and do you know what there is in that egg? In that egg lies a basilisk. No one can stand the sight of such a thing; people know that, and now you know it too—you know what is in me, and what a champion of all cocks I am!”

And with this the Yard Cock flapped his wings, and made his comb swell up, and crowed again; and all of them shuddered—all the hens and the chickens; but they were proud that one of their people should be such a champion of all cocks. They clucked and chirped till the Weathercock heard; he heard it, but he never stirred.

“It’s all stupid stuff!” said a voice within the Weathercock. “The Yard Cock does not lay eggs, and I am too lazy to lay any. If I liked, I could lay a wind-egg; but the world is not worth a wind-egg. And now I don’t like even to sit here any longer.”

And with this the Weathercock broke off; but he did not kill the Yard Cock, though he intended to do so, as the hens declared. And what does the moral say?—“Better to crow than to be ‘used up’ and break off.”

[ 1860 ]

The Beetle

—

The Emperor’s favourite horse was shod with gold; he had a golden horseshoe on each foot.

But why was that?

He was a beautiful creature, with slender legs, bright, intelligent eyes, and a mane that hung down like a veil over his neck. He had carried his master through the smoke of gunpowder and the rain of bullets, and had heard the balls whistling past. He had bitten, kicked, and taken part in the fight when the enemy pressed forward, and, leaping with the emperor across the fallen horse of one of the foe, had saved the bright golden crown and the life of the emperor—and that was worth more than all the bright gold. And that is why the emperor’s horse had golden horseshoes.

A Beetle came creeping out. “First the great, then the small,” he said; “but size is not everything.” And with that he stretched out his thin legs.

“Well, what do you want?” asked the Smith.

“Golden shoes,” replied the Beetle.

“Why, you must be out of your senses!” cried the Smith. “You want golden shoes too?”

“Certainly—golden shoes!” said the Beetle. “Am I not as good as that creature there, that is waited on, and brushed, and has food and drink put before him? Don’t I belong to the imperial stables too?”

“But why has the horse golden shoes?” asked the Smith. “Don’t you understand that?”

“Understand? I understand that it is a personal slight for me,” said the Beetle. “It is done to vex me, and I will therefore go out into the wide world.”

“Go along with you then!” said the Smith.

“You rude fellow!” said the Beetle; and then he went out of the stable, flew a short distance, and soon afterwards found himself in a beautiful flower-garden, fragrant with roses and lavender.

“Isn’t it beautiful here?” asked one of the little Lady-bird Beetles that were flying about with their red, shield-shaped, black-spotted wings. “How sweet it is here, and how lovely!”

“I have been used to better than that,” said the Beetle. “You call this beautiful? Why, there’s not even a dunghill.”

Then he went on, under the shadow of a big gillyflower, where a caterpillar was creeping along.

“How beautiful the world is!” said the Caterpillar. “The sun is so warm, and everything so happy! And when one day I fall asleep and die, as they call it, I shall awake as a butterfly.”

“What things you do fancy!” said the Beetle. “To fly about as a butterfly! I come from the Emperor’s stable, but no one there—not even the Emperor’s favourite horse, that wears my cast-off golden shoes—fancies anything like that. Get wings! Fly! Well, we’ll fly now!” And away flew the Beetle. “I don’t want to be vexed, but all the same, I am.” he said, as he flew off.

Soon afterwards he fell upon a great lawn; here he lay awhile, and pretended to be asleep, but at last he really dozed off.

Suddenly a heavy shower of rain fell from the clouds. The noise awoke the Beetle, and he wanted to creep into the earth, but could not, for he was being turned over and over. First he was swimming on his stomach, then on his back, and flying was not to be thought of—he despaired of getting away from the place alive. So he remained, quietly lying where he was. When the rain had left off a little, and the beetle had blinked the water out of his eyes, he saw the gleam of something white; it was linen laid out to bleach. He reached it and crept into a fold of the damp linen. It was certainly not so comfortable here as in the warm dunghill in the stable, but nothing better happened to be at hand, and so he stayed where he was—stayed a whole day and a whole night, and the rain stayed too. Towards morning he crept out; he was greatly annoyed at the climate. On the linen sat two Frogs, their bright eyes sparkling with pure joy.

“This is glorious weather,” said one. “How refreshing! And the linen keeps the water together so beautifully. My hind legs are itching to swim.”

“I should like to know,” said the other, “whether the swallow which flies about so far has ever found a better climate than ours in her many travels abroad. So nice and damp! It is really like lying in a wet ditch. Whoever doesn’t like this can’t be said to love his native country.”

“Have you then never been in the Emperor’s stable?” asked the Beetle. “There the dampness is warm and fragrant; that’s the climate for me! But you can’t take it with you when you travel. Is there no dung-heap in the garden here, where people of rank, like myself, can feel at home and take up their quarters?”

The Frogs either could not or would not understand him.

“I never ask twice!” exclaimed the beetle, after he had already asked three times and received no answer.

Then he went a little farther, and came across a piece of broken pottery which should certainly not have been lying there, but which, as it lay, afforded a good shelter against wind and weather. Here lived several families of Earwigs; they did not require much—only company. The females are full of tenderest maternal love, and every mother therefore praised her child as the most beautiful and cleverest.

“Our little son is engaged to be married!” said one mother. “Sweet innocence! It is his sole ambition to get into a parson’s ear someday. He is so artless and lovable; his engagement will keep him steady. What joy for a mother!”

“Our son,” said another mother, “had hardly crept out of the egg when he was off on his travels. He’s all life and spirits; he’ll run his feelers off. What joy for a mother! Isn’t it so, Mr Beetle?” They recognized the stranger by the cut of his wings.

“You are both right!” said the Beetle, and then they begged him to enter the room—that is to say, to come as far as he could under the piece of pottery.

“Now you see my little earwig too,” cried a third and a fourth mother. “They are the sweetest children, and very playful. They are never naughty, except when they occasionally have pains in their inside; unfortunately, one gets those only too easily at their age.”

In this manner every mother spoke of her baby, and the babies joined in too, and used the little nippers on their tails to tweak the Beetle’s moustache.

“Yes, they’re always up to something, the little rascals!” said the mothers, bubbling over with maternal affection. But this bored the Beetle, and so he asked whether it was much farther to the dunghill.

“Why, that’s out in the wide world, on the other side of the ditch,” answered an Earwig. “I hope none of my children will go so far—it would be the death of me.”

“I’ll try to get as far anyhow,” said the Beetle; and he went off without saying goodbye, for that is considered the most polite way. By the ditch he met several of his kind—beetles, all of them.

“We live here!” they said. “We are very comfortable. May we ask you to step down into the rich mud? The journey has no doubt been very fatiguing for you?”

“Very,” said the Beetle. “I have been exposed to the rain, and have had to lie on linen, and cleanliness always weakens me very much. I have pain, too, in one wing, through having stood in the draught under a broken piece of pottery. It is really quite a comfort to get once more among one’s own kindred.”

“Perhaps you come from the dung-heap?” asked the eldest.

“Oho! from higher places!” cried the Beetle. “I come from the Emperor’s stable, where I was born with golden shoes on my feet. I am travelling on a secret mission, but you must not ask me any questions about it, for I can’t betray the secret.”

With that the Beetle stepped down into the rich mud. There sat three young Beetle maidens; they giggled, because they did not know what to say.

“None of them are engaged yet,” said the mother; and the young Beetle maidens giggled again, this time from bashfulness.

“I have not seen greater beauties in the imperial stables,” said the Beetle, taking a rest.

“Don’t you spoil my girls for me, and don’t speak to them unless you have serious intentions. But about that I have no doubt, and so I give you my blessing!”

“Hurrah!” cried all the other Beetles, and our friend was now engaged. The engagement was immediately followed by the wedding, for there was no reason for delay.

The following day passed very pleasantly, and the one after that fairly so; but on the third day the time had come to think of providing food for the wife, and perhaps even for children.

“I have been taken in,” thought the Beetle. “Nothing is therefore left for me but to take them in, in return.”

So said, so done. Away he went, and stayed out the whole day and the whole night—and his wife sat there, a lonely widow.

“Oh!” said the other Beetles, “that fellow whom we received into our family is a thorough vagabond; he went away and left his wife sitting there, to be a burden upon us.”

“Well, then she must be passed off as unmarried again, and stay here as my child,” said the mother. “Shame on the villain who deserted her!”

In the meantime the Beetle had gone on travelling, and had sailed across the watery ditch on a cabbage-leaf. In the morning two people came to the ditch; when they spied him they picked him up, turned him over and over, and looked very wise, especially one of them—a boy. “Allah sees the black beetle in the black stone and in the black rock. Isn’t it written so in the Koran?” Then he translated the beetle’s name into Latin, and enlarged upon its species and nature. The second person, an older scholar, was for taking him home with them. But the other said that they had specimens quite as good as that, and this, our Beetle thought, was not a polite thing to say—so he suddenly flew out of the speaker’s hand. His wings being now dry, he flew a pretty long distance and reached a hothouse, where, one of the windows being ajar, he slipped in comfortably and buried himself in the fresh manure.

“How delightful it is here!” he said.

Soon after he fell asleep, and dreamed that the Emperor’s favourite horse had fallen and had given him his golden horseshoes, with the promise to have two more made for him.

That was very acceptable. When the Beetle awoke he crept out and looked about him. What splendour there was in the hothouse! In the background were palm trees, growing to a great height; the sun made them look transparent, and under them what a wealth of greenery and bright flowers, red as fire, yellow as amber, and white as driven snow!

“There is an incomparable splendour in these plants,” said the Beetle. “How fine they will taste when they decay! This is a good larder! There must certainly be relatives of mine living here. I’ll have a look round to see if I can find anyone to associate with. Proud I am, and that is my pride.” And now he strolled about in the hothouse, and thought of his beautiful dream of the dead horse, and the golden horseshoes he had inherited.

Suddenly a hand seized the Beetle, squeezed him, and turned him over and over.

The gardener’s son and a playmate had come up to the hothouse, had spied the Beetle, and wanted to have some fun with him. First he was wrapped up in a vine-leaf, and then put into a warm trousers pocket. There he cribbled and crabbled about with all his might; but for this he got a squeeze from the boy’s hand, and that taught him to be quiet. Then the boy ran off to the great lake at the end of the garden. Here the Beetle was put into an old, half-broken wooden shoe, in which a little stick was placed for a mast, and to this mast the Beetle was bound by a woollen thread. Now he was a sailor and had to sail. The lake was not very large, but to the Beetle it seemed an ocean; he was so terrified by it that he fell on his back and kicked out with his feet. The little ship sailed away, and the current of the water seized it. But when it went too far from the shore the little boy would turn up his trousers, go into the water, and fetch it back to the land. But at last, just as it was setting out to sea again in full sail, the children were called away for something important. They hastened away from the lake, and left the little ship to its fate. This drifted farther and farther away from the shore, and farther out into the open sea. It was terrible for the Beetle, for he could not get away, being bound to the mast. Then a Fly paid him a visit. “What lovely weather!” said the Fly. “I’ll rest here and bask in the sun; it’s very pleasant for you here.”

“You speak without knowing the facts! Don’t you see that I’m a prisoner?”

“But I’m not,” said the Fly, and flew off.

“Well, now I know the world,” said the Beetle. “It’s a base world. I’m the only honest one in it. First they refuse me golden shoes; then I have to lie on wet linen and stand in a draught; and, to cap all, they fasten a wife on to me. Then, when I have taken a quick step out into the world, and learned how comfortable one can be there, and how it ought to be for me, up comes a human boy, binds me fast, and leaves me to the wild waves, while the Emperor’s favourite horse prances about in golden shoes. That vexes me most of all! But one must not count on sympathy in this world. My career is very interesting; but what’s the use of that if nobody knows it? The world doesn’t deserve to be made acquainted with my story, for it ought to have given me golden shoes in the Emperor’s stable when the Emperor’s favourite horse was being shod, and I stretched out my legs too. If I had received golden shoes I should have been an ornament to the stable; now the stable has lost me, the world has lost me—all is over!”

But all was not over yet. A boat with some young girls in it came along.

“Look, there’s an old wooden shoe sailing along,” said one of the girls.

“There’s a little creature tied up in it!” cried another.

The boat came quite close to our Beetle’s little ship, and the young girls fished it up out of the water. One of them drew a small pair of scissors out of her pocket, cut the woollen thread without hurting the Beetle, and when she got to the shore placed him in the grass.

“Creep, creep. Fly, fly away—if you can,” she said. “Freedom is a splendid thing.”

The Beetle flew up and went through the open window of a large building; there he sank down, tired and exhausted, upon the fine, soft long mane of the Emperor’s favourite horse, who was standing in his stable; and the beetle found himself at home again. The Beetle clung fast to the mane, and sat there quite still for a time to recover.

“Here I sit on the Emperor’s favourite horse—sit on him just like an Emperor. But what was I going to say? Ah, yes! I remember. It’s a good idea, and quite correct. Why does the Emperor’s horse have golden shoes? That’s what the smith asked me. Now the answer is clear to me. The horse had golden horseshoes on my account!”

And now the Beetle was in a good temper. “Travelling opens one’s mind,” he said.

The sun’s rays came streaming into the stable upon him, and made things bright and pleasant.

“The world is not so bad after all, when you come to examine it,” said the Beetle; “but you must know how to take things as they come.”

[ 1861 ]

The Old Street Lamp

—

Have you ever heard the story of the old Street Lamp? It is not particularly amusing, it is true, but still it is worth hearing once.

It was a very honest old Lamp, that had done its duty for many, many years, but was now to retire from active service. It felt like an old ballet-dancer who dances for the last time, and tomorrow will sit forgotten in her garret. The Lamp was very anxious indeed about the next day, for it knew that it was to appear for the first time in the Town Hall and be examined by the mayor and the council to see whether it was fit for further service or not.

Then it was to be decided whether it was in future to show its light for the inhabitants of one of the suburbs, or in some factory in the country; its way might even lead straight to an iron foundry to be melted down. In the latter case anything might indeed be made of it, but the thought whether it would then retain the recollection of having formerly been a Street Lamp troubled it terribly. Whatever might happen to it, this much was certain: that it would be separated from the watchman and his wife, who looked upon it as belonging to their family. When the Lamp was hung up for the first time, the watchman was a sturdy young man; it happened at the very same hour when he first entered on his duties. Yes, it was certainly a long time ago, that it became a lamp and he a watchman. The wife was at that time rather proud. Only when she went by in the evening would she deign to notice the Lamp; in the daytime, never. But now, of late years, when they all three, the watchman, his wife, and the Lamp, had grown old, the wife had also tended it, cleaned it, and provided it with oil. The old couple were thoroughly honest; never had they cheated the Lamp of one drop of its proper measure of oil.

It was its last evening in the street, and on the morrow it was to go to the Town Hall; these were two gloomy thoughts. No wonder that it did not burn brightly. But many other thoughts passed through it too. To how much had it given its light! How much it had seen! Perhaps quite as much as the mayor and the council. But it did not give utterance to these thoughts, for it was a good, honest old Lamp, which would never have hurt anyone, least of all the authorities. It thought of many things, and from time to time its flame flickered up. At such moments it had a feeling that it, too, would be remembered.

“There was that handsome young man—it is certainly a long time ago—who had a letter on pink paper with gilt edges. It was so daintily written, as if by a lady’s hand. Twice he read it and kissed it and looked up at me with eyes which plainly said, ‘I am the happiest of men!’ Only he and I knew what was written in this first letter from his love. Yes, there is still another pair of eyes that I remember. It is something wonderful how thoughts jump about. There was a funeral procession in the street; the young beautiful lady lay on a grand hearse in a coffin covered with flowers and wreaths, and the number of torches dimmed my light. The people stood in crowds along the houses, and all followed the funeral as it passed. But when the torches were out of my sight and I looked round, a single person still stood leaning against my post, weeping. Never shall I forget those mournful eyes that looked up to me!” These and similar thoughts occupied the old Street Lamp, which was burning today for the last time.

The sentry who is relieved from his post at least knows his successor and may whisper a few words to him. The Lamp did not know who was to succeed it, and yet it might have given a few useful hints regarding rain and fog, and some information as to how far the rays of the moon fell upon the pavement, and from what side the wind generally blew, and many other things.

On the bridge of the gutter stood three persons who wished to introduce themselves to the Lamp, believing that the latter itself had the bestowal of the office it filled. The first person was a herring’s head, which could shine in the dark too. He thought it would be a great saving of oil if he were stuck up on the post. Number two was a piece of rotten wood, which also shines in the dark. It believed itself to be descended from an old stock, once the pride of the forest. The third person was a glow-worm; the Lamp could not imagine where this one had come from, but there it was, and it could give light too. But the rotten wood and the herring’s head swore by all that they held sacred that it only gave light at certain times, and could therefore not be taken into account.

The old Lamp declared that none of them gave sufficient light to fill the post of a street lamp; but none of them believed that. They were therefore very glad to hear that the office could not be given away by the Lamp itself, declaring that it was much too decrepit to choose aright.

At the same moment the Wind from the street corner came rushing along and passed through the air-holes of the old Lamp. “What do I hear?” he said; “you are going away tomorrow? Do I meet you today for the last time? Then I must give you something at parting; I am now going to blow into your brain box in such a way that in future you will not only be able to remember all that you have seen and heard, but it will be so bright within you that you will be able to see all that is read about, or spoken of, in your presence.”

“Oh, that is really much, very much,” said the old Lamp.

“I thank you heartily. I only hope I shall not be melted down.”

“That won’t happen just yet,” said the Wind. “Now I am blowing memory into you; if you get many presents like that, you will be able to pass your old age very pleasantly.”

“I only hope I shall not be melted down,” said the Lamp. “Or should I, in that case, also retain my memory?”

“Old Lamp, be sensible,” said the Wind, and blew.

At that moment the Moon came out from behind some clouds.

“What do you give the Lamp?” asked the Wind.

“I give nothing,” answered the Moon. “I am on the wane, and the lamps have never shone for me, but I have shone for the lamps.” [21] With these words she again hid herself behind the clouds to escape from further demands.

A drop now fell down upon the Lamp as if from the roof; the drop declared that it came from the grey clouds, and that it was also a present, and perhaps the best of all. “I will penetrate you so thoroughly that you will have the power to turn into rust and to crumble away in a single night, if you wish it.”

This seemed to be a very bad present to the Lamp, and the wind thought the same. “Does no one give any more? Does no one give any more?” he blew as loud as he could.

There fell a bright shooting star, forming one long band of light.

“What was that?” cried the Herring’s Head. “Didn’t a star fall down? I verily believe it went into the Lamp. Really, if such high-placed personages compete for this post, we may say good night and betake ourselves home.”

And they so they did, all three.

The old Lamp shed a wonderfully strong light. “That was a splendid present!” it said. “The bright stars, which have always been my greatest joy, and which shine as I have never been able to shine, although I have tried with all my might, have yet noticed me, the poor old Lamp, and have sent me a present, consisting in the power of letting those I love see all that I remember, and which I myself see as plainly as if it stood before me. And herein lies true pleasure; for joy that cannot be shared with others is only half joy.”

“Such sentiments do you honour,” said the Wind. “But for that, wax candles will be necessary. If these are not lit up in you, your rare powers will be of no use to others. Do you see?—the stars have not thought of that; they take you and every other light to be wax candles. But I must go down.” And the wind went down.

“Good heavens! Wax candles!” said the Lamp. “I never had such things till now, and don’t suppose I shall get them in the future. I only hope I shall not be melted down.”

The next day—well, the next day we shall do better to pass over. The next evening the Lamp was reclining in an armchair. Guess where! At the old watchman’s. He had begged of the mayor and council, in consideration of his long and faithful services, the favour of being allowed to keep the old Lamp, which he himself had set up and lit for the first time on his first day of office, four-and-twenty years ago. He looked upon it as his child, for he had no other; and the Lamp was given to him.

Now it lay in the armchair, near the warm stove. It seemed as if it had got bigger, for it occupied the chair all alone.

The old people sat at supper, and cast kindly glances at the old Lamp, to whom they would gladly have given a place at the table.

Their dwelling was certainly only a cellar, six feet below the ground, and one had to go along a stone passage to get to the room. But inside, it was very comfortable and warm, strips of cloth having been nailed along the door. Everything was clean and neat; there were curtains round the little beds and before the little windows. On the windowsill stood two curious flower-pots which Christian the sailor had brought from the East or West Indies. They were made of clay, and represented two elephants whose backs were wanting; in their place there sprang up from the earth with which one figure was filled the most beautiful chives: that was the kitchen garden. Out of the other grew a large geranium: that was the flower garden. On the wall hung a large coloured picture of the Congress of Vienna; there they had all the kings and emperors at once. A kitchen clock with heavy weights went “tick, tick,” and always went too fast; but the old people declared that this was much better than going too slow. They ate their supper, and the Street Lamp lay, as we have said, in the armchair close to the stove. It seemed to the Lamp as if the whole world had been turned round and round. But when the old watchman looked at it and spoke of what they two had gone through together—in rain and fog, in the short bright summer nights, as well as in the long nights of winter, when the snow came down and one longed to be back in the cellar—then the old Lamp felt all right again. It saw everything as plainly as if it were now taking place; yes, the wind had provided it with a capital light.

The old people were very active and industrious; not an hour was spent in idleness. On Sunday afternoons some book or other was brought out—preferably a book of travels. And the old man read aloud of Africa, of the great forests, of the elephants which run about wild; and the old woman listened intently, with stolen glances at the clay elephants which served as flower-pots.

“I can almost picture it to myself,” said she. And the Lamp heartily wished that a wax candle had been there, and could have been lit up within it; then the old woman could have seen everything to the smallest detail, just as the Lamp saw it: the high trees, the branches all closely interwoven, the naked black people on horseback, and bands of elephants trampling down the reeds and bushes with their broad clumsy feet.

“What is now the use of all my powers if I get no wax candle?” sighed the Lamp. “They have only tallow candles and oil, and that won’t do.”

One day a great heap of wax candle-ends came down into the cellar; the largest pieces served as lights, the small ones the old woman used for waxing her thread. So there were wax candles enough, but it occurred to no one to put a little piece into the Lamp.

“Here stand I with my rare powers,” thought the Lamp. “I carry everything within me, and cannot let them take part in it; they do not know that I am able to transform bare walls into the most gorgeous tapestries, into the most beautiful woods, into everything they can wish for.” The Lamp was, however, kept clean, and stood shining in a corner where it caught everybody’s eye. Strangers considered it a great piece of rubbish; but the old people did not mind that: they loved the Lamp.

One day—it was the old watchman’s birthday—the old woman approached the Lamp, smiling to herself, and said: “I’ll have some illuminations today in honour of my old man.” And the Lamp rattled its metal frame and thought: “Well, at last they have a bright idea.” But the idea only went as far as oil, and no wax candle came forth. The Lamp burned the whole evening, but now saw only too well that the gift of the star would remain a lost treasure for all its life. Then it had a dream—for one possessing its rare faculties, there was, of course, nothing wonderful in that. It seemed to it that the old people were dead, and that it had itself come to the iron foundry to be melted down. It felt quite as terrified as the time when it had to go to the Town Hall to be inspected by the mayor and the council. But although the power had been given it to fall into rust and dust at will, still it did not do so. It was put into the furnace and turned into an iron candlestick to hold wax candles—as beautiful a candlestick as anyone could wish for. It had received the shape of an angel holding a large bouquet, and in the middle of the bouquet the wax candle was to be placed. The candlestick had a place given to it on a green writing-table. The room was very comfortable: many books stood round it, and the walls were hung with beautiful pictures; it belonged to a poet. Everything that he thought or wrote showed itself round about him. Nature changed itself into thick dark forests, into smiling meadows where the storks strutted about, into a ship on the billowy sea, into the clear sky with all its stars.

“What powers lie in me!” said the old Lamp, awakening. “I could almost wish to be melted down. But no! that must not be while the old people live. They love me for myself alone, they keep me bright, and supply me with oil. I am as well off as the picture of the Congress, in which they take so much pleasure.”

And since that time it enjoyed more inner peace, and the honest old Street Lamp well deserved that.

[ 1847 ]

The Silver Shilling

—

There was once a shilling. He came out quite bright from the mint, and sprang up, and sang out, “Hurrah! now I’m off into the wide world.” And into the wide world he certainly went.

The child held him with soft, warm hands; the miser clutched him in a cold, avaricious palm; the old man turned him goodness knows how many times before parting with him; while careless youth rolled him lightly away. The Shilling was of silver, and had very little copper about him: he had been now a whole year in the world—that is to say, in the country in which he had been struck. But one day he started on his foreign travels; he was the last native coin in the purse borne by his travelling master. The gentleman was himself not aware that he still had this coin until he came across it by chance.

“Why, here’s a shilling from home left to me,” he said. “Well, he can make the journey with me.”

And the Shilling rattled and jumped for joy as it was thrust back into the purse. So here it lay among strange companions, who came and went, each making room for a successor; but the Shilling from home always remained in the bag; which was a distinction for it.

Several weeks had gone by, and the Shilling had travelled far out into the world without exactly knowing where he was, though he learned from the other coins that they were French or Italian. One said they were in such and such a town, another that they had reached such and such a spot; but the Shilling could form no idea of all this. He who has his head in a bag sees nothing; and this was the case with the Shilling. But one day, as he lay there, he noticed that the purse was not shut, and so he crept forward to the opening, to take a look around. He ought not to have done so; but he was inquisitive, and people often have to pay for that. He slipped out into the pocket; and when the purse was taken out at night the Shilling remained behind, and was sent out into the passage with the clothes. There he fell upon the floor: no one heard it, no one saw it.

Next morning the clothes were carried back into the room; the gentleman put them on, and continued his journey, while the Shilling remained behind. The coin was found, and was required to go into service again, so he was sent out with three other coins.

“It is a pleasant thing to look about one in the world,” thought the Shilling, “and to get to know strange people and foreign customs.”

And now began the history of the Shilling, as told by himself.

“‘Away with him! he’s bad—no use.’ These words went through and through me,” said the Shilling. “I know I sounded well and had been properly coined. The people were certainly mistaken. They could not mean me. But, yes, they did mean me: I was the one of whom they said, ‘He’s bad—he’s no good.’ ‘I must get rid of that fellow in the dark,’ said the man who had received me; and I was passed at night, and abused in the daytime. ‘Bad—no good!’ was the cry: ‘we must make haste and get rid of him.’

“And I trembled in the fingers of the holder each time I was to be secretly passed on as a coin of the country.

“What a miserable shilling I am! Of what use is my silver to me, my value, my coinage, if all these things are looked on as worthless? In the eyes of the world one has only the value the world chooses to put upon one. It must be terrible indeed to have a bad conscience, and to creep along on evil ways, if I, who am quite innocent, can feel so badly because I am only thought guilty.

“Each time I was brought out I shuddered at the thought of the eyes that would look at me, for I knew that I should be rejected and flung back upon the table, like an impostor and a cheat. Once I came into the hands of a poor old woman, to whom I was paid for a hard day’s work, and she could not get rid of me at all. No one would accept me, and l was a perfect worry to the old Dame.

“‘I shall certainly be forced to deceive someone with this shilling,’ she said; ‘for, with the best will in the world, I can’t hoard up a false shilling. The rich baker shall have him; he will be able to bear the loss—but it’s wrong in me to do it, after all.’

“‘And I must lie heavy on that woman’s conscience too,’ sighed I. ‘Am I really so much changed in my old age?’

“And the Woman went her way to the rich baker; but he knew too well what kind of shillings would pass to take me, and he threw me back at the Woman, who got no bread for me. And I felt miserably low to think that I should be the cause of distress to others—I who had been in my young days so proudly conscious of my value and of the correctness of my mintage. I became as miserable as a poor shilling can be whom no one will accept; but the Woman took me home again, and looked at me with a friendly, hearty face, and said:

“‘No, I will not deceive anyone with thee. I will bore a hole through thee, that everyone may see thou art a false thing. And yet—it just occurs to me—perhaps this is a lucky shilling; and the thought comes so strongly upon me that I am sure it must be true! I will make a hole through the shilling, and pass a string through the hole, and hang the coin round the neck of my neighbour’s little boy for a lucky shilling.’

“So she bored a hole through me. It is certainly not agreeable to have a hole bored through one; but many things can be borne when the intention is good. A thread was passed through the hole, and I became a kind of medal, and was hung round the neck of the little child; and the child smiled at me, and kissed me, and I slept all night on its warm, innocent neck.

“When the morning came, the child’s mother took me up in her fingers and looked at me, and she had her own thoughts about me—I could feel that very well. She brought out a pair of scissors, and cut the string through.

“‘A lucky shilling!’ she said. ‘Well, we shall soon see about that.’

“And she laid me in vinegar, so that I turned quite green. Then she plugged up the hole, and carried me, in the evening twilight, to the lottery collector, to buy a lottery ticket that should bring her luck.

“How miserably wretched I felt! There was a stinging feeling in me as if I should crumble to bits. I knew that I should be called false and thrown down—and before a crowd of other shillings and coins, too, who lay there with images and inscriptions of which they might be proud. But I escaped that disgrace, for there were many people in the collector’s room—he had a great deal to do, and I went rattling down into the box among the other coins. Whether my ticket won anything or not I don’t know; but this I do know, that the very next morning I was recognized as a bad shilling, and was sent out to deceive and deceive again. That is a very trying thing to bear when one knows one has a good character, and of that I am conscious.

“For a year and a day I thus wandered from house to house and from hand to hand, always abused, always unwelcome: no one trusted me; and I lost confidence in the world and in myself. It was a heavy time. At last, one day a traveller, a strange gentleman, arrived, and I was passed to him, and he was polite enough to accept me for current coin; but he wanted to pass me on, and again I heard the horrible cry, ‘False! Good-for-nothing!’

“‘I received it as a good coin,’ said the man, and he looked closely at me: suddenly he smiled all over his face; and I had never seen that expression before on any face that looked at me. ‘Why, what ever is that?’ he said. ‘That’s one of our own country coins, a good honest shilling from my home, and they’ve bored a hole through him, and they call him false. Now, this is a curious circumstance. I must keep him and take him home with me.’

“A glow of joy thrilled through me when I heard myself called a good honest shilling; and now I was to be taken home, where each and every one would know me, and be sure that I was real silver and properly coined. I could have thrown out sparks for very gladness; but, after all, it’s not in my nature to throw out sparks. Steel can do so, but not silver.

“I was wrapped up in clean white paper, so that I should not be mixed with the other coins, and spent; and on festive occasions, when fellow-countrymen met together, I was shown about, and they spoke very well of me: they said I was interesting—and it is wonderful how interesting one can be without saying a single word.

“And at last I got home again. All my troubles were ended, joy came back to me, for I was of good silver, and had the right stamp, and I had no more disagreeables to endure, though a hole had been bored through me, as through a false coin: but that does not matter if one is not really false. One must wait for the end, and one will be righted at last—that’s my belief,” said the Shilling.

[ 1862 ]

The Story of the Year

—

It was late in January, and a fearful snowstorm. The snow came flying in a drifting whirl through streets and lanes. The outside of the windowpanes was fairly plastered over with it, and it plumped down from the roofs in masses, and caused a stampede among the people. They rushed, they flew into each other’s arms, clasped each other tight for a moment, and for just so long got a firm foothold. Carriages and horses were powdered all over; the servants turned their backs to the carriages and rode backwards against the wind, foot passengers took care to keep in the lee of some cart which could only move slowly along in the deep snow; and when at last the storm sank to rest, and a narrow path had been cleared along the house-fronts, people when they met face to face stood still in it. Neither liked to take the first step and walk into the deep snow, so that the other could step by. Silent they stood, till finally by a sort of tacit agreement, each of them sacrificed one leg and let that plunge into the snowdrift.

Towards evening it became dead calm. The sky looked as if it had been swept and made more lofty and transparent: the stars looked brand new, and some of them were ever so blue and bright—and there was a cracking frost—anyhow, the top layer of snow managed to become so hard that by the morning it could bear the Sparrows. They hopped about, up here and down there, wherever any shovelling had been done, but little enough could they find to eat, and how they did freeze!

“Twit!” said one of them to another. “This is what people call the New Year. Why, it’s worse than the old one; we might just as well have stuck to that. I’m dissatisfied with the whole thing, and I’ve every reason to be.”

“Yes, just now the humans were running about, shooting in the New Year,” said a little small frost-nipped Sparrow; “they smashed pots against the doors and were clean out of their wits with delight at the old year having gone; and I was glad too, for I expected we should get some warm weather. But nothing’s come of it all; it’s freezing a deal harder than before. The humans have got wrong in their reckoning.”

“That they have,” said a third. He was old, and white on the top of his head. “They’ve got hold of something they call the Almanac. It’s some of their own invention, I suppose, and everything’s to go according to that; only it doesn’t. When the Spring comes, then the year will begin. That’s Nature’s order, and that’s what I go by.”

“But when will the Spring come?” asked the others.

“It’ll come when the stork comes: but there’s a good deal of uncertainty about him, and here in the town there’s nobody that knows anything about it. They understand that better out in the country. Shall we fly out there and wait? One’ll be nearer the Spring there.”

“Yes, that may be all very well,” said one of them who had gone about chirping for some time without really saying anything. “I’ve got some advantages here in the town which I’m afraid I might miss out there. Round here is a house with a family of humans who’ve had the very sensible notion of building three or four flower-pots into the wall with the big mouth inside and the bottom out, and in the bottom there’s been cut a hole big enough for me to fly in and out of. I and my husband have got a nest there, and all our young ones have flown out of that. The human family have, of course, arranged it all so as to have the pleasure of looking at us, else they’d never have done it. They throw out breadcrumbs, too—for their own satisfaction—and so we get our food: one is provided for in a kind of way—and so I think I shall stay, and my husband too—though we’re very much dissatisfied—still, we shall stay.”

“And we shall fly out into the country to see whether the Spring isn’t coming.” And off they flew.

Out in the country it was proper winter: freezing several degrees harder than in the town. The keen wind blew far over the snow-covered fields. The farmer with his great mittens on sat in his sledge and beat himself with his arms to get the cold out of them. His whip lay across his lap; the skinny horses galloped till they smoked again: the snow crackled, and the Sparrows hopped in the ruts and froze. “Tweet, when’s the Spring coming? It stays so long.”

“So long!” rang a voice far over the fields from the high slope covered with snow. And it might have been an echo that one heard; or, again, it might have been the voice of the strange old man who sat there on the top of the snowdrift in the wind and weather. He was quite white—like a farmer in a white frieze coat—with long white hair, white beard, very pale, with large bright eyes.

“Who’s that chap over there?” asked the Sparrows.

“I know that,” said an old Raven who was sitting on the gate-post, and who was condescending enough to recognize that we are all little birds in God’s sight, and so entered into talk with the Sparrows and explained matters. “I know who that old chap is. That’s Winter, the old man from last year. He’s not dead, as the Almanac says; no, he’s more like a regent for the little Prince Spring, who’s coming. Yes, Winter holds the reins. Ugh, it makes you crackle, don’t it, little ones?”

“Yes, now, isn’t that just what I was saying?” said the littlest Sparrow. “That Almanac’s nothing but a make-up of the humans: it isn’t arranged according to Nature. They ought to leave that to us—us that’s organized more delicate!”

And a week went by—almost two weeks. The wood was black, the frozen lake lay heavily still and looked like lead that has cooled. The clouds—no, they were not clouds, they were wet ice-cold mists—hung over all the land. The big black crows went in flights without a caw. It seemed as if all things slept…. There shot a sunbeam out over the lake, and it shone like molten tin. The snow on the fields and on the slopes did not glisten as it used—but the white shape, Winter himself, still sat there with his gaze turned steadily towards the South. He took no note of how the snow carpet sank, as it were, into the earth, how here and there a little grass-green space emerged, and in a moment was alive with sparrows.

“Tweet, tweet, is it coming, the Spring?”

“Spring!” It rang out over field and meadow and through the dark brown woodlands where the moss shone fresh and green on the tree-trunks. And through the air came flying from the South the first two storks. On the back of each sat a fair little child—a boy and a girl; and they kissed the earth in greeting; and where they set foot, white blossoms grew up from beneath the snow. Hand in hand they went up to the old ice-man, Winter, and laid themselves on his breast for yet another greeting. And in that instant all three were hidden from sight, and the whole landscape with them: a thick mist, close and heavy, veiled all things. A little after it cleared a wind sprang up. Onward it came, with mighty gusts, and cleared the fog away. The sun shone out warm. Winter himself had vanished. The fair children of the Spring sat on the throne of the Year.

“That’s what I call New Year,” said the Sparrow. “Now, no doubt, we shall get our rights again, and some compensation for the hard winter.”

Whichever way the two children turned, green buds shot out from bush and tree, the grass grew taller, the sown fields showed brighter and brighter green, and all about her the little girl scattered flowers. She had multitudes of them in her lap, they seemed to teem forth of it, it was always full, however lavishly she strewed them; in her haste she shook a whole snow-fall of blossom out over the apple and peach trees, so that they stood clad in full beauty before they had properly got their green leaves. And she clapped her hands and the boy clapped his, and out came birds, one could not tell whence, and all of them twittered and sang: “Spring is come!”

It was a lovely sight, and many an old granny came out of her house door into the sunshine and straightened herself up and looked out over the yellow blossoms that decked all the meadows just exactly as they had in her young days. The world had turned young again. “Blessed weather it is out here today!” said she.

The forest was still brown-green, bud beside bud, but the woodruff was out, fresh and fragrant, the violets stood there in crowds, and there were anemones, cowslips and oxslips; nay, in every blade of grass was there sap and strength; it was just a broidered carpet to sit upon, and there sat the bride and bridegroom of the Spring and held each other by the hand and sang and smiled and grew.

A gentle rain from heaven fell on them, but they marked it not. The raindrops and the tears of joy were all one. The bride and bridegroom kissed, and in a moment the forest sprang to life. When next the sun rose, all the woods were green.

Hand in hand went the bridal pair beneath the fresh waving roof of leaves, where only the rays of sunlight and the flecking shadows varied the tints of green. A virginal purity and a refreshing fragrance were in the delicate leaves; clear and living babbled river and brook in and out of the velvet-green reeds and over the dappled stones. “Full for ever and always it is and it shall be,” said all Nature. And the cuckoo called and the lark sang, and it was pleasant Spring. All the same, the willows kept woolly mittens over their flowers: they were so horribly cautious, and that is most tiresome.

And so days passed by and weeks passed by, and the heat came sweltering down. Hot waves of air passed through the corn, which grew yellower and yellower. The white lotus of the North on the woodland lakes spread out its great green leaves over the watery mirror, and the fish took shelter beneath them; and on the lee-side of the wood, where the sun blazed on the farmhouse wall and warmed the new-sprung roses through and through—where the cherry-tree boughs hung full of juicy black, almost sun-hot fruit, the beautiful Queen of Summer sat and sang—even she whom we have seen a child and a bride; and she gazed at the dark climbing clouds which in great billows like mountains, blue-black and heavy, were rising higher and higher. From three sides they gathered: then downward and down, like a sea enchanted and turned to stone, they lowered themselves toward the forest, where everything was hushed as under a spell. Every breeze was laid, every bird was still: there was a gravity, an expectation, over all Nature. But on road and path everyone was hurrying—driving, riding or on foot—to get under shelter. All at once it lightened as if the sun had burst forth, dazzling, blinding, consuming, and there was darkness again, with a rolling crash. The rain poured down in torrents—it was night—then day—stillness—then a roar. The young brown-plumaged reeds in the marsh swayed in long billows, the boughs of the forest were veiled in sheets of rain—darkness came—then light—silence—and then a crash. Grass and corn lay beaten down, deluged, as if they could never rise again. Quickly the rain dwindled to single drops, the sun shone out, and from blade and leaf the water-drops glistened like pearls; birds sang, fishes leapt up from the stream, midges danced: and out on a rock in the salt, rain-whipped seawater sat Summer himself, the strong man with the vigorous limbs, his hair drenched—revived by the cool bath he sat in the hot sunshine. All Nature about him was revived, everything was gay, strong and beautiful. It was Summer, warm lovely Summer.

Fresh and sweet was the scent that came from the thick-grown clover fields. The bees hummed there about the ancient moot-place. The brambles twined upward around the altar stone which, washed by the rain, glistened in the sunshine; and from it out flew the queen bee with her swarm, and made wax and honey. No one saw them but the Summer and his mighty spouse; it was for them that the altar-table stood covered with the thank-offerings of Nature.

And the evening sky gleamed like pure gold—no cathedral dome so nobly decked—and the moon shone betwixt the glow of evening and the glow of dawn. It was summertime.

And days passed and weeks passed. The bright sickles of the harvesters shone in the cornfields. The branches of the apple trees bent low beneath their red and yellow fruit, the hops smelt delicious, hanging in great clusters, and under the hazel bushes, where the nuts grew in heavy bunches, rested the husband and the wife, Summer and his spouse, grown grave.

“What wealth!” said she. “All round us is blessing, homelike and good: and yet I cannot tell why, I long for rest—quiet—I know no word for it. They are ploughing the fields all afresh; more and yet more mankind is after gaining. Look, the storks are gathering in groups and following the plough at a distance—the bird of Egypt, that brought us through the air. You remember the time we two came here as children into the land of the North? We brought flowers, fair sunshine and green leafage. The wind has dealt roughly with them now. They are growing brown and dark like the trees of the South; but they do not, like those, bear golden fruit.”

“Is that what you would see?” said Summer. “Then have your pleasure.” And he raised his arm, and the leaves of the forest were tinted with red and with gold, a blaze of colour came over all the woodland: the rose bushes shone with fiery hips, the elder trees were hung with masses of heavy dark berries, the wild chestnuts fell ripened out of the dark-green husks, and within the wood the violets blossomed a second time.

But the Queen of the Year grew yet more quiet and pale. “It blows cold,” she said, “the night brings damp mists. I long for the land of my childhood.”

And she saw the storks take their flight—every one of them—and she stretched her hands out after them. She looked up at the nests that stood empty; in one the tall cornflower had grown up, in another the yellow charlock, as if the nest were only meant for a shelter and fence for them, and up came the Sparrows.

“Twit, what’s gone with the gentlefolk? Why, they can’t bear the wind blowing on ’em, so they’ve left the country! A pleasant journey to ’em.” Yellower and yellower grew the leaves in the wood: one after another they fell. The storms of Autumn were sounding; it was late in harvest-time. And on the yellow fallen leaves lay the Queen of the Year, gazing with gentle eyes toward the shining stars, and her husband stood by her. A gust of wind whirled up the leaves—they fell to earth again, and she was gone. Only a butterfly, the last of the year, was fluttering through the chilly air. And the wet mists came and the icy blast, and the long dark nights. The King of the Year stood there with snow-white hair, but he knew it not, he thought it was the snowflakes that fell from the clouds. A thin covering of snow lay far and wide over the green fields.

And then the church bells rang out for Christmas.

“The birthday bells are ringing,” said the King of the Year. “Soon will the new King and Queen be born, and I shall have won my rest like her—rest in the shining star.”

And in the fresh green fir-wood, where the snow lay, the Angel of Christmas stood, blessing the young trees that were to deck his feast.

“Joy in the house and beneath the green boughs,” said the old King of the Year—a few weeks had aged him into a snow-white veteran. “The time hastens on towards my rest, and the young couple of the year will soon take the sceptre and crown.”

“Still the power is yours,” said the Angel of Christmas, “the power and not the rest. Let the snow lie and keep the young seed warm all about you. Learn to endure that homage should be paid to another while yet you are the Prince: learn to be forgotten and yet go on living. The time of your freedom will come when the Spring comes.”

“When will the Spring come?” Winter asked.

“It will come when the stork comes.”

And with white locks and snow-white hair, Winter sat, cold as ice, old and bent, yet strong as the winter wind and the hardness of ice, high up on the snowdrift of the upland, gazing southward ever, just as the Winter before had sat and gazed. The ice cracked, the snow creaked, the skaters circled on the bright lakes, and ravens and crows stood sharply out against the white background. There was no stir of wind, and in the still air Winter clenched his fists, and the ice grew fathoms thick between shore and shore.

Then out came the Sparrows from the town again and asked: “Who’s that old man over there?” And the raven sat there again—or a son of his, which comes to the same—and told them: “That’s Winter, the old man from last year. He’s not dead, as the Almanacs say, but regent for the Spring who’s coming.”

“When is the Spring coming?” said the Sparrows. “When it does, we shall have a good time, and better management. The old one is no good at all.”

And in silent thought Winter beckoned to the black leafless wood, where every tree showed clear the beautiful form and curve of its branches; and in their winter slumber the icy mists of the clouds lowered themselves. The Ruler was dreaming of the days of his youth and of his manhood; and towards dawn the whole forest stood fair with hoar frost. It was Winter’s dream of Summer. The sunshine melted the snow from the branches.

“When is the Spring coming?” asked the Sparrows.

“Spring!” It came sounding like an echo from the upland where the snow lay. The sun shone out, warmer and warmer, the snow shrank, the birds twittered: “Spring is coming!”

And aloft through the air the first stork came flying; a second followed; a fair child sat on the back of each, and they lighted down upon the green field, and they kissed the earth, and they kissed the old silent man, and like Moses on the Mount he vanished, borne away by the misty cloud.

The Story of the Year was finished.

“That’s all very fine and large,” said the Sparrows, “and it’s also extremely pretty; but it doesn’t agree with the Almanac, so it must be wrong.”

[ 1852 ]

Twelve by the Mail-Coach

—

It was intensely cold, the sky was studded with stars, there was no breath of air stirring.

“Boom!” An old earthen pot was flung against the neighbour’s door. [22] “Bang, bang!” A gun was fired off. They were greeting the New Year. It was New Year’s Eve! The church clock was striking Midnight.

“Ta-ta-ra, ta-ta-ra!” The heavy mail-coach came lumbering up and stopped before the gate of the town. There were twelve passengers in it, for all seats were occupied.

“Hip, hip, hurrah!” cried the people in the houses of the town, where they were keeping New Year’s Night, and rose when the clock struck twelve with their glasses in their hands, drinking the health of the New Year.

“A Happy New Year to you!” was the cry. “A pretty wife! plenty of money! no trouble and sorrow!”

Such were the good wishes expressed amid clinking of glasses. There was singing and ringing! Before the gate of the town stopped the mail-coach with twelve guests, the passengers.

And who were these strangers? Each of them had his passport and luggage with him; they even brought presents for you, for me, and for all the inhabitants of the little town. But who were they, what did they intend to do, and what did they bring with them?

“Good morning!” they called out to the Sentry at the town-gate

“Good morning!” answered the Sentry, for the clock had already struck twelve o’clock.

“Your names? your business?” the Sentry asked the first who left the coach.

“Look for yourself in my passport,” replied the man. “I am I!” And he was indeed a man, clad in a large bearskin and wearing fur boots. “I am the man on whom many people set their hopes. Come and see me tomorrow and I shall give you a New Year’s gift. I throw coppers and silver among the people, and give balls—to wit, thirty-one; but more nights I cannot sacrifice. My ships are frozen in, but my office is warm and pleasant. My name is January; I am a merchant, and carry all my accounts with me.”

Then the second alighted from the coach. He was a jovial fellow; he was a theatrical manager, arranger of masquerades and all sorts of amusements that one could think of. His luggage consisted of a big keg.

“We shall drive the cat out of this keg at carnival time,” he said. “I shall give you and myself pleasure. We shall be merry every day. I have not too long to live—in fact, of all the family my life is the shortest, for I shall only become twenty-eight days old. Sometimes they allow me one day more, but I don’t trouble myself about that. Hurrah!”

“You must not shout so!” said the Sentry.

“Why shouldn’t I?” replied the man. “I am Prince Carnival, travelling under the name of Februarius.”

Then the third left the coach. He looked the very picture of fasting; he carried his nose very high, for he was related to the “forty knights,” and he was a weather-prophet. But this is not a remunerative trade, and therefore he was in favour of fasting. He had a bunch of violets in his button-hole, but it was very small.

“March, March!” cried the fourth after him, slapping his shoulders, “do you not smell something? Come quick into the guardroom; they are drinking punch there, which is your favourite beverage; I can smell it outside. March, Mr. Martins!” But it was not true, he only wished to tease him by making him an April fool; for with such merriment the fourth generally made his entrance into the town. He looked very smart, worked but very little, and kept more holidays than others. “I wish there was a little more steadiness in the world,” he said, “but sometimes one is in good, sometimes in bad, humour, always according to circumstances; one has continually to change one’s dress, for sometimes it rains and sometimes the sun shines. I am a sort of house agent and undertaker; [23] I can laugh and weep according to circumstances. I have my summer-clothes here in my portmanteau, but it would be foolish to put them on. Here I am! On Sundays I take a walk in shoes and white silk stockings, and with a muff.”

After him a lady alighted from the coach. Her name was Miss May. She wore a summer dress and galoshes, her frock was of a light green, and anemones adorned her hair; she smelt so strongly of thyme that the sentry could not help sneezing. “Health and prosperity to you,” she said, greeting him. How pretty she was! She was a singer, but not a theatrical vocalist, nor a ballad-singer; she was a songstress of the grove; she roamed about in the green forests and sang for her own pleasure and amusement.

“Now comes the young married woman,” they cried from inside the coach, and a young, beautiful and distinguished-looking woman stepped out. One could see that Mrs. June was not accustomed to do much for herself, but rather to be waited upon. On the longest day in the year she gave a great dinner-party, that her guests might have time to eat the numerous courses which were served. Although she had her own carriage, she travelled like the others by the mail-coach, in order to show people that she was not haughty. But she was not unaccompanied, for her younger brother Julius was with her. He looked very well fed, wore summer clothes and a straw hat. He had but little luggage, as it was burdensome to carry in the great heat; he had only a pair of bathing-trunks with him.

Then the mother alighted, Mrs. August, a wholesale fruiterer, the proprietress of many fish-ponds and a farmer, wearing a large crinoline; she was stout and hot, worked hard, and carried the beer out to her labourers in the field herself. “In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread,” she used to say; “that is written in the Bible. When the work is done follow the excursions into the country, dance and play under the green trees, and the harvest festivals.” She was an excellent housekeeper.

After her a man came out of the coach who was a painter; he was the famous colourist, September; he would repair to the woods and change the colour of the leaves according to his ideas; and soon it gleamed with crimson, russet, and gold. The master could whistle like a starling; he was a quick worker, and decorated his beer-jug with a twining branch of hops, so that it looked beautiful; he had a strong sense of beauty. There he stood with his colour-box, which made up his whole luggage.

He was followed by a landowner, who only thought of ploughing and preparing the field in the seed-month, and who was fond of field sports. Mr. October had his dog and gun with him, and carried nuts in his game-bag. “Crack, crack!” He had a great deal of luggage, including even an English plough; he talked about agriculture, but on account of the coughing and groaning of his neighbour one could not hear much of it.

It was November who coughed so much when he got out. He suffered a great deal from colds, and blew his nose continually; and yet he declared that he must accompany the servant-girls to their new places and initiate them into their winter service; his cold, he thought, would soon be better when he began wood-cutting, for he was a master woodcutter, and the president of the guild. He passed his evenings cutting wood for skates, for he knew well, he said, that in a few weeks these articles would be in great demand for the people’s amusement.

Finally, the last passenger made her appearance—the old mother December, carrying a foot-warmer with her. The old woman was shivering with cold, but her eyes were as bright as two stars. She held a flower-pot in her arm, in which a little fir tree was growing. “This tree,” she said, “I will take care of and cherish, that it may thrive and grow very tall, till Christmas-eve; it must reach from the floor to the ceiling, and will be covered with glittering lights, gilded apples, and cut-out figures. The foot-warmer warms me like a stove; I shall take a story-book out of my pocket and read it aloud, until all the children in the room are quiet, and all the little figures on the tree become alive; and the little wax angel on the top of the tree opens his wings of tinsel, flies down from his green resting-place, and kisses all the children and grown-up people in the room. Nay, he also kisses the poor children who stand outside in the street and sing the Christmas song of the ‘Star of Bethlehem.’”

“Well, the coach may drive off,” said the Sentry, “now we have all the twelve. And the luggage cart may come up.”

“First let the twelve come in to me,” said the Captain of the guard, “one after the other. I shall keep their passports here; they are all available for one month; when it is gone I shall give them a character on the passports. Now, Mr. January, please walk in.”

And Mr. January accepted the invitation.

When a year is gone, I shall tell you what the twelve passengers have brought you, myself, and all of us. At present I do not know it, and probably they do not know it themselves; for we live in strange times.

[ 1861 ]

The Days of the Week

—

We will also have a good time for once,” said the Days of the Week; “we will come together and have a feast.” But every one of the seven Days was so much occupied all the year round, that they had not a free moment left for enjoyment. They wanted to have a whole day to themselves, and such a day they get every four years on the intercalary day; this day is placed at the end of February, for the purpose of bringing order in the account of time. [24]

And on this intercalary day they decided to meet together, and hold their feast. February being the month of carnivals, they agreed to come together in a carnival fashion, everyone dressed according to his profession and destination; have the best things to eat, and drink the best wines, make speeches, and tell each other the most agreeable and most disagreeable things in unrestrained fellowship. The Norse heroes had a custom, in the good old times, of shying the bones, which they had cleared of all the meat, at each others head; but the week-days thought they would throw bombshells at each other with their mouths, in the form of scorching witticisms, such as might be in keeping with innocent carnival amusements.

And the twenty ninth of February came in due time; with it they assembled.

Sunday, foreman of the week-days, came first, dressed in a black silk cloak. The pious people mistook the cloak for a minister’s gown. The worldly-minded, however, saw that he was dressed in domino for a frolic, and that the full blown carnation, which he wore in his button-hole, was nothing but a little red theatre-lantern, which said, “No more tickets: standing room only; hope you will enjoy yourself.”

Monday, a young mechanic, a distant relative of Sunday, and much given to pleasures, came next. No sooner did he hear the military music of the parade, than he rushed out, saying, “I mast go and hear Offenbach’s music: it does not go to my head, neither to the heart: but it itches in the muscles of my legs. I must dance, and have a swing with the girls, get me a black eye, and then sleep upon it; the next day I go to work with new vigour: did you see the new moon of the week?’

Tuesday is Tyr’s day, the day of strength. “Yes, that I am,” said Tuesday. “I take hold of the work, fasten Mercury’s wings to the merchant’s boots, look after the factory, and see that the wheels are oiled, and turn easily. I also see to it that the tailor sits upon his table, and the street-paver is by his paving-stones. I hold everybody to his business, and have an eye upon them all, and therefore I appear among you in a policeman’s uniform, and my name is ‘Politics day.’ If this is a bad joke, then you may think of a better one, every one of you.”

“And now come I,” said Wednesday. “I stand in the middle of the week; the Germans call me Mr. Midweek. I stand like a young clerk in a store, like a flower among the other honoured days of the week. If we march up in file, then have I three days in front of me, and three days behind; they are my body-guard: and I may with propriety say that I am the most prominent of all the days of the week.”

And now Thursday came in, dressed up like a coppersmith, with a hammer and a copper kettle—token of his aristocratic descent. “I am of very high birth,” said he. “In the northern countries I am named after Thor, the god of thunder; and in the south, after Jupiter, the god of lightning; these two understood how to thunder and lighten, and that has remained in the family.”

And then he beat his copper kettle, and thus proved his high birth.

Friday was dressed up like a young girl, who called herself Freia, the goddess of beauty of the North; for variety’s sake she called herself Venus; that depended altogether on the language of the country in which she appeared. She was of a quiet, cheerful character, she said; but this was the odd day of the leap year, which gives liberty to woman, that she may, according to an old custom, propose to the man she likes without waiting for him to propose to her.

Last came Saturday, waddling along like an old housekeeper, with broom, dust-pan, and other cleaning articles. Her favourite dish was beer-soup, but she was not particularly anxious to have it put on the table on that festive occasion.

And thus the week-days held a banquet, as I have described them; here they are, ready for family use as tableaux. Of course you may improve upon them; we give them only as vignettes for February, the only month that receives an extra day.

[ 1869 ]

The A-B-C Book

—

There was a certain man who set himself to writing new doggerel for the A-B-C Book—two lines to every letter, as in the old one: he fancied the old rhymes were too hackneyed, and that something new was needed for the rising generation. His new A-B-C Book was as yet only in manuscript, and he had placed it by the side of the old printed one, in the great bookcase, full of such a multitude of books, some learned, others mere books of amusement. But the old A-B-C-book would not peaceably endure the new A-B-C Book as a neighbour: he had sprung down from the shelf, giving his rival a push that stretched him on the floor, scattering the loose leaves all about. As for the old A-B-C Book, he lay open at his first page, the most important of all, where stand displayed all the letters, large and small. That page contains within it the essence of all the books that ever were written: it contains the alphabet, the wonderful army of signs that rule the world: a marvellous power, in sooth, have they! It all depends on the order in which they are commanded to stand; they have power to give life or take it away, to gladden or to sadden. Individually they mean nothing; but marshalled, ranked in order by a mighty chieftain, what can they not do?

And now, there they lay, turned upward, and the Cock which was pictured at the beginning of the alphabet beamed out with feathers, red, blue, and green. Proudly he bridled up and ruffled his plumes, for he knew how great was the power of the letters, how honourable his position.

So, finding the old A-B-C Book had fallen open, he flapped his wings, flew forth, and perched on a corner of the bookcase; there he preened himself with his beak, and crowed long and loud. Every single book among them all—and they were all accustomed to stand night and day as in a trance, so long as no one was reading them—every single book was roused by his trumpet-call; and then, when they were all wide awake, the Cock spoke out loudly and clearly about the insult that had been shown toward the worthy, venerable old A-B-C Book.

“Everything is to be new nowadays,” he complained. “Children are so wise now, they can read before they have learned the alphabet. ‘Oh, they want something new!’ declared the man who wrote those stupid new verses that now lie sprawling on the floor. I know them well enough; more than ten times over have I heard him read them aloud, he admired them so much. Saving his presence, I prefer my own, the good old rhymes, with Xanthus for X, and with pictures belonging to them. I will fight for them; I will crow for them! Every book in the bookcase knows them well. But I will just read out these absurd new rhymes. I will try to read them patiently, and then I know we shall all agree that they are good for nothing:

“A.—Air.

The Air spreads round us far and wide,

Above us, and on every side.

“Could anything be more insipid?” commented the Cock. “But I will go on:

“B.—Bear; Boat.

The Bear roams lonely—look, a Boat!

Men hunt him for his good warm coat.

“C.—Columbus.

Columbus seeks America’s shore,

And the earth grows twice as large at before.

“D.—Denmark.

Denmark is a bonnie land;

God shield it with protecting hand!

“Now, that is just what some folk will consider so fine and patriotic,” quoth the Cock. “I don’t; I can find nothing fine here. No matter.

“E.—Elephant.

The Elephant walks with a stately stride

Crushing the jungle on either side.

“F.—Fair.

Fantastic sights are in the Fair;

Let us see the monkeys and dancing bear.

“G.—Gold.

Gold! gold! bright red gold!

Heavy to win, and light to hold.

“I have heard something very like that before,” objected the Cock.

“H.—Hurray.

Hurray! ’tis an easy word to say:

But where is the deed that deserves hurray?

“I should like to know how many children will understand that!” exclaimed the Cock. “I suppose they will put on the title-page, ‘A-B-C Book for Big People and Little;’ but the big folk have something else to do besides reading A-B-C Book rhymes, and the little ones won’t be able to understand them. There are limits to everything. Well, what now?

“I.—Iceland; Island; Ida; Isaac.

Iceland, an Island, lies in the sea;

And Ida and Isaac shall go there with me.

“Perfectly absurd!” declared the Cock.

“K.—Kitten; Kitchen; Knitting.

Whilst in the Kitchen we were sitting,

That frolicsome Kitten tangled my Knitting.

“As bad as the last!” interjected the Cock. “I don’t approve of double rhymes:

“L.—Lion; Land.

Slowly the Lion paces the sand,

With solemn step, in the Nubian Land.

“M.—Morning.

Duly this Morning the sun uprose,

But not for the noisy cock’s loud crows.

“Personalities!’ exclaimed the Cock; “coarse enough, too. But, thank you, good man, I am in tolerable company; I don’t object to being named along with the sun. Let’s try a little further:

“N.—Negro; Night.

Black as a Negro, black as Night;

For where is the soap that can wash him white?

“O.—Olive.

The best of all leaves, which is it?—I know!

The dove’s own Olive begins with an O.

“P.—Patience.

Patience, Prudence, Peace, and Plenty,

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

“Q.—Queen.

A quiet Queen went in quest of a Quill,

For all I know she is seeking it still.

“R.—River; Reeds.

The rapid River runs along,

Reeds and Rushes hear his song.

“S.—Swine.

Proclaim it not, though all the Swine

That in the forest feed were thine.

“Bear with me, my friends!” said the Cock. “I really must stop and crow a little. It tries one’s strength, reading so long: I must get breath.” And then he crowed, shrill as a brass trumpet; it must have been a real pleasure—for the Cock, at least, he always enjoyed it. Then he went on:

“T.—Tea-kettle; Tea-urn.

The Tea-kettle doth to the kitchen belong,

Yet the Tea-urn sings not a better song.

“U.—Upsal.

Upsal is a stately town,

In the map you’ll find the name set down.

“V.W.—Vine; Wine.

O, graceful doth twine the bonnie green Vine,

And from its juice we make good Wine.

“Now, it is quite impossible,” quoth the Cock, “that he can have found anything new for X instead of Xanthus. Nay, what have we here?

“X.—Xantippe.

The sea of marriage has rocks of strife,

As Socrates found with Xantippe, his wife.

“Well, let him take Xantippe, if he likes. He is welcome. Xanthus was ever so much better.

“Y.—Ygdrasil.

Under Ygdrasil tree—an ash, they say—

Sat the gods in council every day;

But the tree is dead and the gods are fled.

“What business had he to make a third line of it? Who wanted more than two, I wonder? And understand it I don’t. But here we come to the last: that’s a comfort—

“Z.—Zephyr.

Sweet Zephyr, the gentle wind from the west,

O, that is the breeze that I love the best!

“Well there’s an end of it—in one sense, at least; I wish we could hear the end of it in the other sense. But, no! it will be printed and sold and read, instead of the noble old rhymes in my book. What says the assembly, learned and unlearned, collectively and individually? What says the alphabet? I have spoken; now let others act!”

The books stood still; the bookcase stood still; but the Cock flew back to his place at great C in the old A-B-C Book, and looked proudly around. “I have spoken well—I have crowed well! The new A-B-C Book can do nothing like it. It will die of a certainty; it is dead already—it has no Cock!”

[ 1858 ]

Sunshine Stories

—

“Now I am going to tell a story,” said the Wind.

“Excuse me,” said the Rain, “but now it is my turn; you have been howling round the corner as hard as ever you could, this long time past.”

“Is this the gratitude you owe me?” said the Wind. “I who, in honour of you, turn inside out—yes, even break—all the umbrellas, when people won’t have anything to do with you.”

“I will speak myself!” said the Sunshine. “Silence!” And the Sunshine said it with such glory and majesty, that the long, weary Wind fell prostrate, and the Rain beat against him, and shook him, and said, “We won’t stand it! She always breaks through, that Madam Sunshine; we won’t listen to her. What she says is not worth hearing.”

And still the Sunshine began to talk, and this is what she said:

“A beautiful swan flew over the rolling, tumbling waves of the ocean. Every one of its feathers shone like gold: one feather drifted down on the great merchant vessel that, with all sail set, was sailing away. The feather dropped on the curly light hair of a young man, whose business it was to care for the goods—supercargo they called him. The feather of the bird of Fortune touched his forehead, became a pen in his hand, and brought him such luck, that very soon he became a wealthy merchant—rich enough to have bought for himself spurs of gold; rich enough to change a golden dish into a nobleman’s shield; and I shone on it,” said the Sunshine.

•  •  •

“The swan flew further, away over the bright green meadow, where the little shepherd-boy, only seven years old, had lain down in the shadow of the old tree, the only tree in sight. The swan, in its flight, kissed one of the leaves of the tree. The leaf fell into the boy’s hand, and it was changed to three leaves, to ten—yes, to a whole book—and in it he read about all the wonders of nature, about his native language, about faith and knowledge. At night he laid the book under his head, that he might not forget what he had been reading.

“The wonderful book led him to the schoolroom, and thence in search of knowledge. I have read his name among the names of learned men,” said the Sunshine.

•  •  •

“The swan flew into the quiet, lonely forest, rested awhile on the dark, deep lake, where the water-lilies grow; where the wild apples are to be found on the shore; where the cuckoo and wild pigeon have their homes.

“A poor woman was in the wood, gathering firewood—fallen branches and dry sticks; she carried them in a bundle on her back, and in her arms she held her little child. She saw the golden swan, the bird of Fortune, rise from among the reeds on the shore. What was that that glittered? A golden egg, still quite warm. She laid it in her bosom, and the warmth remained in it. Surely there was life in the egg! She heard a gentle pecking inside of the shell, but mistook the sound, and thought she heard her own heart beating.

“At home, in the poor cottage, she took out the egg; ‘tick, tick,’ it said, as if it had been a valuable gold watch; but that it was not, only an egg—a real, living egg. The egg cracked and opened, and a dear little baby-swan, all feathered as with purest gold, put out its little head; round its neck it had four rings, and as the poor woman had four boys—three at home, and the little one that she had had with her in the lonely wood—she understood at once that here was a ring for each boy. Just as she had taken them, the little gold-bird took flight. She kissed each ring, made each of the children kiss one of the rings, laid it next to the child’s heart a while, then put it on his finger. I saw it all,” said the Sunshine, “and I saw what followed.

“One of the boys was playing in a ditch, and took a lump of clay in his hand, turned and twisted and pressed it between his fingers, till it took shape, and was like Jason, [25] who sought and found the golden fleece.

“The second boy ran out on the meadow, where the flowers stood—flowers of all imaginable colours. He gathered a handful, and squeezed them so tight that all the juice spurted into his eyes, and some of it wetted the ring. It cribbled and crawled in his thoughts, and in his hands, and after many a day, and many a year, people in the great city talked of the great painter that he was.

“The third child held the ring so tight in his teeth, that it gave forth sound, an echo of the song in the depth of his heart. Thoughts and feelings rose in beautiful sounds; rose like singing swans; plunged, like swans, into the deep, deep sea. He became a great master, a great composer, of whom every country has the right to say, ‘He was mine!’ for he was the world’s.

“And the fourth little one was—yes, he was—the ‘ugly duck’ of the family; they said he had the pip, and must have pepper and butter, like the little sick chickens, and that he got; but of me he got a warm, sunny kiss,” said the Sunshine. “He got ten kisses for one; he was a poet, and was buffeted and kissed, alternately, all his life. But he held what no one could take from him—the Ring of Fortune, from Dame Fortune’s golden swan. His thoughts took wings, and flew up and away, like singing butterflies—the emblem of immortality!”

“That was a dreadfully long story,” said the Wind.

“And oh, how stupid and tiresome!” said the Rain. “Blow on me, please, that I may revive a little.”

And the Wind blew, and the Sunshine said: “The swan of Fortune flew over the beautiful bay, where the fishermen had set their nets; the poorest of them wanted to get married, and marry he did. To him the swan brought a piece of amber; amber draws things toward it, and it drew hearts to the house. Amber is the most wonderful incense, and there came a soft perfume, as from a church; there came a sweet breath from out of beautiful nature, that God has made. They were so happy and grateful for their peaceful home, and content even in their poverty. Their life became a real Sunshine story!”

“I think we had better stop now,” said the Wind, “the Sunshine has talked long enough, and I am dreadfully bored.”

“And I also,” said the Rain.

And what do we others, who have heard the story, say?

We say, “Now the story’s done.’

[ 1869 ]

The Naughty Boy

—

There was once an old Poet, he was a good, honest old poet. One evening when he was sitting quietly at home a terrible storm came on; the rain poured down in torrents, but the old poet was warm and cosy in his corner beside the stove, where the fire blazed brightly and the apples were fizzling.

“There won’t be a dry thread on any poor creature who is out in this rain,” said he, for he was such a kind-hearted man.

“Oh, please open the door for me, I am so cold and so wet!” cried a little child outside. It kept on crying and knocking at the door, while the rain poured down and the wind rattled the windows.

“Poor little creature!” said the old Poet, as he went to open the door.

There stood a little boy, who was quite naked, and the water was streaming out of his yellow hair. He was shaking with cold, and if he had not been taken in he must surely have died of the cold.

“You poor little fellow!” said the Poet, taking him by the hand. “Come to me and I will soon have you warm! You shall have some wine and a roasted apple, for you are a beautiful boy!”

And so he really was. His eyes were like two bright stars, and although dripping wet, his hair hung in lovely curls. He looked like a little angel child,but was pale with cold, and trembling all over. He had a splendid crossbow in his hand, but it was quite spoiled by the rain; all the colours in the pretty arrows had run from the wet.

The old Poet sat down by the stove and took the little boy on his knee; he wrung the water out of his hair, warmed his hands, and heated some sweet wine for him. He soon recovered, and the roses came back to his cheeks; he jumped down and skipped and danced round the old Poet.

“You are a merry boy!” said the Poet. “What is your name?”

“I am called Cupid!” he answered. “Don’t you know me? There lies my bow—and I know how to shoot with it, I can tell you! Look, the weather is getting quite fine again, the moon is shining!”

“But your bow is spoiled,” said the old Poet.

“That would be a pity,” said the little boy, and he took it up and looked at it. “Oh, it is quite dry again—it is not a bit the worse, the string is quite tight. See, I will try it!”

He then drew his bow, put an arrow in, took aim, and shot right into the old man’s heart.

“Do you see now that my bow is not spoiled?” he said, as he ran away laughing. The naughty boy! to shoot the old Poet who had been so kind to him, and had given him the warm wine and the best apple.

The good old man lay upon the floor and wept, he had really been shot right through the heart, and he said: “Fie, what a naughty boy that Cupid is! I will tell all the good children about him, so that they may take care never to play with him, or he will certainly do them some mischief.”

All the good boys and girls to whom he told this story took good care to avoid wicked little Cupid, but he deceives them over and over again, for he is so crafty.

When the students go home from class, he runs along by their side with a black coat on and a book under his arm. They don’t recognise him, and take hold of his arm thinking he is a fellow-student, but then he sends a dart into their bosoms. When the girls go home from their classes, and even when they are in church, he is amongst them too. In fact, he is always after people. He sits in the great chandelier in the theatre blazing away, so that people think it is a lamp, but they are soon undeceived. He runs about the Royal Gardens and on the promenades. Yes, once he even shot your father and mother right through the heart! Ask them about it and you will hear what they say. Oh! he is a bad boy, this Cupid, and you must never have anything to do with him, for he is after everyone. Just think, he even shot an arrow at old Grandmother; but that was a long time ago. The wound has long been healed, but such things are never forgotten.

Now you know what a bad boy this wicked Cupid is.

[ 1835 ]

The Wicked Prince

—

There lived once upon a time a wicked prince whose heart and mind were set upon conquering all the countries of the world, and on frightening the people. He devastated their countries with fire and sword, and his soldiers trod down the crops in the fields and destroyed the peasants’ huts by fire, so that the flames licked the green leaves off the branches, and the fruit hung dried up on the singed black trees. Many a poor mother fled, her naked baby in her arms, to hide behind the smoking ruins of her cottage; but also there the soldiers followed her, and when they found her, she served as new nourishment to their diabolical enjoyments; demons could not possibly have done worse things than these soldiers! The Prince was of opinion that all this was right, and that it was only the natural course which things ought to take. His power increased day by day, his name was feared by all, and fortune favoured his deeds.

He brought enormous wealth home from the conquered towns, and gradually accumulated riches which could nowhere be equalled. He erected magnificent palaces, churches, and halls, and all who saw these splendid buildings and great treasures exclaimed admiringly: “What a mighty Prince!” But they did not know what endless misery he had brought upon other countries, nor did they hear the sighs and lamentations which rose up from the debris of the destroyed cities.

The Prince often looked with delight upon his gold and his magnificent edifices, and thought, like the crowd: “What a mighty Prince! But I must have more—much more. No power on earth can equal mine, much less exceed it.”

He made war with all his neighbours, and defeated them. The conquered kings were chained up with golden fetters to his chariot when he drove through the streets of his city. These kings had to kneel at his and his courtiers’ feet when they sat at table, and live on the scraps which they left.

At last the Prince had his own statue erected in the public places and in the royal palaces; nay, he even wished it to be placed in the churches, on the altars, but in this the priests opposed him, saying: “Prince, you are mighty indeed, but God’s power is much greater than yours; we dare not obey your orders.”

“Well,” said the Prince, “then I will conquer God too.” And in his haughtiness and foolish presumption he ordered a magnificent ship to be constructed, with which he could sail through the air; it was gorgeously fitted out and of many colours; like the tail of a peacock, it was covered with thousands of eyes, but each eye was the barrel of a gun. The Prince sat in the centre of the ship, and had only to touch a spring in order to make thousands of bullets fly out in all directions, while the guns were at once loaded again. Hundreds of eagles were attached to this ship, and it rose with the swiftness of an arrow up towards the sun. The earth was soon left far below, and looked, with its mountains and woods, like a cornfield where the plough had made furrows which separated green meadows; soon it looked only like a map with indistinct lines upon it; and at last it entirely disappeared beneath mist and clouds. Higher and higher rose the eagles up into the air; then God sent one of his numberless angels against the ship. The wicked Prince showered thousands of bullets upon him, but they rebounded from his shining wings and fell down like ordinary hailstones. One drop of blood, one single drop, dripped from one of the white pinions, and fell upon the ship in which the Prince sat, burned into it, and weighed upon it like thousands of hundred-weights, dragging it rapidly down to the earth again. The strong wings of the eagles gave way, the wind roared round the Prince’s head, and the clouds around—were they formed by the smoke rising up from the burned cities?—took strange shapes, like mile-long crabs which stretched their claws out after him, and like rolling boulders, and fire-spitting dragons.

The Prince was lying half-dead in his ship, when it sank at last with a terrible shock into the branches of a large tree in the wood. “I will conquer God!” said the Prince. “I have sworn it: my will must be done!”

And he spent seven years in the construction of wonderful ships to sail through the air, and had darts cast from the hardest steel to break the walls of heaven. He gathered warriors from all countries, so many that when they were placed side by side they covered the space of several miles. They entered the ships and the Prince was approaching his own, when God sent a swarm of gnats—one swarm of tiny gnats. They buzzed round the Prince and stung his face and hands; angrily he drew his sword and brandished it, but he only touched the air and did not hit the gnats. Then he ordered his servants to bring costly coverings to wrap him, that the gnats might no longer be able to reach him. The servants carried out his orders, but one single gnat had placed itself inside one of the coverings, crept into the Prince’s ear and stung him. The place burned like fire, and the poison entered into his blood. Mad with pain, he tore off the coverings and his clothes too, flinging them far away, and danced about before the eyes of his ferocious soldiers, who now mocked him, the mad Prince, who wished to make war with God, and was overcome by a single tiny gnat.

[ 1840 ]

The Bell’s Hollow

—

Ding-dong! ding-dong!” sounded from the buried Bell in Odensee River. What sort of a river is that? Every child in the town of Odense knows it. It flows round the foot of the gardens, from the locks to the water-mill, a way under the wooden bridges. In the river grow yellow water-lilies, brown, feather-like reeds, and the soft, velvet-like bulrushes, so high and so large. Old, split willow trees, bent and twisted, hang far over the water by the side of the monks’ meadows and the bleaching greens; but a little above is garden after garden—each one very different from the others: some with beautiful flowers and arbours, clean and in prim array, like dolls’ villages; some only filled with cabbages; While in others there are no attempts at a garden to be seen at all, only great elder trees stretching themselves out, and hanging over the running water, which here and there is deeper than an oar can fathom.

Opposite to the nunnery is the deepest part. It is called “the Bell’s Hollow,” and there dwells the Merman. He sleeps by day when the sun shines through the water, but comes forth on the clear, starry nights, and by moonlight. He is very old. Grandmothers have heard of him from their grandmothers. They said he lived a lonely life, and had scarcely anyone to speak to except the large old church-bell. Once upon a time it hung up in the steeple of the church; but now there is no trace either of the steeple or of the church, which was then called Saint Albani.

“Ding-dong! ding-dong!” rang the Bell while it stood in the steeple; and one evening, when the sun was setting, and the Bell was in full motion, it broke loose, and flew through the air, its shining metal glowing in the red sunbeams. “Ding-dong! ding-dong! now I am going to rest,” sang the Bell; and it flew out to Odensee River, where it was deepest, and therefore that spot is now called “The Bell’s Hollow.” But it found neither sleep nor rest there. Down at the Merman’s it still rings; so that at times it is heard above, through the water, and many people say that its tones foretell a death; but there is no truth in that, for it rings to amuse the Merman, who is now no longer alone.

And what does the Bell relate? It was so very old, it was there before our grandmothers’ grandmothers were born, and yet it was a child compared with the Merman, who is an old, quiet, strange-looking person, with eel-skin leggings, a scaly tunic adorned with yellow water-lilies, a wreath of sedges in his hair, and seaweed in his beard. It must be confessed he was not very handsome to look at.

It would take a year and a day to repeat all that the Bell said, for it told the same old stories over and over again very minutely, making them sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, according to its mood. It told of the olden days—the rigorous, dark times.

To the tower upon St. Albani Church, where the Bell hung, ascended a monk. He was both young and handsome, but had an air of deep melancholy. He looked through an aperture out over the Odensee River. Its bed then was broad, and the monks’ meadows were a lake. He gazed over them, and over the green mound called “The Nun’s Hill,” beyond which the cloister lay, where the light shone from a nun’s cell. He had known her well, and he remembered the past, and his heart beat wildly at the recollection.

“Ding-dong! ding-dong!” This was one of the Bell’s stories:

“There came up to the tower, one day, an idiot servant of the Bishop; and when I, the Bell, who am cast in hard and heavy metal, swung about and pealed, I could have broken his head, for he seated himself immediately under me, and began to play with two sticks, exactly as if it had been a stringed instrument, and he sang to it thus: ‘Now I may venture to sing aloud what elsewhere I dare not whisper—sing of all that is kept hidden behind locks and bolts. Yonder it is cold and damp. The rats are eating her up alive! No one knows of it; no one hears of it—not even now, when the Bell is pouring forth its loudest peal—ding-dong! ding-dong!’

“There was a king: he was called Canute. He humbled himself before bishops and monks; but as he unjustly oppressed the people, and laid heavy taxes on them, they armed themselves with all sorts of weapons, and chased him away as if he had been a wild beast. He sought shelter in the church, and had the doors and windows closed. The furious multitude surrounded the sacred edifice, as I heard related; the crows and the ravens, and the jackdaws to boot, became frightened by the noise and the tumult; they flew up into the tower, and out again; they looked on the multitude below, they looked also in at the church windows, and shrieked out what they saw.

“King Canute knelt before the altar and prayed; his brothers Erik and Benedict stood guarding him with their drawn swords; but the King’s servant, the treacherous Blake, betrayed his lord. They knew outside where he could be reached. A stone was cast in through the window at him, and the King lay dead. There were shouts and cries among the angry crowd, and cries among the flocks of frightened birds; and I joined them, too. I pealed forth, ‘Ding-dong! ding-dong!’

“The Church-bell hangs high, sees far around, receives visits from birds, and understands their language. To it whispers the Wind through the wickets and loopholes, and through every little chink; and the Wind knows everything. He hears it from the Air, for it encompasses all living things; it even enters into the lungs of human beings; it hears every word and every sigh. The Air knows all, the Wind repeats all, and the Bell understands their speech, and rings it forth to the whole world—‘Ding-dong! ding dong!’

“But all this was too much for me to hear and to know. I had not strength enough to ring it all out. I became so wearied, so heavy, that the beam from which I hung broke, and I flew through the luminous air down to where the river is deepest, where the Merman dwells in solitude; and here I am, year after year, relating to him what I have seen and what I have heard. ‘Ding-dong! ding-dong!’”

Thus rang the chimes from “The Bell’s Hollow” in the Odensee River, as my grandmother declares.

But our schoolmaster says there is no Bell ringing down there, for it could not be; and there is no Merman down there, for there are no mermen; and, when all the church-bells are ringing loudly, he says that it is not the bells, but the air, that makes the sound. My grandmother told me that the Bell also said this; so, since the schoolmaster and the Bell agree in this, no doubt it is true.

“Be cautious, cautious, and take good heed to thyself,” they both say.

The air knows everything. It is around us, it is in us; it speaks of our thoughts and our deeds; and it proclaims them farther than did the Bell now down in the Hollow in Odensee River, where the Merman dwells—it proclaims all into the great vault of heaven, far, far away, even into eternity, up to where heaven’s bells ring “Ding-dong! ding-dong!”

[ 1857 ]

The Old House

—

Somewhere in the street there stood an old, old house. Almost three hundred years old it was, as you could read for yourself on the beam, where the date was carved out with tulips and hop vines round it. There stood a whole verse spelled out in the old fashion, and over every window a face was carved on the lintel, pulling a grimace. Each story stuck out a long way over the one below, and immediately under the roof there was a lead gutter with a dragon’s head. The rain-water ought to have run out of its mouth, but it ran out of its stomach instead, for there was a hole in the gutter.

All the other houses in the street were very new and neat, with large windowpanes and smooth walls. You could see, well enough, that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the old house. You could see they were thinking: “How long is this old rubbish-heap going to stand there, making an exhibition of itself, in our street? The bay-window sticks out so that nobody can see, out of our windows, what’s going on at the corner. The front doorsteps are as broad as if they led up to a palace, and as steep as if they were in a church tower. The iron railings look like the gate on an old family vault, and they’ve got copper knobs, too. Vulgar, I call it.”

Facing it, in the street, were more new neat houses, and they thought just the same as the rest. But at the window of one sat a little boy with fresh rosy cheeks and bright shining eyes, and he liked the old house far best, whether in sunshine or moonlight. When he stared at the place on the wall where the plaster had fallen off, he could sit and keep on finding out the most wonderful pictures. He could see exactly how the street used to look in old times, with steps and oriels and pointed gables; he could see soldiers with halberds, and gutters twisting about like dragons and serpents. It was a splendid house to look at. And over there lived an old man who went about in corduroy breeches, and had a coat with big copper buttons, and a wig that you could see really was a wig. Every morning an old servant used to come to him, who cleaned up and did errands, but except for that the old man in the corduroy breeches was quite alone in the old house. Sometimes he would come to the window and look out, and then the little boy would nod to him, and the old man would nod back; and so they became, first acquaintances and then friends, though they had never spoken to each other—but that didn’t matter.

The little boy heard his father and mother say: “The old man, over there, is very comfortably off, but he is so dreadfully lonely.”

Next Sunday the little boy took something and wrapped it up in a bit of paper, and went down to the front door, and when the man who went on errands came past he said to him: “I say! Will you take the old man opposite this from me; I’ve got two tin soldiers and this is one of them. I want him to have it, because I know he’s so dreadfully lonely.”

And the old servant looked quite pleased, and nodded and took the tin soldier across to the old house. After that there came a message—would the little boy like to come over himself, and pay a visit? And he got leave from his parents and went across to the old house.

And the copper knobs on the stair railing shone much brighter than usual—you’d think they had been polished up specially for this visit, and it seemed as if the carved trumpeters (for there were trumpeters carved on the door, standing in tulips) were blowing with all their might, for their cheeks looked much fatter than before. Of course, they were blowing “Tratteratra! The little boy’s come! Tratteratra!” And the door opened. The whole of the front hall was hung with old portraits—knights in armour and ladies in silk gowns, and the armour rattled and the silk dresses rustled. Then there was a staircase which led a long way up and a little way down, and then you were in a balcony, which certainly was very rickety, with big holes and long cracks in it; but grass and plants grew out of them all, for the balcony, not to mention the court and the walls, was overgrown with such a lot of green stuff that it looked like a garden. Still, it was only a balcony. Here stood old flower-pots that had faces with donkeys’ ears; the flowers in them grew just as they liked. In one of them a mass of pinks hung over all the edges—that is to say, the green part did—in a multitude of shoots, and it was saying, quite plainly: “The air has stroked me, the sun has kissed me, and promised me a little flower for Sunday! A little flower for Sunday!”

Then they came into a room where the walls were covered with stamped pigskin and gold flowers printed on it.

“Gilding’s soon past;

Pigskin will last,”

said the walls. And there stood arm-chairs, ever so high-backed, and carved, and with arms on both sides. “Sit down! Sit down!” they said. “Ugh! How I do creak! I shall get the gout, I know, like that old cupboard! Gout in the back, ugh!”

And then the little boy came into the room where the bay-window was, and where the old man was sitting.

“Thank you for the tin soldier, my little friend,” said the old man, “and thank you for coming over to see me.”

“Thanks! Thanks!” or “Crack! Crack!” sounded from all the furniture. There was such a lot of it the pieces got in each other’s way to see the little boy.

And in the middle of the wall there hung a portrait of a beautiful lady, young and gay, but dressed all in the old fashion, with powder in her hair and a dress that would stand up by itself. She didn’t say either thanks or crack, but looked with her kind eyes on the little boy, who forthwith asked the old man: “Where did you get her from?”

“Round at the dealer’s,” said the old man. “There are a lot of pictures hanging up there; nobody knows them or cares about them, for the people are in their graves, every one of them. But in the old days I used to know her, and now she’s dead and gone these fifty years.”

Beneath the portrait was hung up, under glass, a withered bunch of flowers: they, too, must have been fifty years old, by the look of them; and the pendulum of the big clock went to and fro and the hands turned round, and everything in the room went on getting older—but they didn’t notice.

“They say, at home,” said the little boy, “that you are so dreadfully lonely.” “Oh,” said he; “but old memories and all they can bring with them come and pay me visits, and now you are come, too. I’m really very well off.” And with that he took from a shelf a book with pictures, a whole long procession of the most marvellous coaches, such as you don’t see nowadays; soldiers like the knave of clubs and guild-men with waving banners. The tailors had on theirs a pair of scissors, held by two horns, and the cobblers had on theirs, not a boot, but an eagle that had two heads, because shoemakers must always have things so arranged that they can say: “There’s a pair.” Ah, that was a picture book!

Then the old man went into another room to fetch sweetmeats and apples and nuts. It really was delightful over in that old house.

“I can’t bear it,” said the tin soldier, who stood on the chest of drawers. “It’s so lonely and so dismal; no, really, when one’s lived in a family one can’t accustom oneself to the life here. I can’t bear it! The whole day is dreary and the evening drearier; it isn’t like being over at your house, where your father and mother talked cheerfully, and you and all the rest of the nice children made such a jolly row. Dear, what a lonely time the old man has of it! Do you suppose he ever gets a kiss? Do you suppose he ever has a kind look from anybody, or a Christmas tree? Not he; he never will get anything but a funeral. I can’t bear it.”

“You mustn’t take such a dismal view,” said the little boy. “I think it’s perfectly delightful here; and then, all the old memories, and all that they can bring with them, come and pay him visits.”

“Yes, but I don’t see them, and I know nothing about them,” said the tin soldier; “I can not bear it.”

“You’ve got to,” said the little boy.

And now the old man came back, looking as cheerful as possible, and brought the most delicious sweetmeats and apples and nuts, and the little boy thought no more about the tin soldier.

Very happy and gay, the little boy went home, and days passed and weeks passed, and there was nodding to the old house and nodding from the old house, and then the little boy went across again; and the carved trumpeters blew: “Tratteratra! Here’s the little boy! Tratteratra!” And the swords and harness on the knight’s pictures rattled and the silken dresses rustled, the pigskin said its say, and the old chairs had gout in their backs. Ow! It was exactly like the first time, for over there one day and hour were just like the next.

“I can’t bear it,” said the tin soldier. “I have cried tears of tin! It is really too dismal here. I’d sooner go to the war, and lose my arms and legs. That would be a change, anyhow. I can not bear it! Now I know what it is to have visits from your old memories, and all that they can bring with them. I’ve had visits from mine, and you may take it from me there’s no pleasure to be got out of them in the long run. By the end of it I was nearly jumping down off the drawers. I saw all you at the house over there as plain as if you were really here. It was that Sunday morning, you remember quite well, all you children were standing before the table singing your hymn as you do every morning. You were very serious, with your hands clasped, and your father and mother were just as solemn; and then the door opened and your little sister Mary, who isn’t yet two years old and who always dances when she hears music or singing of any kind, was put in—she oughtn’t to have been—and she began to dance, but she couldn’t keep time, the notes were too long. So first she stood on one leg and bent her head this way, and then on the other leg and bent her head that way, but even so it wouldn’t come right. You all kept grave, every one of you, though it was hard enough; but I laughed to myself, and so I fell off the table and got a bump which I still have, for it wasn’t right of me to laugh. But all that, now, goes on in my head, and everything else that has happened to me, and that, I suppose, is the old memories and all they can bring with them. Tell me, do you still sing on Sunday? Tell me, do, something about little Mary, and how my comrade is, the other tin soldier? Ah, he’s the lucky one! I cannot bear it!”

“You’ve been given away,” said the little boy. “You’ve got to stay here, can’t you see that?”

The old man came in with a drawer in which there were a lot of things to look at; pen-cases and scent boxes, and old cards so big and so begilded as one never sees now. Then there was opening of large drawers, and the piano was opened; it had a landscape painted inside the lid; and how husky it was when the old man played on it! Then he hummed a song: “Ah, she could sing that,” said he, and nodded at the portrait he had bought at the dealer’s—and the old man’s eyes shone very bright.

“I’ll go to the wars! I will! I will!” shrieked the tin soldier as loud as he could, and dashed himself down on the floor. Why, what had become of him? The old man searched and the little boy searched, but gone he was, and gone he remained. “I shall find him all right,” said the old man, but he never did; the floor was too full of gaps and holes. The tin soldier had fallen through a crevice, and there he lay, in an open grave.

•  •  •

So that day passed, and the little boy went home; and the weeks went by, and several more weeks. The windows were quite frozen over. The little boy had to sit and breathe on them to make a peep-hole to look across at the old house, and there the snow was drifted into all the curly-wurlies and lettering, and lay all over the steps, as if there was nobody at home. The old man was dead.

Late in the evening a carriage drew up outside, and he was carried down to it, in his coffin, for he was to be driven out into the country to lie there in his family burial-place. So thither he drove off, but nobody followed; all his friends were dead. But the little boy kissed his hand to the coffin as it drove away.

Some days after there was a sale at the old house, and the little boy saw from his window how the old knights and the old ladies, the flower-pots with long ears, the old chairs and the old chests, were carried off, some one way, some another. The portrait of the lady that had been found at the dealer’s went back to the dealer’s again, for nobody knew her any more, and nobody cared about the old picture.

In the spring the house itself was pulled down, for it was an old rubbish-heap, people said. From the street you could look right into the room and see the pigskin hanging, which was stripped off and torn to bits; and the greenstuff from the balcony hung all in disorder about the fallen beams—and then it was all cleared away.

“That’s a good job,” said the houses next door.

•  •  •

And a beautiful house was built, with large windows and smooth white walls. But in front of it, in the place where the old house had actually stood, a small garden was planted, and wild creepers grew up against the neighbour’s walls. In front of the garden a large iron fence, with an iron gate, was put up, and it looked so imposing that people stopped and peeped through. The sparrows perched by scores in the creepers and talked into each others’ beaks as hard as they could: but it wasn’t about the old house that they talked; they couldn’t remember that. So many years had gone by that the little boy had grown into a real man, and a good man, too, who was a great comfort to his parents, and now he had just married and moved with his little wife into this house where the garden was. And there he was, standing by her, while she planted a wild meadow flower which she thought very pretty. She planted it with her own little hands, and was patting the earth with her fingers. “Ow!” What was that? She had pricked herself; something sharp was sticking up out of the earth.

It was—only think! It was the tin soldier; the very one that had been lost up in the old man’s room and had been tumbled hither and thither among the beams and rubbish, and had ended by lying in the earth this many a year.

The young wife wiped the soldier clean, first with a green leaf and then with her pocket handkerchief, which had a delightful smell—and the tin soldier felt as if he had been waked out of a trance.

“Let me look at him,” said the young man; and he laughed and shook his head. “Why, of course it can’t be the same, but he does remind me of an affair of a tin soldier I had when I was a little boy.” And he went on to tell his wife about the old house and the old man, and the tin soldier he sent across to him because he was so dreadfully lonely. And he told it all exactly as it had really happened, and the young wife’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of the old house and the old man.

“It’s quite possible it may be the same tin soldier,” said she. “I’ll keep him and remember all that you’ve told me—but you must show me the old man’s grave.”

“Ah, I don’t know it,” he said; “and nobody knows it. All his friends were dead; nobody looked after it, and I was only a little boy.”

“How dreadfully lonely he must have been!” said she.

“Dreadfully lonely,” said the tin soldier; “but it is delightful not to be forgotten.”

“Delightful indeed!” something called out nearby; but no one except the tin soldier saw that it was a rag of the pigskin hanging. It had no gilding left and looked like damp earth, but it had an opinion of its own, and spoke it out.

“Gilding’s soon past;

Pigskin will last.”

However, the tin soldier did not agree.

[ 1848 ]

The Toad

—

The well was deep, and so the rope was long, and the wheel went heavily round, before one could hoist the bucket over the side of the well. The sun could not see its face in the water, however brightly it shone; but as far as it could shine there were green weeds growing between the stones.

A family of the toad race dwelt here. They were emigrants; indeed, they had all come plump down in the person of the old Toad Mother, who was still alive. The green frogs who swam in the water, had been at home here ever so much longer, but they acknowledged their cousins, and called them the “well-guests.” The latter, however, had no thoughts of ever leaving; they made themselves very comfortable here on the dry land, as they called the wet stones.

Dame Frog had once travelled, riding in the bucket as it went up; but the light was too much for her, and gave her spasm in the eyes; luckily she got out of the bucket. She fell with a frightful splash in the water, and lay up for three days with the back-ache. She had not much to tell about the upper world, but one thing she did know, and so did all the others now—the well was not the whole world. Dame Toad might have told them a thing or two more, but she never answered any questions, and so they left off asking any.

“Nasty, ugly, squat, and fat she is!” said the young Green Frogs; “and her brats are getting just like her.”

“Maybe so!” said Dame Toad, “but one of them has a jewel in its head, or else I have it myself.”

The Green Frogs listened and stared, and as they did not like to hear that, they made faces and went to the bottom. But the young Toads stretched their hind-legs out of sheer pride. Each of them thought it had the jewel, and so they all kept their heads quite still; but at last they began to ask what sort of a thing they had to be proud of, and what a jewel was exactly.

“It is something so splendid and so precious,” said Dame Toad, “that I cannot describe it; it is something that one wears to please oneself, and that others fret to death after. But don’t ask questions; I shan’t answer them.”

“Well, I have not got the jewel,” said the smallest Toad; she was as ugly as ugly could be. “How should I have anything so splendid? and if it vexed others, why, it could not please me. No; all I want is to get up to the well-side, and have one peep out; that would be glorious!”

“Better stay where you are,” said the old one. “Here you are at home, and you know what it’s like. Keep clear of the bucket, or it may squash you. And even if you get safe into it, you may fall out again, and it is not everyone that can fall so luckily as I did, and keep legs and eggs all safe and sound.”

“Quack!” said the little one; and that means the same as when we men say “Alack!”

She did so long to get up to the well-side, and look out; she felt quite a yearning after the green things up yonder. And so, next morning, as the bucket was going up, when it happened to stop for an instant before the stone where the Toad sat, the little creature quivered through and through, and edged into the bucket. She sank to the bottom of the water, which was presently drawn up and poured out.

“Phew, botheration!” said the man, when he saw it; “it is the ugliest I have ever seen.” He kicked with his wooden shoe at the Toad, which was near being crippled, but managed to escape into the middle of some tall stinging-nettles. She saw stalks side by side around her, and she looked upward too. The sun shone on the leaves; they were quite transparent. For the Toad it was the same as it is for us men when we come all at once into a great forest, where the sun is shining between leaves and branches.

“It is much prettier here than down in the well! One might well stay here for a whole lifetime,” said the little Toad. She lay there one hour, she lay there two. “Now I wonder what there is outside; as I have gone so far, I may as well go further.” And she crawled as fast as she could crawl, till she came out into the full sunshine, and got powdered with dust, as she marched across a road.

“This is something like being on dry land,” said the Toad. “I am getting almost too much of a good thing; it tickles right into me.”

Now she came to a ditch; the forget-me-not grew here, and the meadow-sweet; beyond it was a hedge of white-thorn and elder bushes, and the convolvulus crept and hung about it. Here were fine colours to be seen! And yonder flew a butterfly. The Toad thought that it was a flower which had broken loose, in order to look about it in the world; it really seemed so very natural.

“If one could only get along like that!” said the Toad “Quack—alack, O how glorious!”

For eight days and nights she lingered by the ditch, and had no lack of food. The ninth day she thought, “Further—forward!” But was there anything more beautiful to be found then? Perhaps a little toad, or a few green frogs; there had been a sound in the wind last night, as if there were “cousins” in the neighbourhood.

“It is a fine thing to live! to come up out of the well; to lie in stinging-nettles; to creep along a dusty road; and to rest in a wet ditch! But onward, onward! let us find frogs or a little toad; one cannot do without them, after all; nature alone is not enough!” And so she set out again on her wanderings.

She came to a field and a large pond, with rushes round it; she took a look inside.

“It is too wet for you here, isn’t it?” said the Frogs, “but you are quite welcome. Are you a he or a she?—not that it matters, you are welcome all the same.”

And so she was invited to a concert in the evening—a family concert, great excitement and thin voices! we all know that sort of thing. There were no refreshments, except drink; but that was free to all—the whole pond, if they pleased.

“Now I shall travel further,” said the little Toad. She was always craving after something better.

She saw the stars twinkle, so large and so clear; she saw the new moon shine; she saw the sun rise higher and higher.

“I think I am still in a well, in a larger well: I must get higher up! I feel a restlessness, a longing!” And when the moon had grown full and round, the poor creature thought, “Can that be the bucket which is being let down, and must I pop into if I wish to get higher up? Or is the sun the great bucket? How great it is, and how beaming! It could hold all of us together. I must watch for my opportunity. What a brightness in my head! I do not believe that the jewel can shine better. But I haven’t the jewel; not that I cry about that—no, I must go higher up, into splendour and joy! I feel so confident, and yet I am afraid. It’s a difficult step to take, and yet it must be taken. Onward, therefore, straight onward. Forward! right on along the highroad!”

And she stepped out as well as such a crawling creature can, till she came to the great thoroughfare, where the men lived. Here there were flower-gardens and kitchen-gardens. It turned aside to rest in a kitchen-garden.

“What a number of different beings there are, which I know nothing about! and how great and blessed is the world! But one must keep looking about one, instead of sitting always in the same corner.” And so she sidled into the kitchen-garden. “How green it is here! how pretty it is here!”

“That I know well enough,” said the Caterpillar, on the leaf. “My leaf is the largest here; it covers half the world—but as for the world, I can do without it.”

“Cluck! cluck!” said somebody, and fowls came tripping into the cabbage-garden. The foremost Hen was long-sighted; she spied out the worm on the curly leaf, and pecked at it, so that it fell to the ground, where it lay twisting and turning. The Hen looked first with one eye and then with the other, for she could not make out what was to be the end of all this wriggling.

“It does not do that with any good intent,” thought the Hen, and lifted her head for a finishing stroke. The Toad grew so frightened, that she crawled right up towards the Hen.

“So it has friends to fight for it,” said the Hen; “just look at the crawler!” and the Hen turned tail. “I shan’t trouble myself about the little green mouthful; it only gives one a tickling in the throat.” The other fowls were of the same opinion, and away they went.

“I have wriggled away from her,” said the Caterpillar; “it is good to have presence of mind, but the hardest task remains—to get up on to my cabbage-leaf. Where is it?”

And the little Toad came forward and expressed her sympathies. She was glad of her own ugliness, that had frightened away the Hen.

“What do you mean by that?” asked the Caterpillar. “I got rid of her myself, I tell you. You are very unpleasant to look at! Mayn’t I be allowed to get back into my own? Now I smell cabbage. Now I am near my leaf. There is nothing so beautiful as what is one’s own. I must go higher up still.”

“Yes, higher up!” said the little Toad, “higher up! it feels just as I feel; but it is not in good humour today; that comes of the fright. We all wish to get higher up.” And she looked up as high as she could.

The Stork sat in his nest on the farmer’s roof; he clattered, and the Stork-mother clattered.

“How high they live,” thought the Toad. “Pity that one can’t get up there!”

There were two young students lodging in the farmhouse; one of them was a poet, the other a naturalist. The one sang and wrote in gladness of all that God had created, even as its image was reflected in his heart; he sang it out short and clear, and rich in resounding verses. The other took hold of the thing itself; aye, and split it up, if necessary. He treated our Lord’s creation like some vast piece of arithmetic; subtracted, multiplied, wished to know it outside and inside, and to talk of it with reason; nothing but reason; and he talked of it in gladness too, and cleverly. They were good, gladhearted men, both of them.

“Yonder sits a fine specimen of a toad,” said the Naturalist; “I must have it in a bottle of spirits.”

“You have two already,” said the Poet. “Let it sit in peace, and enjoy itself.”

“But it is so beautifully ugly!” said the other.

“Yes, if we could find the jewel in its head,” said the Poet, “then I myself might lend a hand in splitting it up.”

“The jewel!” said the other. “Much you know about natural history!”

“But is there not something very fine, at least, in the popular belief that the toad, the ugliest of creatures, often hides in its head the most precious of all jewels? Is it not much the same with men? Was there not such a jewel hidden in Aesop, and Socrates too?”

The Toad heard nothing more; and even so far she did not understand half of it. The two friends went on, and she escaped being put into spirit.

“They were talking about the jewel, too,” said the Toad “I am just as well without it; otherwise I should have got into trouble.”

There was a clattering upon the farmer’s roof. Father Stork was delivering a lecture to his family, while they all looked down askance at the two young men in the cabbage garden.

“Man is the most conceited of creatures,” said the Stork. “Hark, how they are going on—clatter, clatter—and yet they cannot rattle off a regular tattoo. They puff themselves up with notions of their eloquence—their language. A rare language indeed; it shifts from one jabber to another, at every day’s journey. Our language we can talk the whole world over, whether in Denmark or in Egypt. As for flying, they can’t manage it at all. They push along by means of a contrivance which they call a ‘railway,’ but there they often get their necks broken. It gives me the shivers in my bill when I think of it. The world can exist without men. What good are they to us? All that we want are frogs and earth-worms.”

“That was a grand speech now,” thought the little Toad. “What a great man he is, and how high he sits; higher than I have ever seen anyone before; and how well he can swim,” she exclaimed, as the Stork took flight through the air with outstretched wings.

And Mother Stork talked in the nest. She told of the land of Egypt, of the water of the Nile, and of the first-rate mud that was to be found in foreign parts; it sounded quite fresh and charming in the ears of the little Toad.

“I must go to Egypt,” she said. “Oh, if the Stork would only give me a lift; or one of the young ones might take me. I would do the youngster some service in my turn, on his wedding-day. I am sure I shall get to Egypt, for I am so lucky; and all the longing and the yearning which I feel; surely, this B better than having a jewel in one’s head.”

And she had it—the true jewel; the eternal longing and yearning to go upward, ever upward. This was the jewel, and it shone within her, shone with gladness and beamed with desire.

At that very moment came the Stork. He had seen the Toad in the grass, and he swooped down and took hold of the little creature, not over tenderly. The bill pinched; the wind whistled; she was not quite comfortable. But still she was going upward, and away to Egypt, she knew; and that was why her eyes glittered, till it seemed as if a spark flew out of them.

“Quack—ack!”

The body was dead, the Toad was killed. But the spark out of its eyes, what became of that?

The sunbeam took it; the sunbeam bore away the jewel from the head of the Toad. Whither?

You must not ask the Naturalist; rather ask the Poet. He will tell it to you as a fairy tale; and the Caterpillar will take a share in it, and the Stork family will take a share in it. Think, the Caterpillar will be changed, and become a beautiful butterfly! The Stork family will fly over mountains and seas far away to Africa, and yet find the shortest way home again to the Danish land, to the same spot, to the same roof! Yes, it is all nearly too much like a fairy tale—and yet it is true. You may fairly ask the Naturalist about the truth of it; he will admit that, and, indeed, you know it yourself, for you have seen it.

But the jewel in the Toad’s head? Look for it in the sun; look at it—if you can.

The splendour is too strong. We have not yet eyes that can look into all the glories which God hath revealed; but someday we shall have them, and that will be the most beautiful fairy tale of all, for we ourselves shall take a share in it.

[ 1866 ]

The Metal Pig

—

In the city of Florence, not far from the Piazza del Granduca, runs a little cross street, called, I think, Porta Rossa. In this street, in front of a kind of market where vegetables are sold, there lies a Pig artistically fashioned of metal. The fresh clean water pours from the mouth of the animal, which has become a blackish-green from age; only the snout shines as if it were polished, and so it is, by many hundreds of children and beggars, who seize it with their hands as they put their mouth to the animal’s snout to drink. It is quite a picture to see the well-formed creature clasped by a pretty and half-naked boy who lays his red lips against its snout.

Everyone who comes to Florence can easily find the place; he need only ask the first beggar he comes across for the Metal Pig, and he will find it. [26]

It was an evening late in winter. The mountains were covered with snow; but it was moonlight, and moonlight in Italy is as good as the light of a dark northern winter’s day, and indeed better, for the air is bright and exhilarating, whilst in the north the cold grey leaden skies seem to press us to the earth, to the cold, damp earth, which will one day press upon our coffin.

In the garden of the grand duke’s castle, where thousands of roses bloom, even in winter, a little ragged boy had been sitting under the pines all day long—a boy who might serve as a type of Italy, pretty and smiling, but yet suffering. He was hungry and thirsty, but no one gave him anything, and when it got dark and the garden had to be closed, the gatekeeper drove him out. For a long time he stood dreaming on the bridge that crosses the Arno, gazing at the stars that were reflected in the water between him and the splendid marble bridge.

He made his way towards the Metal Pig, and, half kneeling down, wound his arms round it, then putting his mouth to the shining snout, drank the fresh water in deep draughts. Close by lay some salad leaves and a few chestnuts; these were his supper. There was no one in the street but himself; it belonged to him alone, and somewhat comforted he lay down upon the pig’s back, bending forward so that his curly head rested on that of the animal, and before he knew it, he fell asleep.

It was midnight—the Metal Pig stirred, and he heard it say distinctly, “You—little boy! hold on tight, for I am going to run,” and away it ran with him; it was a wonderful ride. First they reached the Piazza del Granduca, and the metal horse that carries the duke’s statue neighed aloud, while the painted coats-of-arms on the council-house looked like transparent pictures, and Michael Angelo’s David swung his sling; there was a strange life stirring. The metal groups representing Perseus and the Rape of the Sabines stood there as if they were alive; a cry of mortal fear escaped them and resounded across the splendid square.

The Metal Pig stopped by the Uffizi palace under the colonnade where the nobles assemble during Lent for the carnival.

“Hold tight,” said the animal, “hold tight, for we are going upstairs.” The little boy spoke not a word, for he was half frightened and half delighted.

They passed through a long gallery where the boy had been before. The walls were hung with pictures, and here stood statues and busts, all in the most excellent light, as if it were broad day; but the most beautiful of all was when the door of a side-room opened. The little boy remembered the beautiful things he had seen there, but that night everything was in its highest splendour.

There stood a lovely woman, as beautiful as only Nature or the greatest master of sculpture could form her. She moved her glorious limbs, dolphins sprang about her feet, and immortality shone out of her eyes. The world calls her the Venus de Medici. At her side are marble statues in which the spirit of life has entered into the stone. There are handsome undraped figures of men-—one is sharpening a sword, and is called the “Grinder”; the “Wrestling Gladiators” form another group; and the sword was sharpened, and the giants struggled for the Goddess of Beauty.

The boy was dazzled by so much splendour; the walls were radiant with colours, and everything had life and movement. The picture of Venus was there in duplicate, the earthly one as yielding and as amorous as when Titian had pressed her to his heart. It was wonderful to behold. They were two beautiful women; their graceful limbs reclined on soft pillows, their bosom heaved, and their heads moved so that their rich tresses fell over their rounded shoulders, whilst the dark eyes expressed the feelings that were coursing through their veins; but none of the pictures ventured to leave their frames entirely. The Goddess of Beauty herself, the Gladiators, and the Grinder remained in their places, for the halo of glory that shone out from the Madonna, Jesus, and John restrained them. The holy pictures were no longer pictures; they were the Holy Ones themselves.

What splendour, what beauty they passed in going from hall to hall! The boy saw it all, for the Metal Pig went step by step through all this glory and magnificence. Each fresh sight effaced the last. But one picture really took hold of his thoughts, and that chiefly because of the happy children in it; once by daylight the little boy had nodded to them.

Many, no doubt, pass this picture with indifference, and yet it contains a treasure of poetry. It is Christ descending into Hell; but these are not the damned by whom he is surrounded—they are heathens. The picture was painted by Angiolo Bronzino, [27] a native of Florence. The most beautiful thing about it is the expression on the children’s faces—the full confidence that they will get to heaven. Two little ones are already embracing; one stretches out his hand to another, who stands below him, and points to himself as if he were saying: “I am going to heaven.” The elder ones look uncertain, though hopeful, or humbly bow down in adoration before the Lord Jesus. Longer than upon any other did the boy’s gaze rest upon this picture, and the metal pig stopped before it. A low sigh was heard; did it come from the picture or from the animal? The boy lifted up his hands towards the smiling children; then the Pig ran away with him away through the open vestibule.

“Thanks and blessings upon you, you beautiful creature,” said the little boy, caressing the Metal Pig as it ran down the steps.

“Thanks and blessings upon yourself,” said the Pig. “I have helped you and you have helped me, for only when I have an innocent child on my back do I have the power to run. You see that I may even go under the rays of the lamp that hangs before the image of the Virgin, though I may not go into the church. But if you are with me I can look in through the open door. Don’t get down from my back, for if you do I shall lie dead as you see me in the daytime at the Porta Rossa.”

“I will stay with you, my dear creature,” said the boy, and so they went on in hot haste through the streets of Florence, out into the square before the church of Santa Croce. The folding doors flew open, and the light shone forth from the altar through the church into the deserted square.

A wonderful blaze of light streamed out from a monument in the left aisle, around which a thousand moving stars formed as it were a halo of glory. A coat of arms stands proudly on the grave—a red ladder on a blue ground—and seemed to glow like fire: it was the grave of Galileo. [28]  The monument is very simple, but the red ladder on the blue ground is full of meaning—an emblem, as it were, of art, the path of which always leads up a burning ladder, and to heaven. All the prophets of the mind soar up towards heaven, like Elijah.

To the right, in the aisle, every figure on the magnificent tombs seemed endowed with life. Here stood Michaelangelo, [29]  there Dante [30]  with a laurel wreath upon his brow, Alfieri [31]  and Machiavelli; [32]  these great men, the pride of Italy, lie side by side. [33] It is a grand church, far more beautiful than the marble cathedral at Florence, though not so large.

It seemed as if the marble draperies of the statues moved, as if these great figures held up their heads and regarded, amidst song and music, the bright altar blazing with light, where white-robed choristers swung the golden censers; the strong fragrance streamed out of the church into the open square.

The boy stretched out his hand towards the stream of light, and in a twinkling the Metal Pig hurried away with him; he had to cling tightly, and the wind whistled about his ears; he heard the church doors creaking on their hinges as they closed, and at the same time he seemed to lose consciousness—he felt an icy shudder pass through him, and he opened his eyes.

It was morning, and he was still sitting on the Metal Pig, which stood where it always stood in the Porta Rossa, but he had slipped half off its back.

Fear and trembling seized the boy at the thought of her whom he called mother, and who had sent him out yesterday to get some money; he had nothing, and he was hungry and thirsty. Once more he put his arms round the Pig’s neck, kissed it on the snout, and, nodding to it, wandered away into one of the narrowest streets, hardly wide enough for a laden donkey. A great iron-clamped door stood ajar; passing through this, he went up some stone stairs with dirty walls and a rope for a balustrade, till he reached an open gallery hung with rags. From here a flight of steps led down into the yard, where there was a fountain, with great iron wires leading up to the different stories, and many water-buckets hung side by side, and at times the roller creaked, and one of the buckets would dance into the air, swaying so that the water splashed out of it down into the yard. A second tumble-down stone staircase led upwards. Two Russian sailors were descending quickly, and almost knocked the poor boy down. They were returning from their nightly carouse. A woman, plump but no longer young, with coarse black hair, followed them.

“What do you bring home?” she asked the boy.

“Don’t be angry,” he pleaded; “I got nothing—nothing at all.” And he seized his mother’s dress, as if to kiss it.

They went into the little room; I will not describe it, but only say that there stood in it a pot with handles—called a “marito”—filled with burning coals. This she took in her arms, warmed her fingers, and pushed the boy with her elbow.

“You must have got some money,” she said.

The boy wept, and she kicked him so that he cried aloud.

“Will you be quiet, or I’ll break your screaming head!” and she lifted up the fire-pot that she held in her hands.

The boy bent down to the ground with a cry of terror. At this a neighbour came in, also with a marito in her arms. “Felicita,” she said, “what are you doing to the child?”

“The child is mine,” answered Felicita. “I can murder him if I like, and you too, Giannina.” And she again lifted up her fire-pot. The other woman raised hers to defend herself, and both pots crashed together so violently that the fragments, fire and ashes, flew all over the room; at the same moment the boy rushed out at the door, across the yard and out of the house.

The poor child ran till he could scarcely breathe; he stopped at the church, whose great doors had opened before him last night, and went in. All was bright as the boy knelt down by the first grave on the right, that of Michael Angelo, and soon he was sobbing aloud.

People came and went, and Mass was performed, but no one noticed the boy; only one elderly citizen stood still, looked at him—and then went away like the rest.

Hunger and thirst tormented the child, and he was quite faint and ill; so he crept into a corner between the marble monuments and went to sleep. Towards evening he was awakened by a tug at his sleeve, and jumping up, he found the old citizen before him.

“Are you ill? Where do you live? Have you been here all day?” were a few of the many questions that the old man put to him. He answered, and the old man took him into his little house close by in a side-street. They entered a glove-maker’s workshop, where a woman sat sewing busily. A little white poodle, so closely shaven that his pink skin could be seen, was capering about upon the table and gambolled before the boy.

“Innocent souls recognise each other,” said the woman, caressing both the dog and the boy. The good people gave the boy food and drink, and they said they would permit him to stay with them for the night, promising him that next day Father Giuseppe should go and speak to his mother. He was given a humble little cot; but for him, who had often been slept on the hard stone ground, it seemed like a royal couch. How sweetly he slept, dreaming of the beautiful pictures and of the Metal Pig!

Next morning Father Giuseppe went out; the poor child was by no means glad, for he knew that the object of this errand was to send him back to his mother. He kissed the lively little dog, and the woman nodded approvingly at them both.

What news did Father Giuseppe bring? He spoke with his wife for a long time, and she nodded and patted the boy’s cheek. “He is a beautiful child,” she said. “He may become a good glove maker like you are, and he has such delicate and pliable fingers. The Madonna intended him for a glove-maker.”

So the boy stayed in the house, and the woman herself taught him to sew; he ate well, slept well, became very cheerful, and began to tease Bellissima, as the little dog was called. This made the woman angry, she scolded him and shook her finger at him. That went to the boy’s heart, and he sat thoughtful in his little room. This looked out into the street where skins were being dried; thick iron bars were before the windows. He could not sleep; the Metal Pig was continually running in his mind, and suddenly he heard a pit-a-pat outside. That must be a pig, he thought. So he ran to the window, but there was nothing to be seen—it had passed already.

“Help the gentleman to carry his box of colours,” said madam the following morning to the boy, when her young neighbour, the artist, passed, carrying the box and a large rolled canvas. The boy shouldered the box and followed the painter, who took the way leading to the gallery, and went up the same steps which were so well known to the boy since the night he had ridden on the Metal Pig. He knew the statues and the pictures, the beautiful marble Venus and the Venus who lived in the picture; he again saw the Madonna, Jesus and John.

They stopped before the picture by Bronzino, in which Christ is descending into hell, and the children are all smiling around him in sweet expectation of heaven. The poor boy smiled too, for here he was in his heaven.

“You may go home now,” said the artist when the boy had stood there till the other had set up his easel.

“May I look at your painting?” asked the boy. “May I see how you get the picture upon this white canvas?”

“Pm not going to paint yet,” replied the man, taking up his black chalk. His hand moved quickly, his eye measuring the great picture, and although only a thin line was visible, the figure of Christ was already on the canvas, as in the painted picture.

“But why don’t you go home?” said the painter; and silently the boy walked home, sat down at the table, and learned to sew gloves.

But the whole day his thoughts were in the picture gallery, and therefore he pricked his fingers and was very awkward, though he did not tease Bellissima. When evening came, and the house door stood open for a moment, he slipped out; it was cold, but a very fine bright starlight night. Away he wandered through the already deserted streets, and was soon standing before the Metal Pig. He bent down, kissed its polished snout, and seated himself on its back.

“You blessed creature,” he cried, “how I have longed for you! We must have a ride tonight.”

The Metal Pig lay motionless, and the fresh stream gushed forth from his mouth. The boy was sitting on his back like a rider, when something pulled him by the clothes. He looked down, and there was Bellissima, the little smooth-shaven Bellissima, barking as if it wanted to say, “Do you see, I’m here too; why are you sitting there?” No fiery dragon could have startled the boy so much as did the little dog in this place. Bellissima in the street, and undressed too, as the old dame called it! What would be the end of it? The dog only went out in winter attired in a little lambskin coat which had been made for him; it fastened with a red ribbon round his neck and under his belly. In this costume the dog looked like a little kid when in winter he got permission to trip out with his mistress. Now Bellissima was out and not dressed! what would be the end of it? All the boy’s fancies had vanished, but still he kissed the Metal Pig and then took Bellissima in his arms. The little creature was trembling with cold, so the boy ran as fast as he could.

“What are you running away with there?” cried two policemen whom he met, and Bellissima barked. “Where did you steal that pretty dog?” they asked, taking it from him.

“Oh, give it back to me,” pleaded the boy.

“If you did not steal it, you can tell them at home that it can be fetched from the police station.” They gave him the name of the street and went away with Bellissima.

Here was a great calamity! The boy did not know whether he should jump into the river, or go home and confess all; they would certainly kill him, he thought. “But I will gladly be killed; then I shall go to heaven.” So he went home, almost hoping to be killed. The door was closed, and he could not reach the knocker. There was no one in the street, so he took a stone and hammered at the door.

“Who’s there?” cried somebody inside.

“It’s I,” he said “Bellissima is gone. Open the door and then kill me.”

Everybody was terror-stricken concerning poor Bellissima, but especially madam. She immediately looked at the wall, where the dog’s coat generally hung, and there was the little lambskin.

“Bellissima at the guard-house,” she cried aloud. “You wicked child! How did you entice him out? He will freeze. The delicate little thing among those rough soldiers!”

Her husband had to go after it at once—the woman lamented and the boy wept. All the inmates of the house came together, and among them the painter. He took the boy between his knees, cross-questioned him, and in fragments got to know the whole story of the Metal Pig and the picture gallery: it was pretty unintelligible. He comforted the little fellow, and tried to pacify the old woman; but she was not satisfied till her husband arrived with Bellissima, who had been amongst the soldiers. There was great rejoicing, and the painter caressed the boy and gave him a handful of pictures.

Oh! what beautiful bits and comical heads there were, and the Metal Pig was actually among them too! Oh, nothing could be more delightful! It had been put there on the paper by a few strokes, and even the house behind it was sketched in.

Whoever could draw and paint, could collect the whole world round him!

The first spare moment he had on the following day the boy seized a pencil and tried to copy the drawing of the Metal Pig on the back of one of the pictures. He succeeded; it was rather crooked, it is true, rather up and down, one leg thick and another thin, but still it was recognisable, and he rejoiced at it himself. The pencil would not go just as it should—he saw that very well; the following day a second Metal Pig stood by the side of the first, and it looked a hundred times better. The third was already so good that everyone could recognise it.

But the glove-sewing went on very badly, and the orders given in the town were but slowly got out; the Metal Pig had taught the boy that all pictures can be drawn on paper, and the city of Florence is a picture-book for anyone who will turn over its pages.

On the Piazza del Trinità stands a slender pillar, on the top of which is the Goddess of Justice, blindfolded, and holding the scales in her hand. She was soon on paper, and it was the glove maker’s young apprentice who had put her there.

His collection of pictures increased, but still it contained only drawings of things without life, when one day Bellissima came springing up to him. “Stand still,” he said, “then you shall be made beautiful and get into my collection.”

But Bellissima would not stand still, so it had to be bound fast. Its head and tail were tied, but as it still barked and jumped, the string had to be pulled tighter. Just then his mistress came in.

“You wicked boy! The poor creature!” was all that she could utter. She pushed the boy aside, kicked him, and turned him out of the house, calling him a most ungrateful good-for-nothing, and a very wicked child, and tearfully she kissed her little half strangled Bellissima.

Just at that moment the painter came down the stairs; and this is the turning-point of the story.

•  •  •

In the year 1834 there was an exhibition in the Academy of Arts at Florence. Two pictures placed side by side attracted a number of spectators. The smaller of the two represented a merry little boy, who sat drawing, with a small white, curiously shorn poodle for his model; but the animal would not stand still, and was therefore tied up with a string, both by its head and tail. There was a life and truth about the picture that appealed to everyone. The painter, it was said, was a young Florentine, who had been picked up from the streets when a child, and brought up by an old glove-maker, and had taught himself to draw. A now celebrated painter had discovered this talent, as the boy was being sent away for tying up madam’s pet, the little poodle, and using it for his model.

The glove-maker’s apprentice had become a great painter; that was evident from the picture, but especially from the larger one beside it. Here there was only a single figure, a ragged but handsome boy, who was lying asleep in the streets, leaning against the Metal Pig in the Porta Rossa. All the spectators knew the spot. The child’s arms rested upon the head of the Pig; he was fast asleep, and the lamp which hung before the image of the Madonna threw a strong effective light upon his pale, handsome face. It was a wonderfully beautiful picture, and was set in a large gilt frame, on the corner of which was hung a laurel wreath; but a black band was wound among the green leaves and a long streamer of crape hung down from it.

A few days before, the young artist had—died!

[ 1842 ]

Thumbelisa

—

There was once a woman who wished for a little child, but she did not know where she could get one. So she went to an old witch and said: “I do so long for a little child! Can you not tell me where I can get one?”

“Oh! that can easily be managed,” said the Witch. “Here is a barleycorn for you; it is not the kind that grows in the countryman’s field, or that the chickens get to eat. Set that in a flower-pot, and you shall see what you shall see.”

“Thank you,” said the Woman; and she gave the Witch a shilling, went home, and planted the barleycorn, and immediately there grew up a big handsome flower, which looked like a tulip; but the leaves were tightly closed, as though it was still a bud.

“That is a beautiful flower,” said the Woman; and she kissed its pretty yellow and red leaves. But just as she kissed it the flower opened with a pop. It was a real tulip, one could see that; but in the middle of the flower upon the green velvet stamens there sat a little tiny girl, so fine and graceful, and scarcely half a thumb’s length in height, and therefore she was called Thumbelisa.

A neat polished walnut-shell served Thumbelisa for a cradle, blue violet-petals were her mattresses, with a rose-petal for a coverlet. There she slept at night, but in the daytime she played upon the table, where the Woman had put a plate with a wreath of flowers round it, whose stalks stood in water; on the water was floating a large tulip-leaf, and on this Thumbelisa could sit, and sail from one side of the plate to the other, and she had two white horsehairs to row with. That was pretty indeed! She could also sing, and, oh, so delicately and sweetly that the like had never been heard before.

One night, as she lay in her pretty bed, there came an old toad hopping through the window, in which one pane was broken. The toad was a very ugly one, large and wet; it hopped right down on to the table, where Thumbelisa lay sleeping under the red rose-petal.

“She would be a lovely wife for my son,” said the toad; and she picked up the walnut-shell in which Thumbelisa lay asleep and hopped with it through the window down into the garden.

There flowed a great wide brook; the margin was swampy and soft, and here the toad dwelt with her son. Ugh! he was ever so ugly and nasty, and looked just like his mother. “Croak, croak! Crekkek-kex!” That was all he could say when he saw the graceful little maiden in the walnut-shell.

“Don’t speak so loud, or she will wake up,” said the old toad. “She might run away from us, for she is as light as swan’s-down. We will put her out in the brook upon one of the broad water-lily leaves. That will be just like an island for her, she is so small and light! Then she can’t run away while we put the best room under the marsh in order, where you are to live and keep house together.”

Out in the brook there grew a great many water-lilies with broad green leaves, which looked as if they were floating on the water. The leaf which was farthest out was also the largest of all, and to that the old toad swam out and laid the walnut-shell upon it with Thumbelisa. The poor little mite woke very early in the morning, and when she saw where she was she began to cry most bitterly, for there was water on all sides of the big green leaf, and she could not get to the land at all.

The old Toad sat down in the marsh, decking out her room with rushes and yellow water-weeds—it was to be made very pretty for the new daughter-in-law; then she swam out, with her ugly son, to the leaf where Thumbelisa was. They had come to fetch her pretty bed, to put it in the bridal chamber before she went in there herself. The old toad bowed low before her in the water, and said:

“See, here is my son; he will be your husband, and you will live so happily together in the marsh.”

“Croak, croak! Crekkek-kex!” That was all her son could say.

Then they took the delicate little bed and swam away with it; but Thumbelisa sat all alone upon the green leaf and cried, for she did not want to live with the nasty old Toad, or have her ugly son for a husband. The little fishes swimming in the water below had seen the Toad, and they had heard what she said; and so they lifted up their heads out of the water, for they wanted to see the little girl. As soon as they saw her they thought she was so pretty that they felt very sorry she should have to go down to the ugly Toad. No, that must never be! They all assembled in the water round the green stalk which held the leaf on which she stood, and with their teeth they gnawed through the stalk, and so the leaf floated down the stream. And away went Thumbelisa with it, far away where the Toad could not get at her.

Thumbelisa sailed by many towns, and the little birds that sat in the bushes saw her, and sang, “What a lovely little maiden!” The leaf swam away with her, farther and farther; so Thumbelisa travelled right out of the country to foreign lands.

A sweet little white Butterfly kept fluttering round her, and at last settled on the leaf. He had taken a fancy to Thumbelisa, and she was very glad too, for now the Toad could not reach them; and it was so beautiful where she was—the sun shone upon the water, making it sparkle like the brightest silver. She took her sash and bound one end of it to the butterfly, and the other end of the ribbon she fastened to the leaf. It now glided along much faster, and she with it, for she stood upon the leaf.

Just then there came a big May-bug flying past, and saw her, and in a moment he seized her slender waist in his claws, and flew with her up into a tree. The green leaf went swimming down the stream, and the Butterfly with it, for he was fastened to the leaf and could not get away.

Mercy! how frightened poor little Thumbelisa was when the May-bug flew with her up into the tree! But most of all she was sorry for the pretty white Butterfly she had bound fast to the leaf, for if he could not free himself, he would starve. The big May-bug, however, did not trouble himself at all about this. He sat down with her upon the biggest green leaf of the tree, gave her the sweet part of the flowers to eat, and declared that she was very pretty, though she was not at all like a may-bug.

Later all the other may-bugs who lived in the tree came to pay a visit. They looked at Thumbelisa, and the young lady May-bugs turned up their feelers and said:

“Why, she has no more than two legs!—that is most ungainly.”

“She hasn’t got any feelers!” said they.

“Her waist is quite slender—she looks like a human creature—Ugh, how ugly she is!” said all the lady may-bugs.

And yet Thumbelisa was very beautiful! Even the May-bug who had carried her off saw that; but when all the others said she was ugly, he at last believed it too, and would not have her at all—she might go where she liked. Then they flew down with her off the tree, and set her upon a daisy. She cried, because she was so ugly that the may-bugs would not have her; and yet she was the loveliest little being one could imagine, and as tender and fair as the most beautiful rose-petal.

The whole summer, poor Thumbelisa lived quite alone in the great wood. She wove herself a bed out of blades of grass, and hung it up under a shamrock, so that she was protected from the rain. She gathered the honey out of the flowers for food, and drank the dew that stood every morning upon the leaves. Thus the summer and the autumn passed, but now came the winter, the cold, long winter. All the birds who had sung so sweetly to her flew away; trees and flowers shed their leaves; the large shamrock under which she had lived shrivelled up, and there was nothing left of it but a withered stalk; and she was dreadfully cold, for her clothes were torn, and she herself was so small and delicate. Poor Thumbelisa!—she was nearly frozen. It began to snow, and every snowflake that fell upon her was like a whole shovelful thrown upon one of us, for we are big, and she was only an inch long. She wrapped herself up in a dry leaf, but that would not keep her warm, and she shivered with cold.

Just outside the wood lay a great cornfield, but the corn was gone long ago, only the naked dry stubble stood up out of the frozen ground. This was just like a great forest for her to struggle through. Oh, how she shivered with cold! Then she came to the door of a Field-mouse. This was a little hole under the stubble. There the Field-mouse lived, warm and comfortable, and had a whole roomful of corn, and a fine kitchen and larder. Poor Thumbelisa stood at the door like a poor beggar girl, and asked for a little bit of barleycorn, for she had not had the smallest morsel to eat for two days.

“You poor little creature,” said the Field-mouse—for really she was a good old Mouse—“come into my warm room and dine with me!”

As she was pleased with Thumbelisa, she said, “If you like you may stay with me through the winter, but you must keep my room clean and neat, and tell me stories, for I am very fond of them.”

And Thumbelisa did as the kind old Field-mouse wished, and had a very good time of it.

“Now we shall soon have a visitor,” said the Field-mouse. “My neighbour is in the habit of visiting me once a week. He is even better off than I am; has large rooms, and wears a beautiful black velvety fur. If you could only get him for a husband, you would be well provided for. But he cannot see. You must tell him all the prettiest stories you know.”

But Thumbelisa did not trouble herself about this; she thought nothing of the neighbour, for he was only a mole.

He came and paid a visit in his black velvet coat. The field-mouse told her how rich and how wise he was, and how his house was more than twenty times larger than hers, that he had learning, but that he did not like the sun and beautiful flowers, and sneered at them, for he had never seen them.

Thumbelisa had to sing, and she sang both “Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home,” and “The parson goes to the field.” Then the Mole fell in love with her, because of her beautiful voice, but he said nothing, for he was a prudent man.

A short time before, he had dug a long passage through the earth from his own house to theirs; and Thumbelisa and the Field-mouse had leave to walk there as much as they wished. But he begged them not to be afraid of the dead bird which was lying in the passage. It was a whole bird, with wings and a beak. It must have died only a short time before, when the winter began, and was now buried just where the Mole had made his passage.

The Mole took a piece of decayed touchwood in his mouth, for that glimmers like fire in the dark, and then he went ahead and lighted them through the long dark passage. When they came where the dead bird lay the Mole thrust up his broad nose against the ceiling and pushed the earth up, so that a great hole was made, through which the daylight could shine down. In the middle of the floor lay a dead swallow, his beautiful wings pressed close against his sides, and his head and feet drawn back under his feathers; the poor bird had certainly died of cold. This grieved Thumbelisa very much, for she was very fond of all the little birds, who had sung and twittered so prettily for her through the summer. But the Mole gave him a push with his crooked legs, and said, “Now he won’t pipe any more. It must be miserable to be born a little bird! I’m thankful that none of my children can be that! Such a bird has nothing but his ‘tweet-weet,’ and is obliged to starve in the winter!”

“Yes, you may well say that, as a clever man,” observed the Field-mouse. “Of what use is all this ‘tweet-weet’ to a bird when the winter comes? He must starve and freeze. But I suppose that’s considered very grand!”

Thumbelisa said nothing; but when the two others had their backs turned she bent down, put the feathers aside which covered his head, and kissed him upon his closed eyes.

“Perhaps it was he who sang so prettily for me in the summer,” she thought. “How much pleasure he gave me, the dear, beautiful bird!”

The Mole now stopped up the hole through which the daylight shone, and showed the ladies home. But at night Thumbelisa could not sleep at all; so she got up out of her bed, and wove a large beautiful carpet of hay, and took it and spread it over the dead bird, and laid some soft cotton-wool which she had found in the Field-mouse’s room, around the bird so that he might lie warm on the cold ground.

“Farewell, you pretty little bird!” said she. “Farewell! And thanks for your beautiful song in the summer, when all the trees were green, and the sun shone warmly upon us.” And then she laid her head on the bird’s breast; but the next moment she was startled to hear something beating inside the bird. It was the bird’s heart. The bird was not dead; he was only lying there benumbed with the cold, and now he had been warmed, was coming back to life.

In autumn all the swallows fly away to warm countries; but if one happens to be left behind, it becomes so cold that it falls down as if dead, and lies where it fell, and then the cold snow covers it over.

Thumbelisa trembled all over, she was so startled; for the bird was big, so big compared with her, who was only an inch in height. But she took courage, laid the cotton-wool closer round the poor bird, and brought a leaf of mint that she had used as her own coverlet, and laid it over the bird’s head.

The next night she stole out to him again, and now he was alive, but so weak that he could only open his eyes for a moment and look at Thumbelisa, who stood before him with a bit of decayed wood in her hand, for she had no other light.

“I thank you, you pretty little child,” said the sick Swallow to her. “I feel so beautifully warm! Soon I shall get my strength back again, and I shall be able to fly again, out in the warm sunshine.”

“Oh,” she said, “it is so cold outside. It snows and freezes. Stay in your warm bed, and I will take care of you.”

Then she brought water in the petal of a flower, and he drank it, and told her how he had torn one of his wings in a thorn bush, and so had not been able to fly as fast as the other swallows, which had sped far, far away to warm countries. So at last he had fallen to the ground, but he could remember nothing more, and did not know at all how he had come here.

The whole winter he remained there, and Thumbelisa took care of him and grew very fond of him. Neither the Field-mouse nor the Mole knew anything about it, for they did not like the poor Swallow.

As soon as the spring came and the sun warmed the earth, the Swallow bade Thumbelisa farewell, and she opened the hole which the mole had made in the ground above. The sun shone in upon them brightly, and the Swallow asked if Thumbelisa would go away with him; she could sit upon his back, and they would fly away far into the green forest. But Thumbelisa knew that the old Field-mouse would be grieved if she left her like this. “No, I cannot!” said Thumbelisa.

“Farewell, farewell, you good, pretty girl!” said the Swallow; and he flew out into the sunshine. Thumbelisa looked after him, and the tears came into her eyes, for she had become so fond of the poor swallow.

“Tweet-weet! tweet-weet!” sang the bird, and flew into the green forest. Thumbelisa felt very sad. She was not allowed to go out into the warm sunshine. The corn which was sown in the field over the house of the Field-mouse had grown high into the air; it was quite a thick wood for the little girl, who was only an inch in height.

“You must get your outfit ready to be married this summer,” said the Field-mouse to her, for their neighbour, the tiresome Mole in the black velvet coat, had proposed for her. “You must have both woollen and linen! You shall have things to wear, and to lie upon too, when you are the Mole’s wife!”

Thumbelisa had to spin, and the Mole hired four spiders to weave for her day and night. Every evening the Mole paid her a visit; and he was always saying that when the summer should end the sun would not shine nearly so hot, and that now it burned the earth almost as hard as stone. Yes, when the summer was over then he would celebrate his marriage with Thumbelisa. But she was not glad at all, for she could not bear the tiresome Mole. Every morning when the sun rose, and every evening when it went down, she stole out of the door, and when the wind blew the corn aside, so that she could see the blue sky, she thought how bright and beautiful it was out here, and wished heartily to see her dear swallow again. But he did not come back any more; he must have flown far away into the beautiful green forest.

When autumn came Thumbelisa had all her outfit ready.

“In four weeks you shall have your wedding!” said the Field-mouse to her.

But Thumbelisa cried, and said she would not have the tiresome Mole.

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Field-mouse. “Don’t be obstinate, or I’ll bite you with my white tooth. He is a very fine man to marry. The Queen herself has not such a black velvet fur, and his kitchen and cellar are full. Be thankful to get him!”

So the wedding was to take place. The Mole had already come to fetch Thumbelisa; she was to live with him deep under the ground, and never to come out into the warm sunshine, for he did not like it. The poor girl was very sorrowful; she had now to say farewell to the beautiful sun, which at least she had been allowed by the Field-mouse to see from the threshold of the door.

“Farewell, thou bright sun!” she said, and stretched up her arms to it, as she walked a little way from the Field-mouse’s house, for now the corn had been reaped, and only the dry stubble stood in the fields. “Farewell, farewell!” said she, and she threw her little arms round a small red flower close by her. “Give my love to the dear Swallow from me, if you see him again.”

“Tweet-weet! tweet-weet!” A voice suddenly sounded over her head. She looked up; it was the Swallow, who was just flying by. As soon as he saw Thumbelisa he was very glad; and she told him how unwilling she was to have the ugly Mole for her husband, and that she would have to live deep under the earth, where the sun never shone. She could not help crying about it.

“The cold winter is coming now,” said the Swallow; “I am going to fly far away to warm countries. Will you come with me? You can sit upon my back. Tie yourself on with your sash, and we will fly away from the ugly Mole and his dark room, far away over the mountains to warm countries where the sun shines brighter than here, where it is always summer, and there are glorious flowers. Do fly with me, dear little Thumbelisa, you who saved my life when I lay frozen in the dark underground cellar.”

“Yes, I will go with you!” said Thumbelisa, and she seated herself on the bird’s back, with her feet on his outspread wing, and tied her sash fast to one of his strongest feathers. Then the Swallow flew high up into the air over forest and sea, high up over the great mountains, where the snow always flies; and Thumbelisa shivered in the cold air, but then she crept under the bird’s warm feathers, and only put out her little head to admire all the beauty beneath her.

At last they reached the warm countries. There the sun shone much brighter than here, the sky seemed twice as high, on the hedges grew the most beautiful blue and green grapes, lemons and oranges hung in the woods, the air was fragrant with myrtles and balsams, and on the roads the loveliest children ran about, playing with the large gay butterflies. But the Swallow flew still farther, and it became more and more beautiful. Under the majestic green trees by the blue lake stood a palace of dazzling white marble, of the olden time. Vines wound themselves round the lofty pillars, and at the top were many swallows’ nests, in one of which lived the Swallow who carried Thumbelisa.

“That is my house,” said the Swallow; “but if you will choose for yourself one of the lovely flowers that are growing there I will put you into it, and you shall be as happy as you could wish.”

“That would be delightful,” she said, clapping her little hands.

A great white marble pillar lay there which had fallen to the ground and broken into three pieces; but between these grew the most beautiful big white flowers. The Swallow flew down with Thumbelisa, and sat her upon one of the broad leaves. But what was her surprise! There sat a little man in the middle of the flower, as white and transparent as if he had been made of glass; he had the loveliest gold crown on his head, and beautiful bright wings on his shoulders; he himself was no bigger than Thumbelisa. He was the angel of the flower. In each of the flowers dwelt such a little man or woman, but this one was king over them all.

“Heavens! how beautiful he is!” whispered Thumbelisa to the Swallow.

The little prince was very much frightened at the Swallow; for it was quite a giant bird to him, who was so small and delicate. But when he saw Thumbelisa he was delighted; she was the prettiest maiden he had ever seen. Therefore he took his golden crown off his head and put it on hers, asked her name, and if she would be his wife, and then she should be queen of all the flowers. Yes, this was truly a different kind of man to the Toad’s son or the Mole with the black velvet fur. So she said “Yes” to the charming Prince. And from every flower came a lady or a gentleman, so lovely to behold that it was a delight; each one brought Thumbelisa a present. But the best of all was a pair of beautiful wings from a great white Butterfly; these were fastened to Thumbelisa’s back, and then she too could fly from flower to flower.

Then there was much rejoicing; and the Swallow sat above them in his nest, and sang to them as well as he could; but in his heart he was sad, for he was so fond of Thumbelisa that he would have liked never to part from her.

“You shall not be called Thumbelisa,” said the Flower Angel to her; “it is an ugly name, and you are so pretty. We will call you Maia!”

“Farewell, farewell!” said the Swallow; and he flew away again from the warm countries, back to Denmark. There he had a little nest over the window where the man lives who can tell fairy tales. To him he sang, “Tweet-weet! tweet-weet!” That is how we know the whole story.

[ 1835 ]

The Little Mermaid

—

Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the most beautiful cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass. But it is very deep—much deeper, indeed, than any anchor can fathom. Many steeples would have to be piled one on top of the other to reach from the bottom to the surface of the water. Down there live the sea-folk.

Now you must not think that there is nothing but the bare white sand down at the bottom. No, there grow the strangest trees and plants, with such pliable stems and leaves that at the slightest movement of the water they stir as if they are alive. All the big and little fishes glide among their branches, as the birds do up above in the air. Where the ocean is deepest stands the Sea-king’s palace. Its walls are made of coral, and the high arched windows of the clearest amber. The roof is made of mussel-shells, which open and close in the current. It is very beautiful, for each of them is filled with gleaming pearls, a single one of which would make a fit jewel for a queen’s crown.

The Sea-king had been a widower for many years, but his old mother kept house for him. She was a clever woman, but very vain of her noble rank; so she wore twelve oysters on her tail, while other grand folk were only allowed to wear six. In every other respect, she deserved great praise, especially for her tender care of the little Sea-princesses, her granddaughters. They were six lovely children, and the youngest was the most beautiful of all. Her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-petal, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea, but, like all the others, she had no legs—her body ended in a fish-tail. All day long they used to play in the great halls of the palace, where living flowers grew out of the walls. The large amber windows were thrown open, and the fishes came swimming in to them, as the swallows fly in to us when we open our windows; but the fishes swam right up to the little Princesses, and ate out of their hands, and let themselves be stroked.

In front of the palace was a large garden, in which bright red and dark blue trees were growing. The fruit glittered like gold, and the flowers looked like flames of fire, with their ever-moving stems and leaves. The ground was covered with the finest sand, as blue as the flame of sulphur. A strange blue light shone over everything; one would imagine oneself to be high up in the air, with the blue sky above and below, rather than at the bottom of the sea. When the sea was calm one could see the sun; it looked like a huge purple flower, from whose centre the light streamed forth.

Each of the little Princesses had her own little place in the garden, where she could dig and plant as she pleased. One gave her flowerbed the shape of a whale; another liked better to make hers like a little mermaid; but the youngest made hers as round as the sun, and only had flowers that shone red like it. She was a strange child, quiet and thoughtful. While her sisters made a great display of all sorts of curious objects which they found from wrecked ships, she only loved her rose-red flowers, like the sun above, and a beautiful marble statue of a handsome boy, carved out of clear white marble, which had sunk from some wreck to the bottom of the sea. She had planted by the statue a red weeping-willow tree, which grew well, hanging over it with its fresh branches reaching down to the blue sand, and casting a violet shadow which moved to and fro like the branches, so that it seemed as if the top and the roots of the tree were playing at kissing each other.

Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to hear stories about the world of men above, and her old grandmother had to tell her all she knew about ships and towns, men and animals. It seemed strangely beautiful to her that on earth the flowers were fragrant, for at the bottom of the sea they have no scent, and that the woods were green, and that the fish which one saw there among the branches could sing so loudly and beautifully that it was a delight to hear them. The grandmother called the little birds fishes; otherwise her granddaughter would not have understood her, as they had never seen a bird.

“When you are fifteen years old,” said the grandmother, “you will be allowed to rise up to the surface of the sea and sit on the rocks in the moonlight, and see the big ships as they sail by. Then you will also see the forests and towns.”

The following year one of the sisters would be fifteen; but the others—well, the sisters were each one year younger than the other; so the youngest had to wait fully five years before she could come up from the bottom of the sea and see what things were like on the earth above. But each promised to tell her sisters what she had seen and liked best on her first day; for their grandmother could not tell them enough—there were so many things about which they wanted to know. None of them, however, longed so much to go up as the youngest, who had the longest time to wait, and was so quiet and thoughtful. Many a night she stood at the open window and looked up through the dark blue water, where the fishes splashed with their fins and tails. She could see the moon and the stars, which only shone faintly, but looked much bigger through the water than we see them. When something like a dark cloud passed under them, and hid them for a while, she knew it was either a whale swimming overhead or a ship with many people, who had no idea that a lovely little mermaid was standing below stretching out her white hands towards the keel of their ship.

The eldest Princess was now fifteen years old, and was allowed to rise to the surface of the sea. When she came back she had hundreds of things to tell: but what pleased her most, she said, was to lie in the moonlight on a sandbank, in the calm sea, and to look at the nearby coast and the big town where the lights twinkled like many hundreds of stars; to hear music and the noise and bustle of carriages and people, and to see the many church towers and spires and listen to the ringing of the bells. Oh, how the youngest sister listened to all this! And when, later on in the evening, she again stood at the open window, looking up through the dark blue water, she thought of the big town, with all its bustle and noise, and imagined she could hear the church bells ringing, even down where she was.

The next year, the second sister was allowed to go up to the surface, and swim about as she pleased. She came up just as the sun was setting, and saw the sight she thought the most beautiful of all. The whole sky was like gold, she said, and the clouds—well, she could not find words to describe their loveliness. Rose and violet, they sailed by over her head; but, even swifter than the clouds, a flock of wild swans, like a long white veil, flew across the water towards the sun. She followed them, but the sun sank, and the rosy gleam faded from the sea and clouds.

The year after, the third sister went up. She was the boldest of them all, and swam up a broad river which flowed into the sea. She saw beautiful green hills covered with vines, and houses and castles peeped out from magnificent woods. She heard the birds sing, and the sun shone so warmly that she often had to dive under the water to cool her burning face.

In a little creek she came across a whole flock of little children, who were quite naked and splashed about in the water; she wanted to play with them, but they ran away terrified. Then a little black animal—it was a dog, but she had never seen a dog before—came out and barked so ferociously at her that she was frightened, and hurried back as fast as she could to the open sea. But she could never forget the magnificent woods, the green hills, and the lovely children, who could swim even though they had no fish-tails.

The fourth sister was not so daring; she stayed far out in the open sea, and said that that was the loveliest place of all. There, she said, one could see for many miles round, and the sky above was like a great glass dome. She saw ships, but far away, and they looked to her like seagulls. The playful dolphins, she said, turned somersaults, and the big whales spouted out seawater through their nostrils, as if a hundred fountains were playing all around her.

Now came the turn of the fifth sister, and, as her birthday was in winter, she saw on her first visit things which the other sisters had not. The sea looked quite green; huge icebergs floated around her—they were like pearls, she said, and yet were much higher than the church steeples built by men. They were the strangest shapes and glittered like diamonds. She sat on one of the biggest, and all the passing sailors were terrified when they saw her sitting there, with the wind playing with her long hair. But towards evening the sky became overcast with black clouds; there was thunder and lightning, and the dark waves lifted up the big blocks of ice, which shone in each flash of lightning. The sails were reefed on all the ships, and there was anxiety and terror; but she sat quietly on her floating iceberg, and watched the blue lightning dart in zigzags into the foaming sea.

The first time each one of the sisters came to the surface, all the new and beautiful things she saw charmed her; but now, when as grown-up girls they were allowed to come up whenever they liked, they became indifferent to them, longing for their home; and after a month they said that after all it was best down below, where one felt at home. On many an evening the five sisters would rise to the surface of the sea, arm-in-arm. They had beautiful voices, far finer than that of any human being; and when a storm was brewing, and they thought that some ships might be wrecked, they swam in front of them, singing so beautifully of how lovely it was at the bottom of the sea, and telling the people not to be afraid of coming down there. But the human beings could not understand the words, and thought it was only the noise of the storm; and they never saw the wonders below, for when the ship went down they were drowned, and were dead when they came to the Sea-king’s palace. When her sisters went up arm-in-arm to the top of the sea there stood the little sister, all alone, looking after them, and feeling as if she could cry; but mermaids have no tears, and so they suffer all the more.

“Oh, if I were only fifteen!” she said. “I know how much I shall love the world above, and the people who live in it.”

* * * * *

At last she was fifteen years old.

“Well, now we have you off our hands,” said her grandmother, the old dowager-queen. “Come now! Let me adorn you like your sisters!” She put a wreath of white lilies on her head, but every petal of the flowers was half a pearl; and the old lady had eight big oysters fixed to the princess’s tail, to show her high rank.

“But it hurts so!” said the little Mermaid.

“Yes, one must suffer to be beautiful,” said the old lady.

Oh, how gladly she would have taken off all her ornaments and the heavy wreath! The red flowers in her garden would have suited her much better, but she dared not make any change now. “Goodbye!” she said, and rose as lightly as a bubble through the water.

The sun had just set when she lifted her head out of the water, but the clouds gleamed with red and gold, and the evening star shone in the rosy sky; the air was mild and fresh, and the sea as calm as glass. Near her lay a big ship with three masts; only one sail was set, as not a breath of wind was stirring, and the sailors were sitting about on deck and in the rigging. There was music and singing on board, and when it grew dark many hundreds of coloured lamps were lighted, and it looked as if the flags of all nations were floating in the air. The little Mermaid swam up close to the cabin windows, and when the waves lifted her up she could see through the clear panes many richly dressed people. But the handsomest of them all was the young Prince, with large black eyes—he could not be older than sixteen; and it was his birthday—that was the reason for all this celebration. The sailors were dancing on deck, and when the young Prince came out, hundreds of rockets were sent off into the air, making the night as bright as day, so that the little Mermaid was frightened, and dived under water. But soon she lifted up her head again, and then it seemed to her as if all the stars of heaven were falling down upon her. Never had she seen such a thing! Great suns whirled round, gorgeous fiery fish flew through the blue air, and everything was reflected in the calm and glassy sea. The ship was so brilliantly lighted up that one could see everything distinctly, even to the smallest rope, and the people still better. Oh, how beautiful was the young Prince! He shook hands with the people and smiled graciously, while the music sounded dreamily through the starry night.

It grew very late, but the little Mermaid could not turn her eyes away from the ship and the handsome Prince. The coloured lamps were put out, no more rockets were sent off nor cannons fired. But deep down in the sea was a strange humming and murmuring, and the little Mermaid sitting on the waves was rocked up and down, so that she could look into the cabin. Soon the ship began to make greater headway, as one sail after another was unfurled; then the waves rose higher and higher; dark clouds gathered, and flashes of lightning were seen in the distance. Oh, what a terrible storm was brewing! Then the sailors reefed all the sails, and the big ship rushed at flying speed through the wild sea; the waves rose as high as great black mountains, as if they would dash over the masts, but the ship dived like a swan between them, and then was carried up again to their towering crests. The little Mermaid thought this was great fun; but not so the sailors. The ship creaked and groaned, her strong timbers bending under the weight of the huge waves; the sea broke over her; the mainmast snapped in two, like a reed; and the ship lay over on her side while the water rushed into her hold. The little Mermaid then realized that the crew was in danger; she herself had to be careful of the beams and planks floating about in the water. For one moment it was so dark that not a thing could be seen, but flashes of lightning made everything visible, and she could see all on board. The little Mermaid looked out for the young Prince, and as the ship broke up she saw him sinking into the deep sea. At first she was very pleased, for now he would come down to her; but then she remembered that men cannot live in the water, and only if he were dead could he come to her father’s palace. No, he must not die! Heedless of the beams and planks floating on the water, which might have crushed her, she dived down into the water and came up again in the waves, in search of the Prince. At last she found him. His strength was failing him, and he could hardly swim any longer in the stormy sea; his arms and legs began to grow numb, and his beautiful eyes closed; he would certainly have died if the little Mermaid had not come to his assistance. She held his head above the water and let the waves carry them where they would.

Next morning the storm was over, but not a plank of the ship was to be seen anywhere. The sun rose red and brilliant out of the water, and seemed to bring new life to the Prince’s cheeks; but his eyes remained closed. The little Mermaid kissed his beautiful high forehead, and smoothed back his wet hair; she thought he looked very much like the white marble statue in her little garden. She kissed him again and again, and wished that he might live.

Then she saw before her eyes the mainland, where lay high, blue mountains, on whose summits snow was glistening, so that they looked like swans. Down by the shore were beautiful green woods, and in front of them stood a church or convent—she did not know which, but it was some sort of building. Lemon and orange trees grew in the garden, and before the gate stood lofty palms. The sea formed a little bay here, and was quite calm, though very deep; she swam straight to the cliffs, where the fine white sand had been washed ashore, and laid the handsome Prince on the sand, taking special care that his head lay raised up in the warm sunshine. Then all the bells began to ring in the big white building, and many young girls came out into the garden. The little Mermaid swam farther out and hid behind some rocks, covering her hair and breast with sea-foam, lest anybody should see her little face; and from there she watched to see who would come to the poor Prince.

It was not long before a young girl came to the spot where he lay. At first she seemed very frightened, but only for a moment, and then she called some of the others. The little Mermaid saw that the Prince came back to life, and smiled at all who stood round him; but at her he did not smile—he little knew who had saved him. She was very sad; and when they had taken him into the big building, she dived sorrowfully down into the water, and so went back to her father’s palace.

She had always been silent and thoughtful, and now she became still more so. Her sisters asked her what she had seen when she went up for the first time, but she told them nothing. Many a morning and many an evening she went back to the place where she had left the Prince. She saw how the fruit in the garden ripened and was gathered, and how the snow melted on the high mountains, but she never saw the Prince; and each time she returned home, she was more sorrowful than before.

Her only comfort was to sit in her little garden and put her arms round the marble figure which was so like the Prince; but she no longer looked after her flowers. Her garden became a wilderness; the plants straggled over the paths, and twined their long stalks and leaves round the branches of the trees, so that it became quite dark there.

At last she could bear it no longer, and confided her troubles to one of her sisters, who, of course, told the others. These and a few other mermaids, who also told their intimate friends, were the only people who were in the secret. One of them knew who the Prince was, and could tell them where his kingdom lay. She also had watched the festivities on board the ship.

“Come, little sister!” said the other Princesses, and arm-in-arm, in a long row, they rose to the surface of the sea, in front of where the Prince’s palace stood. It was built of bright yellow stone, and had broad marble staircases, one of which reached right down to the sea. Magnificent gilt cupolas surmounted the roof, and in the colonnades, which ran all round the building, stood lifelike marble statues. Through the clear panes of the high windows could be seen splendid halls, hung with costly silk curtains and beautiful tapestries, and on all the walls were paintings which were a joy to look at. In the centre of the largest hall a big fountain was playing. Its jets rose as high as the glass dome in the ceiling, through which the sun shone on the water and on the beautiful plants which grew in the great basin.

Now she knew where he lived, and came there many an evening and many a night across the water. She swam much closer to the shore than any of the others would have ventured, and she even went up the narrow channel under the magnificent marble terrace which cast a long shadow over the water. Here she would sit and gaze at the young Prince, who thought that he was all alone in the bright moonlight.

Many an evening she saw him sailing in his stately boat, with music on board and flags waving. She watched from behind the green rushes, and when the wind caught her long silvery-white veil, and people saw it, they thought it was a swan spreading its wings. Many a night when the fishermen were out at sea fishing by torchlight, she heard them say many good things about the Prince, and she was glad that she had saved his life when he was drifting half dead upon the waves. She remembered how heavily his head had lain upon her breast, and how passionately she had kissed him, but he knew nothing about it, and did not even see her in his dreams.

More and more she grew to love the human beings, and more and more she longed to be able to live among them, for their world seemed to her so much bigger than hers. They could sail over the sea in great ships and climb mountains high above the clouds, and the lands which they owned stretched, in woods and fields, farther than her eyes could see. There were still so many things she wanted to know about, and her sisters could not answer all her questions; so she asked her grandmother, who knew the upper world very well, and rightly called it “the countries above the sea.”

“If human beings are not drowned,” asked the little Mermaid, “can they live forever? Don’t they die as we do down here in the sea?

“Yes,” said the old lady, “they also die, and their life is even shorter than ours. We can live to be three hundred years old, but when we cease to exist we are turned into foam on the water, and have not even a grave down here among our dear ones. We have not got immortal souls, and can never live again. We are like the green rushes, which, when once cut down, can never grow again. Human beings, however, have a soul which lives forever, lives even after the body has become dust; it rises through the clear air up to the shining stars. As we rise out of the water and see all the countries of the earth, so they rise to unknown, beautiful regions which we shall never see.”

“Why don’t we also have an immortal soul?” said the little Mermaid sorrowfully. “I would gladly give all the hundreds of years I have yet to live if I could only be a human being for one day, and to have the hope of seeing that marvellous country beyond the sky.”

“You must not think about that,” said the old lady. “We are much happier and better off than the human beings up there.”

“So I must die, and float as foam on the sea, and never hear the music of the waves or see the beautiful flowers and the red sun! Is there nothing I can do to obtain an immortal soul?”

“No,” said the grandmother. “Only if a man loved you so much that you were dearer to him than father or mother, and if he clung to you with all his heart and all his love, and let the priest place his right hand in yours, with the promise to be faithful to you here and to eternity—then would his soul flow into your body, and you would receive a share in the happiness of mankind. He would give you a soul and yet still keep his own. But that can never happen! What is thought most beautiful here below, your fish-tail, they would consider ugly on earth—they do not know any better. Up there one must have two clumsy supports, which they call legs, in order to be beautiful.”

The little Mermaid sighed and looked sadly at her fish-tail.

“Let us be happy!” said the old lady. “Let us hop and skip through the three hundred years of our life! That is surely long enough! And afterwards we can rest all the better in our graves. This evening there is to be a Court ball.”

Such a splendid sight has never been seen on earth. The walls and ceiling of the big ballroom were of thick transparent glass. Several hundred colossal mussel-shells, red and grass-green, stood in rows down the sides, holding blue flames, which illuminated the whole room and shone through the walls, so that the sea outside was brightly lit up. One could see countless fish, both big and small, swimming outside the glass walls; some with gleaming purple scales and others glittering like silver and gold. Through the middle of the ballroom flowed a broad stream, in which the mermen and mermaids danced to their own beautiful singing. No human beings have such lovely voices. The little Mermaid sang most sweetly of all, and they all applauded her. For a moment she felt joyful at heart at the thought that she had the most beautiful voice on land or in the sea; but soon her mind returned to the world above, for she could not forget the handsome Prince and her sorrow at not possessing an immortal soul like his. So she stole out of her father’s palace; and while the others within enjoyed songs and merriment, she sat sorrowfully in her little garden.

Suddenly she heard the sound of a horn through the water, and thought: “Now he is sailing above, he whom I love more than father or mother, and into whose hands I would entrust my life’s happiness. I will dare anything to win him and an immortal soul. While my sisters are dancing in my father’s palace I will go to the sea-witch, whom I have always feared so much. Perhaps she may be able to give me advice and help.”

Then the little Mermaid left her garden, and went out towards the roaring whirlpools where the witch lived. She had never been that way before; no flowers, no seaweed even, were growing there—only bare, grey sand stretching to the whirlpools, where the water swirled round like rushing mill-wheels, dragging everything it got hold of down into the depths. She had to pass right through these dreadful whirlpools to reach the witch’s territory. For a long way the only path led over bubbling mud, that the witch called the peat-bog. Behind this her house stood, in a strange forest, for all the trees and bushes were polyps—half animals and half plants—which looked like hundred-headed snakes growing out of the ground. All the branches were slimy arms with fingers like wriggling worms, and they moved joint by joint from the root to the topmost branch. Everything that they could lay hold of in the sea they clutched and held fast, and never let it go again. The little Mermaid stopped timidly in front of them. Her heart was beating with fear, and she nearly turned back; but then she thought of the Prince and the immortal soul, and took courage. She twisted her long flowing hair round her head, in case the polyps should seize her by it, and, crossing her hands on her breast, darted through the water as fast as a fish, right past the hideous polyps, who stretched out their writhing arms and fingers after her. She saw that each one of them had seized something, and held it tightly with hundreds of little arms like bands of iron. The bleached bones of men who had perished at sea and sunk into the depths were tightly grasped in the arms of some, while others clutched ships’ rudders and sea-chests, skeletons of land animals, and a little mermaid whom they had caught and strangled, which was the most terrifying sight of all to her.

She now came to a big marshy place in the forest, where big, fat water-snakes were writhing about, showing their ugly yellow bellies.

In the middle of this place stood a house built of the white bones of shipwrecked men, and there sat the Sea-witch, letting a toad eat out of her mouth, as we should feed a little canary with sugar. The ugly, fat water-snakes she called her little chickens, and allowed them to crawl all over her hideous bosom.

“I know quite well what you want!” said the Sea-witch. “It is silly of you! But you shall have your way, for it is sure to bring you misfortune, my pretty Princess! You want to get rid of your fish-tail and have instead two stumps which human beings use for walking, so that the young Prince may fall in love with you, and you may win him and an immortal soul!” As she said this the old Witch laughed so loudly and horribly that the toad and the snakes fell to the ground, where they crawled about. “You have only just come in time,” said the Witch, “for if you had come after sunrise tomorrow I should not have been able to help you till another year had passed. I will make you a drink, and before sunrise you must swim ashore and sit on the beach and drink it. Then your tail will split in two and shrink into what human beings call legs; but it will hurt you, as if a sharp sword were running through you. Everyone who sees you will say that you are the most beautiful child of man they have ever seen. You will keep your gracefulness, and no dancer will be able to move as lightly as you; but at each step you take you will feel as if you were treading on a sharp knife, and as if your blood must flow. Are you willing to suffer all this, and shall I help you?”

“Yes,” said the little Mermaid in a trembling voice, and thought of the Prince and of winning an immortal soul.

“But remember!” said the Witch. “When once you have taken the human form you can never become a mermaid again. You will never again be able to dive down through the water to your sisters and your father’s palace. And if you fail to win the Prince’s love, so that for your sake he will forget father and mother, and cling to you with body and soul, and make the priest join your hands as man and wife, you will not be given an immortal soul. On the first morning after he has married another your heart will break, and you will turn into foam on the water.”

“I will do it,” said the little Mermaid, as pale as death.

“But you will have to pay me,” said the Witch, “and it is not a trifle that I ask. You have the most beautiful voice of all who live at the bottom of the sea, with which you probably think you can enchant the Prince: but this voice you must give to me. I must have the best thing you possess in return for my precious drink, for I have to give you my own blood in it, so that the drink may be as sharp as a two-edged sword.”

“But if you take away my voice,” said the little Mermaid, “what have I got left?”

“Your lovely figure,” said the witch, “your grace of movement, and your speaking eyes! With these surely you can capture a human heart. Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue, so that I may cut it off in payment, and you shall have the powerful drink.”

“Do it,” said the little Mermaid, and the Witch put her cauldron on the fire to prepare the magic drink. “Cleanliness is a good thing,” she said, and scoured the cauldron with snakes which she had tied into a bundle. Then she pricked her breast and let her black blood drip into it, and the steam rose up in the weirdest shapes, so that one could not help being frightened and horrified. Every moment the Witch threw some new thing into the cauldron, and when it boiled the sound was like crocodiles weeping. At last the drink was ready, and it looked like the clearest water.

“Here it is!” said the Witch, and cut off the little Mermaid’s tongue, so that now she was dumb and could neither sing nor speak. “If the polyps should catch hold of you when you go back through my wood,” said the Witch, “you need only throw one drop of this liquid over them, and their arms and fingers will fly into a thousand pieces!” But the little Mermaid had no need to do this, for the polyps shrank back from her in terror at the sight of the sparkling drink, which gleamed in her hand like a glittering star. So she came quickly through the forest and the bog and the roaring whirlpools.

She could see her father’s palace: in the ballroom the lamps were all darkened, and everyone was asleep, but she dared not go in to them, now that she was dumb and about to leave them forever. She felt as if her heart would break with sorrow. She stole into the garden, took a flower from each of her sisters’ flower-beds, kissed her hand a thousand times to the palace, and swam up through the dark blue sea.

The sun had not yet risen when she came in sight of the Prince’s palace and reached the magnificent marble steps. The moon was shining bright and clear. The little Mermaid drank the sharp, burning draught, and it felt as if a two-edged sword went through her tender body; she fainted, and lay as if dead.

When the sun shone over the sea she awoke, and felt a stabbing pain; but there before her stood the beautiful young Prince. He fixed his black eyes on her, so that she cast hers down, and saw that her fish-tail had disappeared, and that she had the prettiest little white legs that any girl could possess; but she was quite naked; so she wrapped herself in her long, thick hair. The Prince asked her who she was and how she came there, and she looked at him tenderly and yet sadly with her deep blue eyes, for she could not speak. Then he took her by the hand and led her into the palace. Every step she took was, as the Witch had warned her, as if she trod on pointed needles and sharp knives, but she bore it gladly, and walked as lightly as a soap-bubble by the side of the Prince, who, with all the others, admired her grace of movement.

She was given wonderful dresses of silk and muslin to put on, and she was the greatest beauty in the palace; but she was dumb, and unable either to sing or speak. Beautiful slaves, dressed in silk and gold, came to sing before the Prince and his royal parents. One of them sang better than all the rest, and the Prince clapped his hands and smiled at her. Then the little Mermaid grew sad, for she knew that she had been able to sing far more beautifully; and she thought: “Oh, if he only knew that to be with him I have given away my voice forever!”

Now the slaves began to dance light, graceful dances to the loveliest music; and then the little Mermaid lifted her beautiful white arms, rose on her toes, and glided across the floor, dancing as none of the others had danced. At every movement her beauty seemed to grow, and her eyes spoke more deeply to the heart than the songs of the slave girls. Everyone was charmed by her, especially the Prince, who called her his little foundling, and she danced again and again, although every time her feet touched the ground she felt as if she were treading on sharp knives. The Prince said that she should always be near him, and let her sleep on a velvet cushion before his door.

He had her dressed like a page, so that she might ride with him. They rode through fragrant woods, where the green branches brushed her shoulders and the little birds sang among the fresh leaves. She climbed with the Prince up the high mountains, and, though her tender feet bled so that even others could see it, she smiled and followed him, till they saw the clouds sailing beneath their feet, like a flock of birds flying to foreign lands.

At home, in the Prince’s palace, when all the others were asleep at night, she would go out on to the broad marble steps. It cooled her burning feet to stand in the cold sea-water, and then she thought of those she had left down below in the deep.

One night her sisters came up arm-in-arm, singing sorrowfully as they swam through the water, and she beckoned to them, and they recognized her and told her how sad she had made them all. After that they came to see her every night, and one night she saw far out her old grandmother, who had not been up to the surface for many, many years, and the Sea-king, with his crown on his head. They stretched out their hands towards her, but did not venture so close to land as her sisters.

Day by day the Prince grew fonder of her; he loved her as one would love a good, sweet child, but he never had the slightest thought of making her his queen; and yet his wife she must be, or she could not win an immortal soul, but on his wedding morning would turn into foam on the sea.

“Don’t you love me more than them all?” the little Mermaid’s eyes seemed to say when the Prince took her in his arms and kissed her beautiful forehead.

“Yes, you are the dearest to me,” he said, “for you have the best heart of them all. You are the most devoted to me, and you are like a young girl whom I once saw, but whom I fear I shall never meet again. I was on board a ship which was wrecked, and the waves washed me ashore near a holy temple where several young maidens were serving in attendance. The youngest of them found me on the beach, and saved my life. I only saw her twice. She is the only girl in the world I could love, but you are like her, and you almost drive her image from my heart. She belongs to the holy temple, and so by good fortune you have been sent to me, and we shall never be parted.”

“Alas! He doesn’t know that it was I who saved his life!” thought the little Mermaid. “I carried him across the sea to the wood where the temple stands; and I was hidden in the foam, watching to see if anyone would come to him. I saw the beautiful girl whom he loves better than me.” She sighed deeply, for she could not weep. “The girl belongs to the holy temple, he said. She will never come out into the world, and they will never meet again; but I am with him, and see him every day. I will care for him, love him, and give up my life for him.”

But soon the rumour spread that the Prince was to marry the beautiful daughter of a neighbouring King, and that that was why they were fitting up such a magnificent ship. The Prince is going to visit the neighbouring King’s country, they said, but really he is going to see his daughter, and a large suite is to accompany him. The little Mermaid shook her head and smiled, for she knew the Prince’s thoughts much better than the others. “I must go,” he said to her. “I must see the beautiful princess, for my parents wish it; but they will not force me to bring her home as my bride. I cannot love her: she will not be like the beautiful girl in the temple whom you are like. If one day I were to choose a bride I would rather have you, my dumb foundling with the eloquent eyes.” And he kissed her red lips, and played with her long hair, and laid his head on her heart, so that she began to dream of human happiness and an immortal soul.

“You are not afraid of the sea, my dumb child?” he said to her, when they were standing on board the stately ship which was to carry him to the neighbouring king’s country. He told her of the storm and of the calm, of the strange fish in the deep, and of the marvellous things which divers had seen down there, and she smiled at his words, for who knew more about the things at the bottom of the sea than she did?

At night, in the moonlight, when all were asleep except the man at the helm, she sat by the ship’s rail, gazing down into the clear water, and thought she could see her father’s palace, and her grandmother, with her silver crown on her head, looking up through the swirling currents at the ship’s keel. Then her sisters came up out of the water, looking sorrowfully at her and wringing their white hands. She beckoned to them, and smiled, and wanted to tell them that she was well and happy, but a cabin-boy came up to her, and her sisters dived under, so that he thought the white things he had seen were just foam on the sea.

The next morning the ship reached the harbour of the neighbouring king’s magnificent city. All the church-bells were ringing, and from the high towers trumpets sounded, while soldiers paraded with flying colours and glittering bayonets. Every day there were festivities; balls and receptions followed one another; but the princess had not yet arrived. She was being brought up in a holy convent far away, they said, where she was learning every royal virtue. At last she came. The little Mermaid was anxious to see her beauty, and she had to admit that she had never seen a lovelier being: her skin was clear and delicate, and behind her long dark lashes smiled a pair of deep blue, loyal eyes.

“You are she!” said the Prince. “She who saved me when I lay almost dead on the shore!” And he clasped his blushing bride in his arms.

“Oh, I am too happy!” he said to the little Mermaid. “My greatest wish, which I have never dared to hope for, has come true. You will rejoice at my happiness, for you love me more than them all.” The little Mermaid kissed his hand, and felt as if her heart was already breaking: his wedding morning, she knew, would bring death to her, and she would turn into foam on the sea.

The church-bells pealed, and heralds rode through the streets announcing the betrothal. On all the altars sweet-smelling oil was burning in costly silver lamps. The priests swung their censers, and the bride and bridegroom joined hands and received the bishop’s blessing. The little Mermaid, dressed in silk and gold, stood holding the bride’s train, but her ears did not hear the joyous music, and her eyes saw nothing of the sacred ceremony—she was thinking of the night of her death, and of all that she had lost in this world.

That same evening the bride and bridegroom came on board the ship; the cannons roared, the flags streamed in the wind, and in the middle of the ship was erected a royal tent of purple and gold, with the most magnificent couch, where the bridal pair were to rest through the still, cool night.

The sails swelled in the wind, and the ship glided gently and lightly over the clear sea. When it grew dark, coloured lamps were lighted, and the sailors danced merrily on deck. The little Mermaid could not help thinking of the first time she had risen to the surface and had seen the same splendour and revelry. She threw herself among the dancers, darting and turning as a swallow turns when it is pursued, and they all applauded her, for she had never danced so wonderfully before. It was like sharp knives cutting her tender feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was much greater. She knew that it was the last evening that she would be with him—him for whom she had left her family and her home, sacrificed her lovely voice, and daily suffered endless pain, of which he had not the slightest idea. It was the last night that she would breathe the same air as he, and see the deep sea and the starry sky. An unending night, without thoughts or dreams, was waiting for her, who had no soul and could not win one. On board the ship the rejoicing and revelry lasted till long past midnight, and she laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart. The Prince kissed his beautiful bride, and she played with his dark hair, and arm-in-arm they retired to rest in the magnificent tent.

Then everything grew quiet on board; only the steersman stood at the helm, and the little Mermaid laid her white arms on the rail, and looked towards the east for the rosy glimmer of dawn, for she knew that the first sunbeam would kill her.

Then she saw her sisters rising out of the waves; they were as pale as she was, and their beautiful hair no longer floated in the wind, for it had been cut off. “We have given it to the Witch, to get her help, so that you need not die tonight. She has given us a knife: here it is. See how sharp it is! Before the sun rises you must thrust it into the Prince’s heart, and when the warm blood sprinkles your feet they will grow together again into a fish-tail. Then you will be a mermaid again, and you can come down with us into the sea, and live your three hundred years before you turn into dead, salt sea-foam. Hurry! For he or you must die before sunrise. Our old grandmother is so full of grief for you that her white hair has all fallen off, as ours fell under the witch’s scissors. Kill the Prince and come back to us! Hurry! Do you see that red streak in the sky? In a few moments the sun will rise, and then you must die!” They gave a deep sigh, and disappeared beneath the waves.

The little Mermaid drew back the purple curtain of the tent, and saw the lovely bride lying asleep with her head on the Prince’s breast, and she bent down and kissed him on his beautiful forehead. She looked up at the sky, where the rosy glow was growing brighter and brighter, and then at the sharp knife, and again at the Prince, who murmured his bride’s name in his dreams. Yes, she alone was in his thoughts, and for a moment the knife trembled in the little Mermaid’s hand. But suddenly she flung it far out into the waves that shone red where it fell, so that it looked as if drops of blood were splashing up out of the water. Once more she looked with dimmed eyes at the Prince, then threw herself from the ship into the sea, and felt her body dissolving into foam.

Now the sun rose out of the sea, and its rays fell with gentleness and warmth on the deathly cold sea-foam, and the little Mermaid felt no pain of death. She saw the bright sun and, floating above her, hundreds of beautiful transparent beings, through whom she could see the white sails of the ship and the red clouds in the sky. Their voices were melodious, but so ethereal that no human ear could hear them, just as no earthly eye could see them, and without wings they floated through the air. The little Mermaid saw that she had a body like theirs and was slowly rising up out of the foam.

“Where am I going to?” she asked, and her voice sounded like that of the other spirits—so ethereal that no earthly music was like it.

“To the daughters of the air,” answered the others. “Mermaids have no immortal soul, and can never have one unless they win the love of a human being. Their eternal life must depend on the power of another. The daughters of the air have no immortal soul either, but by their own good deeds they can win one for themselves. We fly to the hot countries where the pestilent winds kill the human beings, and we bring them cool breezes. We spread the fragrance of the flowers through the air, and bring life and healing. When for three hundred years we have striven to do all the good we can we are given an immortal soul, and share the eternal happiness of mankind. You, poor little Mermaid, have struggled with all your heart for the same goal, and have suffered and endured. Now you have risen to the spiritual world, and after three hundred years of good deeds you will win an immortal soul for yourself.”

And the little Mermaid lifted her eyes to the sun, and for the first time she felt tears in them.

On the ship there was life and noise once more. She saw the Prince and his beautiful bride looking for her, and gazing sadly at the gleaming foam, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Unseen, she kissed the bride’s forehead and smiled at the Prince. Then she rose with the other children of the air up to the rosy clouds which sailed across the sky.

“In three hundred years we shall float like this into the kingdom of God!”

“But we may get there sooner!” whispered one of them. “Unseen, we fly into houses where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child that gives its parents joy and deserves their love God shortens our time of probation. The child does not know when we fly through the room, and if we smile for joy one of the three hundred years is taken off; but if we see a naughty and wicked child we must shed tears of sorrow, and every tear adds a day to our time of probation.”

[ 1836 ]

The Elf of the Rose

—

In the middle of a garden there grew a rose tree which was quite full of blossoms, and in one of these, the prettiest of them all, lived an Elf: he was such a little tiny thing that no human eye could see him. Behind every petal in the rose he had a bedroom. He was as well shaped and as handsome as any child could be, and had wings reaching from his shoulders right down to his feet. Oh! what a sweet smell there was in his room! And how bright and pretty were the walls of it! They were the pale pink, delicate rose leaves.

All day he enjoyed himself in the hot sunshine, flying from flower to flower, dancing on the wings of the butterfly as it flew, and measuring how many steps it took to go over all the roads and paths on a single lime-leaf. It was what we call the veins of the leaf that he reckoned as roads and paths: an enormous distance he had to go, and before he had finished, the sun set. He had begun very late for another thing.

It got very cold, the dew fell, the wind blew. It would be best to go home. He made all the haste he could, but the rose was shut, and he could not get in, not a single rose was open. The poor little Elf was terribly frightened: he had never spent the night out of doors before, but had always slept sweetly, snug among the rose leaves. Oh dear! It would be the death of him for certain!

At the other end of the garden, he knew, there was a summer-house with beautiful honeysuckle on it, whose flowers looked like large coloured horns: he would get into one of them and sleep till morning. Thither he flew. Hush! There were two people inside, a handsome young man and the prettiest of girls. Side by side they sat, and wished they might never be parted, so fond they were of each other, far fonder than the best of children can be of its father and mother.

“Yet we must part,” said the young man; “your brother wishes us no good: that is why he is sending me on a mission far away beyond mountains and lakes. Farewell, my sweetest bride, for my bride you are!”

They kissed one another: the young girl wept and gave him a rose, but before she put it in his hand she printed a kiss on it so fond and tender that the flower opened, and into it the little Elf flew and nestled his head against the delicate fragrant walls. But he could plainly hear “Farewell, farewell!” said, and feel that the rose was placed in the young man’s bosom. Oh how the heart in it beat! The little Elf could not get to sleep, so fast it beat. Not long did the rose lie quiet on his heart: the young man drew it out, and as he went alone through the dark wood he kissed it so often and so hard that the little Elf was in danger of being squeezed to death. Through the leaf he could feel how the man’s lips burned: the very rose had opened itself as under the hottest sun of noonday.

There came another man, gloomy and passionate, the fair girl’s evil brother. He drew a long sharp knife, and while the other kissed his rose the wicked man stabbed him to death, cut off his head, and buried it, with the body, in the soft earth under a lime tree.

“He’s gone and forgotten now,” said the wicked brother; “he will come back no more. A long journey he was to go, over mountains and lakes, where a man can easily lose his life; and he’s lost his. He won’t come back, and my sister will never dare ask me about him.” With that he spread the dead leaves over the disturbed earth with his foot, and went home in the dark night, but not alone, as he supposed. The little Elf kept him company, sitting in a withered rolled-up lime-leaf that had fallen on the bad man’s hair as he dug the grave. His hat was over it now, and very dark it was in there, and the Elf quivered with horror and wrath at the foul deed.

The bad man got home at dawn. He took off his hat and went into his sister’s bedroom. There she lay, the pretty young maid, dreaming of him whom she held so dear, who now, she thought, was travelling over hills and through forests: and the wicked brother stooped over her and laughed horribly, as a devil might laugh. The withered leaf fell from his hair upon the counterpane, but he did not notice it; he went out to sleep—he too—for a little in the early morning. But the Elf stole out of the withered leaf, crept into the ear of the sleeping girl, and told her, as in a dream, of the frightful murder; described to her the place where her brother had killed him and laid his body, told of the flowering lime tree hard by, and said: “That you may see this is no dream that I have told you, you will find a withered leaf on your bed.” And so she did when she awoke.

Oh what bitter tears she wept! Yet to no one dared she confide her trouble. The window stood open all day, and the little Elf might easily have gone out into the garden to the roses and all the other flowers, but he cared not to leave her in her sorrow. In the window stood a tree of monthly roses, and in one of these he sat and watched the poor girl. Several times her brother came into the room: he was in high spirits, and unkind—but she dared not say a word of her great sorrow. As soon as night came she stole out of the house and into the wood to the place where the lime tree stood: she cleared the leaves away from the soil, dug down into it and found the murdered man. Oh, how she wept and prayed God that she might die soon! She longed to bear the body home with her, but that she could not. So she took the pale head with the closed eyes, kissed the cold mouth and shook the earth from the fair hair. “This shall be mine!” said she. So when she had laid earth and leaves over the dead body she took the head home with her, and a little branch of jessamine which was flowering in the wood where he was killed. As soon as she was in her room again, she fetched the largest flower-pot she could find, and in it she laid the dead man’s head, put earth over it, and planted the sprig of jessamine.

“Farewell! farewell!” whispered the little Elf; he could not bear to look on all this sorrow any longer, and flew out into the garden, to his rose. But it had faded; only a few pale petals hung to the green fruit. “Ah, how quickly passes all that is fair and good!” sighed he. At last he found another rose, which became his house; among its delicate scented leaves he could live and make his home.

Every morning he would fly to the poor girl’s window, where she would always be standing by her flower-pot, weeping. The salt tears fell on the sprig of jessamine, but day by day as she grew paler and paler, the sprig grew yet more fresh and green; one twig after another was put forth, and little white buds came and turned to flowers, and she would kiss them. But her wicked brother reviled her and asked if she were going crazy: he could not bear it, and could not understand why she was always weeping over the flowerpot. He little knew what closed eyes, what red lips, had turned to earth there: and she would bow her head over the flower-pot, and there the little Elf found her slumbering. Into her ear he crept, and told her of the evening in the summer-house, and of the sweet smell of the roses and the loving kindness of the Elves, and she slept sweetly, and while she slept her life faded: a quiet death was hers, and now she was in heaven with him whom she loved.

The jessamine flowers opened their great white bells and gave forth a perfume of wonderful sweetness: it was the only way they had to mourn over the dead.

But the wicked brother looked at the beautiful flowering shrub and took it for himself as a legacy, and put it in his room, near the bed, for it was pleasant to look at, and the smell was sweet and fresh. The little Elf went there too, and flew from one flower to another—in each of them dwelt a little soul—and to them he told the story of the murdered youth whose head was now earth in earth, and of the wicked brother and the wretched sister. “We know it!” said each of the souls in the flowers. “We know it! Did we not grow out of the slain man’s eyes and lips? We know! We know!” and they nodded their heads in a strange fashion. The Rose Elf could not understand how they could be so calm, and he flew out to the bees, who were gathering honey, and told them the story of the wicked brother; and the bees told their Queen, who gave orders that next morning they should join and kill the murderer.

But the night before—that is, the first night after the death of his sister, as the wicked brother slept in his bed close by the sweet-smelling jessamine—every flower cup opened, and, unseen, but each one bearing a poisoned spear, the flower souls came forth: and first they settled at his ear and told him dreadful dreams, and then they flew to his lips and pricked his tongue with the poisoned spears. “Now we have avenged the dead!” they said, and home they went into the white bells of the jessamine. When morning came and the window was all at once thrown open, the Rose Elf hastened in with the Queen Bee and all the swarm to kill him. But he was dead already, and people were standing about him saying: “The smell of the jessamine has killed him.” Then the Rose Elf understood the vengeance of the flowers and told it to the Queen of the Bees, and she hummed about the flower-pot with all her swarm. And as the bees could not be driven away, a man took the flowerpot, and one of the bees stung him on the hand, and he let the pot fall and it broke.

Then they saw the whitened skull; and they knew that the dead man in the bed was a murderer.

And the Queen Bee hummed in the fresh air and sang of the vengeance of the flowers and the Elf of the Rose, and how behind the smallest leaf dwells one who can discover evil deeds and avenge them.

[ 1839 ]

The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf

—

I’m sure you have heard about the girl who trod on the loaf so as not to dirty her shoes, and what a dreadful thing happened to her for it. The story has been written, and printed too.

She was a poor child, but proud and haughty; there was a bad drop in her, as the saying is. When she was quite a little girl she took a pleasure in catching flies and pulling off their wings and turning them into creeping things. She would take cockchafers and beetles and stick each of them on a pin and put a green leaf or a little bit of paper to their feet; and the wretched creature caught at it and turned it round and round, trying to get off the pin.

“Now the cockchafer’s reading,” said little Inger. “Look how he’s turning the page!”

And as she grew up she became rather worse than better; but she was pretty, and that was her misfortune, for otherwise she would have been handled very differently to what she was.

“That head of yours wants a sharp snub,” said her own mother. “Often enough, when you were a baby, you trampled on my apron; I’m afraid when you grow older you’ll often come to trample on my heart.”

And so she did indeed.

She went into the country to take service with people of quality, and they treated her as if she had been their own child, and dressed her as such, and she was good to look at, and her pride grew. When she had been there a year her mistress said to her: “You ought for once to go and see your parents, Inger, dear.”

So she went, but only to show herself off; they must see how fine she had become. But when she got to the side road, and saw girls and young lads gossiping by the street gutter, and just then her own mother sat down on a stone to rest, with a bundle of sticks she had picked up in the wood, Inger turned back. She was ashamed that she who was dressed out so fine should have such a ragged creature, that picked up sticks, for a mother. She didn’t in the least repent of turning back, she was only angry.

Another half-year went by.

“You really ought to go home one day and see your old parents, Inger, dear,” said her mistress. “Here’s a large wheaten loaf for you; you can take it to them, they will be glad to see you.”

Inger put on her best finery and her new shoes, and she held up her skirts and walked most carefully so as to keep neat and clean about the feet—and there was nothing to scold her about in that—but when she came to a place where the path went over marshy ground, and there was water and mud over a long piece of the way, she threw the bread down into the mud to step on it and get across dryshod. But as she stood with one foot on the loaf and lifted the other, the loaf sank down with her deeper and deeper, and she disappeared wholly, and nothing was to be seen but a black bubbling pool.

That’s the story.

Where did she go to? Why, she went down to the Marsh Woman who brews. The Marsh Woman is aunt to the Elf girls—they are well enough known, there are ballads about them and they have had their pictures taken—but about the Marsh Woman people only know that when the meadows steam in summer time it is because the Marsh Woman is brewing. It was down into her brewery that Inger sank, and that’s not a place you can stand for long. The cesspool is a charming apartment compared with the Marsh Woman’s brewery. Every vat stinks enough to make you faint away, and the vats stand thick together, and if there is anywhere a tiny opening between them where you could squeeze through, you can’t, because of all the damp toads and fat snakes that cluster together there. Down there sank little Inger. All that horrible live mess was so icy cold that she shuddered through all her limbs and stiffened with it more and more. The loaf stuck fast to her and drew her as an amber button draws a bit of straw.

The Marsh Woman was at home, and that day the brewery was being visited by the Devil and his great-grandmother; and she is an ancient and very venomous lady who is never idle. She never goes out without taking her work with her, and she had it with her now. She was busily making gad-about leather to put into people’s shoes, so that the wearer might have no rest. She embroidered lies and knitted up thoughtless words that had fallen on the ground—all to make mischief and sow trouble. Ah, that old grandmother! She could sew and embroider and knit with a vengeance!

She caught sight of Inger and put up her spy-glass to her eye and looked her over again. “That’s a girl with something to her,” said she. “I must beg her of you for a souvenir of my visit here. She might make a very proper decoration for my great-grandson’s front hall.”

And she got her: and so it was that little Inger went to Hell. People don’t always go there straight off. They may get round by a side way if they have quality.

That front hall was infinitude. You turned giddy with looking before you, and giddy with looking behind you: and there stood a host of the despised, waiting for the door of mercy to be opened; and long might they wait.

Huge fat crawling spiders spun webs of a thousand years about their feet, and these threads cut like thumbscrews and held like chains of copper, and besides that, there was an eternal unrest in every soul, an anguishing unrest. The miser who stood there had forgotten the key of his money box—he knew it was there in the lock. Oh, it would be too much to reckon up all the sorts of torments and pains that were felt there.

Inger felt it horribly, standing as a statue there: she was as it were pinned to the loaf by her foot.

“This comes of trying to keep one’s feet clean,” said she to herself. “Look how they glare at me!” Yes, they were all looking at her. Their evil desires shone out of their eyes and spoke without sound from their twisted mouths; they were awful to look upon.

“It must be a pleasure to look at me,” thought little Inger. “I have a pretty face and nice clothes.” And she turned her eyes about—her neck was too stiff to turn. Oh, dear, how muddy she had got in the Marsh Woman’s brew-house! She had not thought of that. Her clothes were coated over with one great clot of slime. A snake had hung itself in her hair and trailed down her neck, and from every fold in her dress a toad peeped out and croaked like an asthmatic poodle. It was very uncomfortable. “But everyone else down here looks just as horrible.” She comforted herself with that.

Worst of all for her was the dreadful hunger she suffered. Couldn’t she manage to stoop and break a bit off the loaf she stood upon? No, her back was perfectly stiff, her arms and hands were stiff, her whole body was like a stone pillar. She could only turn her eyes in her head, turn them right round so that they looked out backwards, and that was a horrid sight. Then came the flies; they crawled to and fro over her eyes. She winked her eyes, but the flies did not fly off, they couldn’t, the wings had been pulled off them, they had been made into creeping things. That was a torture, and the hunger besides—till at last she felt as if her inside had eaten itself up, and she became perfectly empty—excruciatingly empty. “If this goes on much longer, I shan’t be able to bear it,” said she. But she had to bear it, and it went on.

Then upon her head fell a burning tear. It truckled over her face and bosom, right down to the loaf. Yet another fell: many fell. Who was weeping for little Inger? Why, had she not up there on earth a mother? Tears of grief, such as a mother sheds for her child, always reach it; but they do not set it free, they burn, they make the torment worse. And then, that intolerable hunger, and the being unable to get at the bread she trod on with her foot! At last she had the feeling that everything within her must have eaten itself up, and she was like a thin hollow pipe that drew every sound into itself. She heard plainly everything up there on earth that concerned her, and all she heard was hard and unkind. True, her mother wept sore and sadly, but, besides, she said: “Pride goes before a fall. That was your misfortune, Inger. How have you brought sorrow on your mother!”

Her mother and everyone else up there knew about her sin, how she had trodden on the loaf and had sunk down and disappeared. The cowherd had told of it; he had seen it himself from the hillside.

“How have you brought sorrow on your mother, Inger,” said her mother. “Aye. I thought it would be so.”

“I wish I had never been born,” was Inger’s thought at that. “It would have been far better for me. It’s no good now, my mother whimpering.”

She heard how the gentlefolk, the kind people who had been like father and mother to her, talked about her. “She was a wicked child,” they said. “She did not respect God’s gifts, but trod them under foot: the gate of mercy will be slow to open to her.”

“Well, they ought to have brought me up better,” thought Inger. “Rubbed the corners off me, if I had any.” She heard how a whole ballad had been published about her. “The proud girl who stood on the loaf to keep her shoes clean.” And it was sung all over the country.

“To think that one should have to bear all that for such a thing, and suffer so much for it,” thought Inger, “the rest of them ought to be punished for what they’ve done. There’d be a nice lot of them to punish. Ugh, how I do suffer!”

And her heart became even more hardened, harder even than herself. “Down here one’s not likely to get much better in this company; and I don’t want to be better. Look how they glare.”

And her heart was angry and savage against all mankind. “They’ve got something to talk about up there, anyhow. Oh, how I do suffer!”

And she heard them telling her story to children, and how the children called her wicked Inger, she was so horrid, they said, so nasty, she deserved to be punished properly.

There were always hard words about her in the children’s mouths. Yet, one day, when anguish and hunger were gnawing deep in her hollow shell, and she heard her name mentioned and her story told to an innocent child, a little girl, she was aware that this little one burst into tears at the story of the proud Inger that loved her finery.

“But won’t she ever come up again?” the little girl asked, and the answer was: “No, she’ll never come up again.”

“But if she begs pardon and never does it again?”

“But she won’t beg pardon,” they said.

“I do wish she would,” said the little girl; and she was quite inconsolable. “I’d give my doll’s house if only she might come up. It is so dreadful for poor Inger.”

And these words came straight into Inger’s heart, and seemed as if they did her good. It was the first time that anybody had said “Poor Inger” and not added a word about her wrongdoing. Here was a little innocent child that prayed and wept for her, and she felt so strange that she would fain have wept herself; but weep she could not, and that too was a torment.

As the years went by up there, there was no change down below. She heard voices from above less often, there was less talk about her. Then one day she was aware of a sigh: “Inger! Inger! What sorrow you have brought me! I said you would.” It was her mother dying.

From time to time she heard her name mentioned by her old masters, and the kindest word was when the mistress said: “Shall I ever see you again, Inger, I wonder? One does not know whither one may go.”

But Inger knew well enough that her kindly mistress could never come to that place where she was.

Again a length of time passed by, slow and bitter.

Then Inger heard her name spoken again, and saw above her as it were two bright stars shining. They were two gentle eyes that were closing on earth. So many years had rolled by since the time when the little girl had cried for poor Inger and could not be comforted, that that child was become an old woman, whom God was now calling to Himself; and just at that hour when the thoughts of a whole life were rising before her, she remembered too how as a little child she had cried bitterly at hearing the story of Inger. That moment and that impression stood in living light before the old woman at her death-hour, and she broke out, quite aloud: “Lord, my God, have not I, like Inger, often trampled on Thy blessed gifts, and thought nothing of them? Have not I too often borne about pride in my heart? But in Thy mercy Thou hast not let me sink down, but hast held me up: loose not Thine hold in my last hour.”

And the old eyes closed, and the eyes of the soul opened to that which is hidden: and since Inger was so vividly present to her last thoughts, she beheld her, saw to what a depth she had been dragged down; and at the sight the saintly soul burst into tears. She stood, a child, in the kingdom of heaven and wept for poor Inger. The tears and the prayers rang like an echo down into the hollow, empty shell that shut in the imprisoned tortured soul—and it was overwhelmed by all that undreamed of love that came from above. An Angel of God was weeping for her! How had that been vouchsafed to her? The tortured soul gathered up as it were in its thought every deed it had wrought in its earth life, and shook with weeping such as had never come to Inger there. She was filled full with sorrow for herself; she thought that never for her could the gate of mercy be opened; and as, in deepest contrition, she acknowledged it, in that instant a ray shone down into the heart of the abyss. The ray came with a force stronger than the sunbeam that thaws the snowman which the boys have raised in the yard; and then, far more swiftly than the snowflake that falls on a child’s warm mouth melts and drops, the stiffened shape of Inger dissolved in vapour—and a little bird shot with the zig-zag of a lightning flash up into the world of men. But it was fearful, and shy of all around it; it was shamefaced in its own sight and in the sight of all living things, and in all haste it sought shelter in a dark hole that it found in a ruined wall. Here it sat crouching down and quivering over all its body. No sound of voice could it utter, for it had none; long it sat there before it could look about quietly and perceive all the beauty that was outside. Beauty indeed there was; the air was fresh and mild, the moon shone clear, the trees and bushes sent forth fragrance, and it was so comfortable where it sat—its kirtle of feathers so clean and delicate. Ah, how all created things stood forth, born in love and beauty! All the thoughts that stirred within the bird’s breast would have sung themselves forth, but the bird had no power for that; it would fain have sung like the cuckoo and the nightingale in spring. Yet God, who hears even the soundless praise of the worm, was aware of the song of praise here, which rose in chords of thanksgiving, as the psalm rang in the heart of David before it was clothed in words and music.

For days and weeks these voiceless songs grew and swelled; burst forth they must at the first flap of the wing towards a deed of good; and that must be achieved.

Now came round the holy feast of Christmas. The farmer set up a pole close by the wall, and tied on it an unthreshed sheaf of oats, that the birds of heaven too might have a merry Christmas and a cheerful meal at this the Saviour’s own season.

The sun rose on Christmas morning and shone on the oat-sheaf, and all the twittering birds flew about the dinner-pole; and from the wall too there sounded a “twit-twit”. The swelling thoughts were turned into sound, and the faint twitter was a whole hymn of joy. The thought of a good deed was awakened, and the bird flew out of its shelter. In heaven they knew well enough what bird that was.

The winter took fast hold. The waters were frozen thick: birds and wood-beasts had a hard time for food. The little bird flew off to the highroad, and there in the wake of the sledges it sought and found every here and there a grain; at the baiting-places it would find a few crumbs of bread. It would eat only one of these itself, and call to all the other hungry sparrows that here they could find food. It flew to the towns and spied round about, and wherever a kindly hand had strewn bread by the window for the birds, it would eat but a single crumb, and give all else to the others.

In the course of the winter the bird had gathered and given away so many breadcrumbs that, weighed together, they made up as much as the whole loaf that little Inger had trodden on so as not to dirty her shoes. And when the last crumb had been found and given away, the grey wings of the bird whitened and spread out.

“There’s a tern flying away over the lake!” said the children who saw the white bird. Now it dipped down into the lake, now it rose into the bright sunshine which shone so that it was not possible to see what became of it. They said that it flew straight into the sun.

[ 1859 ]

The Red Shoes

—

Once upon a time there was a little girl, pretty and dainty. But in summertime she was obliged to go barefooted because she was poor, and in winter she had to wear large wooden shoes, so that her little instep grew quite red and chafed.

In the middle of the village lived an old shoemaker’s wife; she sat down and made, as well as she could, a pair of little shoes out of some old pieces of red cloth. They were clumsy, but she meant well, for they were intended for the little girl, whose name was Karen.

Karen received the shoes and wore them for the first time on the day of her mother’s funeral. They were certainly not suitable for mourning; but she had no others, and so she put her bare feet into them and walked behind the humble coffin.

Just then a large old carriage came by, and in it sat an old lady; she looked at the little girl, and taking pity on her, said to the clergyman, “Look here, if you will give me the little girl, I will take care of her.”

Karen believed that this was all on account of the red shoes, but the old lady thought them hideous, and so they were burned. Karen herself was dressed very neatly and cleanly; she was taught to read and to sew, and people said that she was pretty. But the mirror told her, “You are more than pretty—you are beautiful.”

One day the Queen was travelling through that part of the country, and had her little daughter, who was a Princess, with her.

All the people, amongst them Karen too, streamed towards the castle, where the little Princess, in a fine white dress, stood at the window and allowed herself to be stared at. She wore neither a train nor a golden crown, but beautiful red morocco shoes; they were indeed much finer than those which the shoemaker’s wife had sewn for little Karen. There is really nothing in the world that can be compared to red shoes!

Karen was now old enough to be confirmed; she received new clothes, and she was also to have some new shoes. The rich shoemaker in the town took the measure of her little foot in his own room, in which there stood great glass cases full of pretty shoes and white slippers. It all looked very lovely, but the old lady could not see very well, and therefore did not get much pleasure out of it. Amongst the shoes stood a pair of red ones, like those which the princess had worn. How beautiful they were! and the shoemaker said that they had been made for a count’s daughter, but that they had not fitted her.

“I suppose they are of patent leather?” asked the old lady. “They shine so.”

“Yes, they do shine,” said Karen. They fitted her, and were bought. but the old lady had not the least idea that they were red, or she would never have allowed Karen to wear them for her Confirmation. This she did however.

Everybody looked at her feet, and the whole of the way from the church door to the choir it seemed to her as if even the ancient figures on the monuments, in their stiff collars and long black robes, had their eyes fixed on her red shoes. It was only of these that she thought when the clergyman laid his hand upon her head and spoke of the holy baptism, of the covenant with God, and told her that she was now to be a grown-up Christian. The organ pealed forth solemnly, and the sweet children’s voices mingled with that of their old leader; but Karen thought only of her red shoes. In the afternoon the old lady heard from everybody that Karen had worn red shoes. She said that it was a shocking thing to do, that it was very improper, and that Karen was always to go to church in future in black shoes, even if they were old.

On the following Sunday there was Communion. Karen looked first at the black shoes, then at the red ones—looked at the red ones again, and put them on.

The sun was shining gloriously, so Karen and the old lady went along the footpath through the corn, where it was rather dusty.

At the church door stood an old crippled soldier leaning on a crutch; he had a wonderfully long beard, more red than white, and he bowed down to the ground and asked the old lady whether he might wipe her shoes. Then Karen put out her little foot too. “Dear me, what pretty dancing-shoes!” said the soldier. “Stick fast, when you dance,” said he, addressing the shoes, and tapped the soles with his hand.

The old lady gave the soldier some money and then went with Karen into the church.

And all the people inside looked at Karen’s red shoes, and all the figures gazed at them; when Karen knelt before the altar and put the golden goblet to her mouth, she thought only of the red shoes. It seemed to her as though they were swimming about in the goblet, and she forgot to sing the psalm, forgot to say her prayer.

Now everyone came out of church, and the old lady stepped into her carriage. But just as Karen was lifting up her foot to get in too, the old soldier said: “Dear me, what pretty dancing shoes!” and Karen could not help it, she was obliged to dance a few steps; and when she had once begun, her legs continued to dance. It seemed as if the shoes had got power over them. She danced round the church corner, for she could not stop; the coachman had to run after her and seize her. He lifted her into the carriage, but her feet continued to dance, so that she kicked the good old lady horribly. At last they took off her shoes, and her legs became quiet.

At home the shoes were put into the cupboard, but Karen could not resist looking at them.

Now the old lady fell ill, and it was said that she would not rise from her bed again. She had to be nursed and waited upon, and this was no one’s duty more than Karen’s. But there was a grand ball in the town, and Karen was invited. She looked at the red shoes, saying to herself that there was no sin in doing that; she put the red shoes on, thinking there was no harm in that either; and then she went to the ball, and commenced to dance.

But when she wanted to go to the right, the shoes danced to the left, and when she wanted to dance up the room, the shoes danced down the room, down the stairs, through the street, and out through the gates of the town. She danced, and was obliged to dance, far out into the dark wood. Suddenly something shone up among the trees, and she believed it was the moon, for it was a face. But it was the old soldier with the red beard; he sat there nodding his head and said: “Dear me, what pretty dancing shoes!”

She was frightened, and wanted to throw the red shoes away; but they stuck fast. She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet. She danced and was obliged to go on dancing over field and meadow, in rain and sunshine, by night and by day—but by night it was most horrible.

She danced into the open churchyard; but the dead there did not dance. They had something better to do than that. She wanted to sit down on the pauper’s grave where the bitter fern grows; but for her there was neither peace nor rest. And as she danced past the open church door she saw an angel there in long white robes, with wings reaching from his shoulders down to the earth; his face was stern and grave, and in his hand he held a broad shining sword.

“Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton. Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live, you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance—!”

“Mercy!” cried Karen. But she did not hear what the angel answered, for the shoes carried her through the gate into the fields, along highways and byways, and unceasingly she had to dance.

One morning she danced past a door that she knew well; they were singing a psalm inside, and a coffin was being carried out covered with flowers. Then she knew that she was forsaken by everyone and damned by the angel of God.

She danced, and was obliged to go on dancing through the dark night. The shoes bore her away over thorns and stumps till she was all torn and bleeding; she danced away over the heath to a lonely little house. Here, she knew, lived the executioner; and she tapped with her finger at the window and said:

“Come out, come out! I cannot come in, for I must dance.”

And the executioner said: “I don’t suppose you know who I am. I strike off the heads of the wicked, and I notice that my axe is tingling to do so.”

“Don’t cut off my head!” said Karen, “for then I could not repent of my sin. But cut off my feet with the red shoes.”

And then she confessed all her sins, and the executioner struck off her feet with the red shoes; but the shoes danced away with the little feet across the field into the deep forest.

And he carved her a pair of wooden feet and some crutches, and taught her a psalm which is always sung by penitents; she kissed the hand that had guided the axe, and went away over the heath.

“Now, I have suffered enough for the red shoes,” she said; “I will go to church, so that people can see me.” And she went quickly up to the church door; but when she came there, the red shoes were dancing before her, and she was frightened, and turned back.

During the whole week she was sorrowful, and wept many bitter tears, but when Sunday came again she said: “Now I have suffered and striven enough. I believe I am quite as good as many of those who sit in church and give themselves airs.”

And so she went boldly on; but she did not get farther than the churchyard gate when she saw the red shoes dancing along before her. Then she became terrified, and turned back and repented right heartily of her sin.

She went to the parsonage, and begged that she might be taken into service there. She would be industrious, she said, and do everything that she could; she did not mind about the wages as long as she had a roof over her, and was with good people. The pastor’s wife had pity on her, and took her into her service. And she was industrious and thoughtful. She sat quiet and listened when the pastor read aloud from the Bible in the evening. All the children liked her very much, but when they spoke about dress and grandeur and beauty she would shake her head.

On the following Sunday, they all went to church, and she was asked whether she wished to go too; but, with tears in her eyes, she looked sadly at her crutches. And then the others went to hear God’s Word, but she went alone into her little room; this was only large enough to hold the bed and a chair. Here she sat down with her hymn-book, and as she was reading it with a pious mind, the wind carried the notes of the organ over to her from the church, and in tears she lifted up her face and said: “O God! help me!”

Then the sun shone so brightly, and right before her stood an angel of God in white robes; it was the same one whom she had seen that night at the church door. He no longer carried the sharp sword, but a beautiful green branch, full of roses; with this he touched the ceiling, which rose up very high, and where he had touched it there shone a golden star. He touched the walls, which opened wide apart, and she saw the organ which was pealing forth; she saw the pictures of the old pastors and their wives, and the congregation sitting in the polished chairs and singing from their hymn-books. The church itself had come to the poor girl in her narrow room, or the room had gone to the church. She sat in the pew with the rest of the pastor’s household, and when they had finished the hymn and looked up, they nodded and said, “That was right for you to come, Karen.”

“It was mercy,” said she.

The organ played and the children’s voices in the choir sounded soft and lovely. The bright warm sunshine streamed through the window into the pew where Karen sat, and her heart became so filled with it, so filled with peace and joy, that it broke. Her soul flew on the sunbeams to Heaven, and no one was there who asked after the Red Shoes.

[ 1845 ]

The Eleven Wild Swans

—

Far away from here, in the lands the swallows fly to when we are having winter, there lived a King who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elisa. The eleven brothers, princes they were, went to school with stars on their breasts and swords at their sides. They wrote on gold slates with diamond pencils, and could read backwards as easily as forwards; anybody could see straight off that they were princes. Their sister Elisa sat at home on a little stool made of looking-glass, and had a picture book that had cost half the kingdom to buy.

Ah, those children had a fine time of it, to be sure; but it wasn’t to be like that for ever.

Their father, who was King of the whole country, married a bad Queen, and she was not at all nice to the poor children; the very first day they noticed it. There were great doings all over the palace, and the children played at visitors; but instead of their having all the cakes and baked apples that were left, she only gave them sand in a teacup and told them they could pretend it was something real.

The week after, she boarded the little sister Elisa out in the country, with some labourers, and it wasn’t long before she got the King to believe such things about the poor princes, that he cared not a rap about them any more.

“Fly away out into the world, and fend for yourselves,” said the wicked Queen; “fly as big birds without any voice.” But she couldn’t do all the harm she would have dearly liked to do, and they turned into eleven beautiful wild swans. With a strange cry they flew out of the palace windows, far away over the fields and woods.

It was still quite early morning when they passed the place where their sister Elisa lay asleep in the labourer’s room. There they hovered over the roof and turned their long necks hither and thither and flapped their wings, but nobody heard or saw it; they had to go on, far upward towards the clouds, far out into the wide world. They flew into a great dark forest that stretched right down to the sea shore.

Poor little Elisa, in the labourer’s cottage, played with a green leaf—the only toy she had, and she pricked a hole in the leaf and peeped up through it towards the sun, and it seemed as if she was looking at the bright eyes of her brothers; and every time the warm rays shone on her cheek, she thought of all the kisses they had given her.

One day passed just like another; when the breeze blew through the great rose bushes outside the house, it whispered to the roses: “Who can be prettier than you?” But the roses shook their heads and said: “Why, Elisa!” And when the old woman sat in the doorway, of a Sunday, and read her hymn book, the breeze would turn the leaves and say to the book: “Who can be better than you?” “Why, Elisa!” said the hymn book; and what the roses and the hymn book said was no more than the truth.

When she was fifteen years old, she was sent for to go home—and when the Queen saw how pretty she was she became full of anger and hatred for her. She would have dearly liked to turn her into a wild swan like her brothers, but that she dared not do at once, for the King wanted to see his daughter.

Early in the morning the Queen went into the bathroom, which was built of marble and decked out with soft skins and lovely rugs, and she took three toads and kissed them and said to the first: “Hop on to Elisa’s head when she gets into the bath, that she may become as stupid as you. Sit yourself on her forehead,” said she to the second, “that she may become as ugly as you, so that her father shall not know her. Lie on her heart,” she whispered to the third; “let her have an evil mind, and let her suffer anguish from it.” Then she put the toads into the clear water, which forthwith took on a greenish tint, and called Elisa and undressed her and made her go down into the water; and as she dived into it, the first toad clambered into her hair, and the second on to her forehead, and the third on to her heart; but Elisa seemed not to notice it. At the moment when she stood up, there were three red poppies floating on the water. Had the beasts not been poisonous and not been kissed by the witch, they would have been changed into red roses. Still, flowers they did become, merely from resting on her head and her heart. She was too good and innocent for any witchcraft to have power over her.

When the wicked Queen saw that, she rubbed Elisa all over with walnut juice, so that she was all dark-brown, and she smeared her pretty face with a nasty ointment, and let her lovely hair get all in a tangle. It was impossible to recognize that pretty Elisa, and so when her father saw her he was dreadfully shocked and said that was never his daughter; and indeed nobody knew her but the watch-dog and the swallows, and they were poor dumb creatures that couldn’t do anything.

Poor Elisa! She cried and she thought of her eleven brothers, all gone! Sorrowfully she stole out of the palace and walked all day over field and moor, into the great forest. She had no notion where she wanted to go, but she was in such trouble, and yearned so for her brothers, who, she was sure, had been driven out into the wide world like herself, and she was set on trying to find them.

Only a short while had she been in the forest before the night fell. She had wandered far from any road or path, so she laid herself down on the soft moss, said her evening prayer, and rested her head against a stump. All was quiet, the air was very soft, and round about in the grass and moss there shone, like a green fire, hundreds of glow-worms. When she gently stirred a twig with her hand, the shining creatures fell down beside her like shooting stars.

All night long she dreamed of her brothers. They were playing together again as children, writing with the diamond pencils on the gold slates, and looking at the lovely picture book that had cost half the kingdom. But on the slates they didn’t write as they used to do—noughts and crosses—no, but the bravest of deeds that they had done and all that they had lived through and seen; and in the picture book everything was alive: the birds sang, and the people came out of the book and talked to Elisa and her brothers, but when she turned the page, they jumped back again at once, so as not to cause confusion in the pictures.

When she woke up the sun was already high. She could not actually see it, for the tall trees spread their branches thick and close; but the rays played through them like a glittering cloth of gold. There was a fragrance from the fresh greenwood, and the birds were almost ready to perch on her shoulders. She heard a splashing of water. There were a number of springs, all falling into a pool that had the most beautiful sandy bottom. True, the bushes grew thick about it, but in one place the deer had made a wide opening, and there Elisa went to the water, which was so clear that if the breeze had not so stirred the branches and bushes that they moved she would have thought they were painted on the bottom of the pool, so sharply was every leaf reflected there, alike those that the sun shone through and those that were in the deepest shadow.

As soon as she saw her own face she was quite horrified, so brown and ugly it was; but when she wetted her little hand and rubbed her eyes and forehead the white skin gleamed out once more. So she laid aside all her clothes and slipped out into the cool water. A fairer King’s daughter than she there was not in all the world.

When she had dressed herself again, and plaited her long hair, she went to the spouting spring and drank from the hollow of her hand, and so wandered further into the forest without knowing whither she went. She thought about her brothers, and she thought about the good God who certainly would not forsake her. It was He who made the wild apples grow to feed the hungry; it was He who guided her to a tree of them, its boughs bending under the fruit, and there she made her midday meal and set props under the branches, and then went on into the darkest part of the forest.

It was so still there that she could hear her own footsteps, nay, every little withered leaf that bent beneath her feet; not a bird was to be seen, not a sunbeam could pierce between the many close-set branches. The tall trunks stood so close together that when she looked straight before her, it seemed as though there was one great fence of timber, trunk after trunk, closing her in all round; yes, indeed, there was a solitude here, the like of which she had never known.

The night was very dark; not a single little glow-worm shone out of the moss, and with a troubled mind she lay down to sleep; and then she thought that the branches above her parted and Our Lord looked down on her with loving eyes, and little angels peeped out above His head and beneath His arms.

When she woke in the morning she was not sure whether she had dreamed it or whether it really had happened.

She walked on but a few steps, and then she met an old woman with a basket of berries, some of which she gave her. Elisa asked her if she had not see eleven princes riding through the forest.

“No,” said the old woman; “but yesterday I saw eleven swans, with gold crowns on their heads, swimming down the river close by here.” And she guided Elisa some way further to a high bank, at the bottom of which was a winding stream. The trees on its banks stretched their long leafy branches across it towards each other, and where their natural growth did not let them meet they had torn their roots loose from the earth and leant over the water and twined their boughs together.

Elisa said good-bye to the old woman, and walked along the stream to the place where it flowed out, on the broad open seashore. All the beautiful sea lay spread out before the young girl, and not a sail showed itself, not a boat was to be seen: how could she get further? She gazed at the numberless pebbles on the beach. The water had worn every one of them round. Glass, iron, stone, everything that lay washed up there had taken its shape from the water, and yet the water was far softer than her own delicate hand. “It keeps rolling on, untiring, and that is how it shapes the hard things smooth, and I will be as untiring as it is. I thank you for your lesson, you clear rolling billows. One day, my heart tells me, you will bear me to my brothers.”

On the seaweed that had been washed up lay eleven swans’ feathers. She gathered them into a bunch; there were drops of water on them: whether dew or tears, who could tell? It was lonely down there on the shore, but she did not feel it, for the sea gave her infinite changes to look at, more within a few hours’ space than a fresh-water lake would show in a whole year. If a big black cloud came over, it was as if the sea would say: “I too can look black.” Then the wind blew and the waves showed their white sides; but if the clouds shone red, and the wind fell to sleep, then the sea was like a rose-leaf. Sometimes it was green, sometimes white; but however still it slept there was always a gentle movement along the beach: the water heaved, softly as the breast of a sleeping child.

Just as the sun was about to set, Elisa saw eleven wild swans, with golden crowns on their heads, flying towards the land; they floated one behind another, looking like a long white ribbon. Elisa clambered up the bank and hid behind a bush. The swans alighted close to her, and flapped their great white wings.

The moment the sun was beneath the waves the swans’ skins fell off and there stood eleven fair princes, Elisa’s brothers. She uttered a loud cry, for though they were greatly altered she knew that it was they—was sure it must be they—and she sprang into their arms, and called them by their names. And happy were they when they saw and recognized their little sister, now so tall and so beautiful. They laughed and wept, and very quickly they came to know about each other, and how ill their stepmother had dealt with them all.

“We brothers”, said the eldest, “fly about in the shape of wild swans so long as the sun is in the sky; when it is set we take our human shape: so at sunset we must always take care to have a resting place for our feet, for if we were flying then, up among the clouds, we should fall in man’s form down into the deep. We do not live here; a fair land like this lies on the other side of the water, but the way to it is long. We have to cross the wide sea, and there is no island on our course where we could spend the night. There is only a little lonely rock that stands up, half-way out: it’s only large enough for us to stand side by side and rest on it; if the sea is high, the water leaps up high above us, yet we thank God for it. There we spend the night in our human form; but for it we could never visit our dear fatherland, for our flight takes up two of the longest days in the year. Only once a year is it permitted to us to visit our father’s home. Eleven days we can stay here: we fly over this great forest, and from there we can look at the castle where we were born and where our father lives, and see the bell-tower of the church where our mother is buried. Here we feel the very trees and bushes are an heirloom; here the wild horses gallop over the plains as we saw them in our childhood. Here the charcoal-burner sings the old songs we danced to as children. Here is our father’s land, here we grew up, and here we have found you, you dear little sister. We have still two days to stay here, and then we must away over the sea, to a land that is beautiful, but is not our own. How can we take you with us? We have neither ship nor boat.”

“How can I contrive to free you?” said their sister. And they went on talking together almost all night, with only an hour or two of sleep.

Elisa was wakened by the sound of swans’ wings rustling above her. The brothers were changed once more, and flew about in wide circles, and at last flew away; but one of them, the youngest, stayed behind. The swan laid his head on her bosom and she fondled his white wings: they spent the whole day together. Towards evening the others came back, and when the sun was down they stood there in their proper forms.

“Tomorrow we fly away from here, and dare not come back for nearly a whole year; but we cannot leave you like this. Have you the courage to come with us? My arm is strong enough to carry you through the forest, and must we not together have strong enough wings to fly with you over the sea?”

“Yes, take me with you,” said Elisa.

They spent the whole night in weaving a net out of the pliant willow bark and the stout reeds, and it was large and strong. On it Elisa lay down, and when the sun came up and the brothers changed into wild swans they gripped the net in their beaks and flew high up towards the clouds, with their dear sister, who was still asleep. The sunbeams fell hotly on her face, so one of the swans flew above her head, that his broad wings might shade her.

They were far from land when Elisa awoke. She thought she was still dreaming, so strange it seemed to her to be borne over the sea, high through the air. At her side lay a branch with beautiful ripe berries on it, and a bundle of sweet-tasting roots. Her youngest brother had gathered them and laid them by her; and she smiled gratefully at him, for she knew it was he who was flying straight over her head and shading her with his wings.

They were so high up that the first ship they saw beneath them looked like a white gull lying on the water. A great cloud came behind them, like a mighty mountain, and on it Elisa saw the shadows of herself and of the eleven swans, flying there as huge as giants; it was like a drawing, prettier than any she had seen before; but as the sun climbed higher and the cloud was left farther behind, the moving shadow-picture disappeared. All day they flew on like a rushing dart through the air, yet their pace was slower than at other times, now that they had their sister to carry. Bad weather, too, came on, and evening grew near. With terror Elisa saw the sun sinking, and yet the lonely rock in the sea was not in sight. She thought the swans were playing their wings more strongly. Ah! It was her fault that they could not go swiftly enough; when the sun was down they would turn into men and fall into the sea and be drowned! From the very bottom of her heart she sent up a prayer to Our Lord; but still she could see no rock. The black cloud drew nearer, the heavy gusts of wind portended a storm. The clouds gathered into a single huge menacing billow which sped onward, looking like a mass of lead. One flash of lightning followed hard on another.

The sun was now at the very rim of the sea. Elisa’s heart beat quickly then; the swans plunged downward so quickly that she thought she must fall, but then they floated again. The sun was half beneath the water. Then first she sighted the little rock beneath her, looking no larger than a seal’s head sticking up above the water. How swiftly the sun sank! It was no bigger than a star. Then her foot touched the firm ground and the sun went out like the last spark on a bit of burning paper. She saw her brothers standing about her, arm in arm, but there was no room for any more than them and herself. The sea beat against the rock and burst over them like a shower of rain: the heavens shone with a blaze that kept flaring out, and the thunder rolled, peal on peal, but the sister and the brothers held each other’s hands and sang a hymn, and it brought them comfort and courage.

At dawn the air was clear and still, and so soon as the sun was up the swans flew off with Elisa from the islet. The sea was still rough, and when they were high up in the air it looked as if the white foam on the dark green sea were millions of swans floating on the water.

When the sun rose higher, Elisa saw ahead of her, half-swimming in the air, a range of mountains with shining masses of ice on their slopes, and in the midst of it there lay, stretched out, a palace—a good mile long—with one mighty colonnade rising over another. Low down before it waved groves of palms and wonderful blossoms, large as mill-wheels. She asked if that were the land she was bound for, but the swans shook their heads: for that which she was looking at was the lovely ever-changing cloud-palace of the fairy Morgana, and into it they dared bring no mortal. Elisa gazed upon it. Suddenly, mountains, groves and palace all fell to pieces, and in their place rose a score of noble churches, each like the next, all with lofty towers and pointed windows. She fancied she could hear the organ sounding, but it was the sea she heard. And now she was quite near the churches, but they changed into a fleet of ships sailing onward beneath her. She looked down, and it was but the sea wrack that was spreading over the water. Yes, it was an endless series of changes that she had to look at; but now she saw the real land she was bound for. There rose the beautiful blue mountains, with forests of cedar and towns and castles. Long ere the sun had set she was seated on the slope before a large cave, whose mouth was grown over with delicate green creeping plants that seemed like broidered carpets. “Now we shall see what you dream of here tonight,” said the youngest brother, as he led her to her sleeping chamber.

“If I could but dream how to free you!” said she; and the thought filled her mind most vividly, and earnestly did she pray to God for His help—nay, even in her sleep she went on praying; and then it seemed to her that she flew high up into the air, to the cloud-palace of the fairy Morgana; and the fairy came to meet her, all beautiful and shining, but all the same, very like the old woman who had given her berries in the forest and told her of the swans with the golden crowns.

“Your brothers can be freed,” said she, “but have you courage and endurance? True it is that the sea is softer than your delicate hands, and yet can change the shape of the hard stones. But it does not feel the pain that your fingers will feel: it has no heart, and does not suffer the fear and trouble that you must go through. Do you see this stinging-nettle that I hold in my hand? Many of this kind grow about the cave where you are sleeping, but only they and those that grow out of churchyard graves are fit for your purpose; mark you that! These you must pick, though they will burn your skin into blisters. You must break them up with your feet, and you will get flax from them, and with it you must weave and hem eleven shirts with long sleeves. Cast these over the eleven wild swans, and the spell will be broken. But remember this well: that from the moment you begin this work, and until it is wholly ended, even though a year should pass in the meantime, you must not speak. The first word you utter will pierce the heart of your brothers like a deadly dagger: on your tongue hangs their life. Take good heed of these things.” And at the same moment she touched her hand with the nettle: it was like a scorching flame. Elisa awoke with the touch. It was bright day, and close by where she had slept lay a nettle like that which she had seen in her dream. She fell on her knees and gave thanks to God, and went out of the cave to begin her work. With her delicate hands she grasped the horrible nettles, which were like fire to touch, and burned great blisters on her hands and arms, but she suffered that gladly, if she might but free her dear brothers. She crushed every nettle with her bare feet and wound up the green flax from it.

When the sun was down the brothers came, and were terrified at finding her so silent. They thought it must be a fresh spell cast by that wicked stepmother; but when they saw her hands they understood what she was doing for their sake, and the youngest brother wept, and where his tears fell she felt no more pain, and the burning blisters vanished.

All night she spent on her work, for she could have no rest till she had freed the beloved brothers. All the next day, while the swans were away, she sat in solitude; but the time had never flown so quickly. One shirt was finished, and she set to work on the second.

Just then a hunting horn rang out among the hills. She was stricken with fear; the sound came nearer. She heard the baying of hounds; in terror she took refuge in the cave, and tied the nettles she had gathered and hackled into a bundle, and seated herself on it.

A great hound came leaping from among the bushes—another just after it, and yet another. They bayed aloud and ran forward and then back again. Before many minutes had passed the whole band of hunters were outside the cave, and the handsomest of them all was the King of the country. He advanced towards Elisa. Never had he beheld a fairer maid.

“How came you here, you beautiful child?” said he. Elisa shook her head, she dared not speak, the saving of her brothers, nay, their life was at stake: and she hid her hand, beneath her apron, that the King might not see what she was suffering.

“Come with me,” said he, “you must not stop here. If you are as good as you are beautiful I will dress you in silks and velvets, and put a golden crown on your head, and you shall have your home in the finest of my palaces.” And with that he lifted her up on his horse. She wept and wrung her hands, but the King said: “I only desire your happiness; one day you will thank me.” And so off he rode among the mountains, holding her before him on his horse, and the huntsmen followed.

At sunset the fair city with its churches and domes lay before them; and the King led her into the palace where great fountains plashed in the lofty marble halls, and walls and roof glowed with paintings; but she had no eyes for that; she wept and sorrowed. Listlessly she allowed the women to dress her in royal apparel, twine pearls in her hair, and put delicate gloves upon her blistered hands.

When at last she stood arrayed in all her splendour, she was so dazzlingly beautiful that all the court bowed deep and low before her, and the King chose her for his bride. Yet the Archbishop shook his head and muttered that this pretty wood-maiden was surely a witch who had dazzled their eyes, and corrupted the heart of the King.

But the King would not listen to that. He bade the music ring out, and the costliest dishes be served, and the fairest girls dance about her, and she walked through fragrant gardens into splendid halls; but not a smile came to her lips or into her eyes. Sorrow stood there, the perpetual heir and possessor. But now the King opened a little chamber, hard by the place where she was to sleep. It was decked with costly green hangings, and was just like the cave she had been in. On the floor lay the bundle of flax she had spun from the nettles, and from the ceiling hung the shirt that had already been woven. All this, one of the huntsmen had brought with him as a curiosity.

“Here you can dream yourself back in your old home,” said the King; “here is the work you were busying yourself with. Now in the midst of all your splendour it will amuse you to remember that old time.”

When Elisa saw this, which lay so near her heart, a smile played about her mouth, and the colour came back into her cheeks at the thought of the saving of her brothers, and she kissed the King’s hand and he pressed her to his heart, and bade all the church bells proclaim the wedding festival. The lovely dumb girl from the forest was to be Queen of all the land.

The Archbishop whispered slanderous words into the ear of the King, but they did not make their way to his heart. The bridal was to be. The Archbishop himself had to set the crown on her head, and he spitefully pressed down the narrow ring upon her brow so that it hurt her, yet a heavier ring lay about her heart; sorrow for her brothers; she hardly felt the bodily pain. Her mouth was dumb, for a single word would end her brothers’ life, but in her eyes there lay a deep affection for the handsome King who did everything to make her happy. With her whole heart, she grew more loving towards him day by day. Oh, if she could but confide in him and tell him of her suffering! but dumb she must remain, in dumbness must she finish her task. So at night she would steal from his side and go into the little room apart, that was decked out like the cave, and weave one shirt after another. But when she began on the seventh she had no flax left.

In the churchyard, she knew, grew the nettles she must use: but she had to gather them herself. How was she to get there?

“Oh, what is the pain in my fingers to the suffering in my heart,” she thought; “I must risk it! Our Lord will not let me fall out of his hands.” With a pain at her heart as if it were a crime she was plotting, she stole down to the garden, in the bright moon-light night, and went along the long avenues out into the empty streets, away to the churchyard. There she saw seated on one of the largest of the gravestones, a ring of Lamias, horrible witches. They put off their rags as if they meant to bathe, and then dug down with their long thin fingers into the newly made graves, pulled out the corpses and ate their flesh. Elisa had to pass close by them, and they fastened their dreadful eyes on her, but she prayed her prayer, and gathered the burning nettles and carried them back to the palace.

Only one person had seen her—the Archbishop. He was awake while everyone else was asleep. Now, then, he had found the truth of what he suspected! All was not as it should be with the Queen. She was a witch, and that was how she had corrupted the King and the whole people.

In the confessional he told the King what he had seen and what he feared, and as the cruel words came from his tongue, the carven images of the saints shook their heads, as if to say: “It is not so; Elisa is innocent.” But the Archbishop interpreted it otherwise; he said they were bearing witness against her, shaking their heads at her guilt. Two heavy tears rolled down the King’s cheek! He went home with misgiving in his heart, and he feigned to be asleep at night, but no sleep came to his eyes: he saw how Elisa got up, and each night she did so again, and every time he followed her quietly he saw that she disappeared into her tiny chamber. Day by day his mien grew sadder. Elisa saw it, but did not understand the cause, yet it troubled her; and what did she not suffer at heart for her brothers! On the royal velvets and purple her salt tears ran down, and lay there like glistening diamonds; while everyone who saw her rich attire wished they were Queen.

Meanwhile she was nearly at the end of her task; only one shirt was still wanting. But flax she had none, and not a single nettle.

Once again then—only this time—must she go to the churchyard and pluck some handfuls. She thought with horror of the lonely journey and the frightful Lamias: but her will was as steadfast as her trust in God.

Elisa went, but the King and the Archbishop followed. They saw her disappear through the iron gates into the churchyard, and when they neared it, there sat the Lamias upon the gravestones, as Elisa had seen them: and the King turned away, for among them, he thought, was she whose head had that very evening rested on his bosom.

“The people must judge her,” said he. And the people did judge her: “She shall be burned in the red fire.” From the splendid royal halls she was taken away to a dark damp vault where the wind whistled through the barred window. In place of velvet and silk they gave her the bundle of nettles she had gathered—she might lay her head on that. The coarse heavy shirts she had woven should be her mattress and coverlets: but nothing dearer to her could they have given her. She began again upon her work and prayed to her God. Outside, the street-boys sang mocking ballads about her, and no soul comforted her with a kind word.

Towards evening came the sound of a swan’s wing; it was the youngest of the brothers: he had found his sister; and she sobbed aloud with joy, though she knew that the night now coming on was perhaps the last she had to live. But now, too, the work was all but finished, and her brothers were there.

The Archbishop came to pass the last hours with her: he had promised the King that he would. But she shook her head and with look and gesture prayed him to go. That night she must finish her task, or else all would have been in vain; everything—the pain, the tears, the sleepless nights. The Archbishop went away with slanderous words against her, but poor Elisa knew she was guiltless, and went on with her work.

The little mice ran over the floor and dragged the nettles to her feet to help her ever so little: and the thrush perched on the window bar and sang the whole night as gaily as he could, that she might not lose heart.

It was still little more than dawn, an hour before the sun would be up, when the eleven brothers were at the palace gate, demanding to be brought to the King. But it could not be, was the answer: it was still night, the King was asleep and could not be roused. They besought, they threatened, the guard came, nay, the King himself came out and asked what it all meant. At that instant the sun rose, and there were no brothers to be seen, but over the palace eleven wild swans were flying.

The whole population came streaming out of the city gates to see the witch burned. A wretched horse drew the tumbril in which she sat: they had put on her a kirtle of coarse sackcloth; her beautiful long hair hung loose about her fair head, her cheeks were deathly pale, her lips moved a little, while her fingers twined the green flax. Even on her way to death she did not leave off the work she had begun. Ten of the shirts lay at her feet, and she was working at the eleventh.

The crowd jeered at her. “Look at the witch mumbling there. No hymn book in her hands, no. She’s still messing at her foul job. Tear it from her into a thousand shreds.” They all crowded in upon her and tried to tear it to bits. But there came eleven swans flying and perched round about her on the tumbril and flapped their great wings. The mob retreated, in terror.

“It’s a sign from heaven. Surely she is innocent,” many of them whispered; but they dared not say it aloud.

Then the executioner seized her by the hand, but hastily she threw the shirts over the swans, and there stood eleven beautiful princes! But the youngest had one swan’s wing instead of an arm, for a sleeve was lacking to his shirt; she had not quite finished it.

“Now I may speak,” she said, “I am innocent.” And the people who beheld what had come to pass, bowed down before her as before a saint. But she sank lifeless into the arms of her brothers, so hard had the suffering, the fear and the pain weighed upon her.

“Yes, she is innocent,” said the eldest brother. And he began to tell all that had befallen: and, while he spoke, there spread abroad a perfume as of millions of roses, for every piece of wood in the pyre had taken root and put forth branches: a fragrant bush stood there, tall and bright with red roses. At its summit was a flower, white and shining, that glistened like a star. The King plucked it and laid it on Elisa’s breast, and she awoke with peace and gladness in her heart.

And all the church bells rang out of their own accord, and the birds came in great flocks, and such a bridal train went back to the palace, as no King yet had ever seen.

[ 1838 ]

The Garden of Eden

—

There was once a King’s son. Nobody ever had so many or such pretty books as he: everything that ever happened in the world was there for him to read. About every nation and every country he could get information. But of where the Garden of Eden was to be found there was not a word; and that was exactly the thing he thought about most.

His grandmother had told him when he was still quite little, just going to begin attending school, that every flower in the Garden of Eden was the sweetest of cakes, and the pistils the finest of wine. On one flower was written History, on another Geography or Tables: you need only eat a cake and you knew your lesson. The more you ate the more Geography or History or Tables you took in.

He believed it at the time, but as he got to be a bigger boy and learned more and became so much cleverer, he understood that there must be quite a different sort of beauty in the Garden of Eden.

“Oh, why did Eve pluck from the Tree of Knowledge? Why did Adam eat of the forbidden fruit? If it had been I, it would not have happened; sin would never have come into the world.” So he said then, and still he said it, when he was seventeen years old. The Garden of Eden took up the whole of his thoughts.

One day he went out into the forest: alone, for that pleased him best.

Evening came on, the clouds drew together, there was such a storm of rain, as if the whole sky were one single sluice out of which the water was rushing: it was as dark as it would be in the deepest well at night. Sometimes he slipped on the wet grass, sometimes he fell down over bare stones that jutted out of the rocky surface. Everything was drenched: there was not a dry thread on the unhappy Prince. He had to clamber over great blocks of stone where the water oozed out of the deep moss. He was ready to faint, when he heard a strange rushing sound, and saw in front of him a large cave, lit up within. In the middle of it blazed a fire at which you could have roasted a deer, and indeed that was what was happening. A magnificent stag with tall antlers was stuck on a spit and was turning slowly round between two rough-hewn pine-trunks. An elderly woman, tall and strong, like a man in disguise, was sitting by the fire throwing log after log into it.

“Just you come a bit nearer,” said she. “Sit down by the fire and get your clothes dry.”

“There’s an awful draught here,” said the Prince, as he sat down on the floor.

“It’ll be worse yet when my sons come home,” said the Woman. “This is the Cave of the Winds you’re in, and my sons are the four Winds of the world. Can you understand that?”

“Where are your sons?” asked the Prince.

“Why, it’s no use answering when people ask stupid questions,” said the Woman. “My sons are on their own: they’re playing bowls with the clouds in the big room upstairs,” and she pointed up in the air.

“Oh, ah!” said the Prince. “Well, you talk rather sharp and you’re not so gentle as the ladies I generally see about me.” “

Ah, they’ve nothing else to do; I’ve got to be sharp if I’m to keep my sons in order. But I can do it, though they’ve stiff necks of their own. Do you see those four sacks hanging on the wall? They’re as frightened of them as you used to be of the birch-rod behind the looking-glass. I can double the boys up, I can tell you, and into the bag they go! We make no bones about it. There they stay and don’t come out to play till I think proper. But here we have one of them.”

It was the North Wind, who came in with a freezing blast. Big hailstones fell and hopped on the floor and snowflakes came floating all round. He was dressed in bearskin breeches and coat, and a sealskin hat was pulled down over his ears: long icicles hung on his beard, and one hailstone after another slid down from his coat collar. “Don’t go near the fire at once,” said the Prince, “you might easily get frostbite in your face and hands if you do!”

“Frostbite!” said the North Wind, and laughed out loud. “Frostbite! Why, that’s what I like best! And what sort of a shrimp may you be? How do you come into the Cave of the Winds?”

“He’s my guest,” said the old lady, “and if you’re not satisfied with that explanation, you can go into the bag. Now you know my decision.”

Well, that had its effect, and the North Wind told them where he had come from and where he had been for nigh upon a whole month. “I come from the Polar sea,” he said; “I’ve been on Behring Island with the Russian whalers. I sat and slept at the helm when they set sail from the North Cape, and every now and then, when I woke up a little, the petrel flew about my legs. That’s a funny bird; it gives one quick flap of its wings, and then keeps them spread out without moving them, and thus is in full flight.”

“Don’t make such a long story of it,” said the Mother of the Winds. “And so you got to Behring Island, did you?”

“It’s beautiful! There’s a floor to dance on as flat as a plate. Half-thawed snow and moss, sharp rocks and skeletons of whales and white bears lying about. They looked like the arm- and leg-bones of giants, with a mouldy green on them. You’d think the sun had never shone on them. I blew at the mist a little, so as to get a sight of the shelter; it was a house built of wreck-wood and covered with whale-hides, the fleshy side was outward, red and green all over: on the roof a live white bear sat growling. I went to the beach and looked at the bird’s nests and the unfledged young, screaming and gaping. I blew down into their thousand windpipes and taught them to keep their mouths still. Farther on were the walruses with pig’s heads, and teeth a yard long, rolling about like great worms.”

“You tell your tale well, my boy!” said his mother; “my mouth waters to listen to you.”

“Then the hunt began. The harpoon was planted in the heart of the whale and made the steaming jet of blood spurt up like a fountain over the ice. Then I too thought of my own game. I blew hard and made my sailing ships, the icebergs as tall as cliffs, freeze the boats right in. Whew! how they did squeak and scream! But I screamed louder. The dead whales, the chests and the tackle, they had to turn them out on the ice. I shook snowflakes over them and left them drifting southward in the frozen-in craft, with their prey, to taste salt water. They’ll never come back to Behring Island.”

“So you’ve done mischief!” said the Mother of the Winds.

“How much good I’ve done let the others tell,” said he. “But here we have my brother from the west. I like him best of the lot. He has a smack of the sea and a blessed coolness about him.”

“Is that the little Zephyr?” asked the Prince.

“Yes, certainly it’s the Zephyr,” said the old lady, “but he isn’t very little now. In old days he was a pretty boy, but that’s past and over.”

He looked like a wild man, but he had a slouch hat to prevent his being hurt: in his hand he held a mahogany club, cut in the mahogany forests of America. He couldn’t do with a smaller one.

“Where do you come from?” asked his mother.

“From the wildernesses of the forest,” he said, “where the thorny lianas make a fence from one tree to the next, where the water snake lies in the wet growth and human beings seem not to be wanted.”

“How did you employ yourself there?”

“I looked at the deep river, where it was dashing down from the rocks and turning into spray to carry the rainbow. I saw the wild buffalo try to swim the river, but the stream hurried him down with it, drifting with a flock of wild ducks which flew up in the air when they came to the waterfall; but the buffalo had to go down it. I liked that, and I blew such a gale that the oldest trees sailed off and turned to chips.”

“And didn’t you get anything else done?” the old lady asked.

“I turned somersaults over the savannahs, I patted the wild horses and shook down coco-nuts. Yes, yes, I’ve plenty of stories to tell, but one mustn’t tell everything one knows. You know that well enough, old lady!” And with that he kissed his mother so hard she nearly went over backwards! He was a regular wild boy.

Next came the South Wind with a turban and a floating Bedouin’s cloak.

“Precious cold in here,” said he, throwing logs on the fire. “One can easily tell that North Wind got here first.”

“It’s hot enough here to roast a white bear,” said North Wind.

“White bear yourself!” said South Wind.

“Do you want to be stuffed in the bag?” asked the old lady; “sit yourself down on the stone there and tell where you’ve been.”

“In Africa, Mother,” he answered. “I was with the Hottentots, lion hunting in Kaffir land. What grass does grow on the plains there, green as an olive! The gnu capered about and the ostrich ran races with me, but I am quicker on my legs. I got to the desert, the yellow sand that looks like the sea-bottom. There I met a caravan: they’d killed their last camel to get some water to drink, but it was only a little they got. The sun was burning them overhead and the sand roasting them underfoot. The desert stretched away without a bound. Then I rolled in the loose fine sand and whirled it up into great pillars—that was a dance! You should have seen how the dromedary stood still and the merchant pulled his kaftan over his head. He threw himself down before me as if before Allah, his God. They are buried now. There’s a pyramid of sand piled over them all, but when I blow it away, the sun will bleach the white bones, and the travellers will see there have been men there before them: else you wouldn’t believe it in the desert.”

“So then you’ve done nothing but mischief!” said his mother. “March into the bag!” And before he knew it she had South Wind by the body and into the bag, which wallowed round about the floor till she sat on it, and it had to be quiet.

“A lively lot of boys you’ve got!” said the Prince.

“They surely are,” she said. “Oh, I can tame ’em. Here we have the fourth.”

It was East Wind, dressed like a Chinaman.

“Oh, you come from that quarter, do you?” said his mother. “I thought you’d been to the Garden of Eden.”

“I’m going to fly there first thing in the morning,” said East Wind. “Tomorrow, it’ll be a hundred years since I was there. I’ve come now from China, where I danced round the porcelain towers and made all the bells ring. In the street below the officials were being beaten: bamboo sticks were being used up on their shoulders, and they were men of the first to the ninth class. They kept crying, ‘Many thanks, my fatherly benefactor’; but they didn’t really mean it. And I rang the bells and sang: ‘Tsing, Tsang, Tsu’.”

“You’re a mischievous boy,” said the old lady; “it’s a good thing you’re going to the Garden of Eden tomorrow; it always improves your manners a bit. Mind you take a good drink of the well of wisdom and bring a little bottle full for me.”

“I will,” said East Wind. “But what have you stuck my brother from the South into the bag for? Out with him, he must tell me about the Phoenix bird. The Princess in the Garden of Eden always wants to hear about that bird when I pay her a visit every hundred years. Open the bag, do, and you’ll be my darling mother, and I’ll make you a present of two pockets full of tea, quite green and fresh, that I picked on the spot.”

“Well then, for the tea’s sake, and because you are my pet boy, I will open the bag.”

So she did, and South Wind crawled out, but looked very sheepish because the strange Prince had seen his disgrace.

“There’s a palm leaf for you, for the Princess,” said South Wind; “that leaf was given me by the old Phoenix bird, the only one there was in the world; he’s scratched on it with his beak the account of his whole life, the hundred years he lived: now she can read it for herself. I saw how the Phoenix bird himself set fire to his nest and sat there and was burned up like a Hindu’s wife. How the dry branches did crackle, and what a smoke and perfume there was! At last it all flamed up in a blaze, and the old Phoenix bird burned to ashes. But his egg lay red hot in the fire, and then burst with a loud report, and the young one flew out; and now he is Regent over all the birds and the only Phoenix in the world. He’s bitten a hole in the palm leaf I gave you, and that is his greeting to the Princess.”

“Now let’s have something to eat,” said the Mother of the Winds; so they all sat down to eat the roasted stag, and the Prince sat by East Wind; and so they soon became good friends.

“Now do just tell me,” said the Prince, “what sort of a Princess is that who is so much talked about here, and where is the Garden of Eden?”

“Ho, ho!” said East Wind, “if you want to go there, why, fly there with me tomorrow. Only I must tell you this, there hasn’t been a mortal there since Adam and Eve. You know about them from your Bible History.”

“Of course,” said the Prince.

“When they were driven out, the Garden of Eden sank down into the earth, but it kept its warm sunshine and its soft air, and all its beauty. The Queen of the Fairies lives there, and there lies the Island of Happiness, where death never comes, and it is delightful to be. You put yourself on my back tomorrow and I’ll take you with me: I think it can be done. But now you mustn’t talk any more, for I want to go to sleep.”

So they all of them went to sleep.

Early in the morning the Prince woke up, and was not a little startled at finding he was already high up above the clouds. He was sitting on East Wind’s back, who was holding him very trustily. They were so high up in the sky that woods and fields, rivers and lakes, looked as they would on a large coloured map of the country.

“Good morning,” said East Wind. “You might as well have slept a bit longer, for there isn’t much to look at in this flat country beneath us, unless you care to count the churches: they show up like blocks of chalk down there on the green board.” It was the fields and meadows that he called the green board.

“It was very uncivil of me not to say good-bye to your mother and your brothers,” said the Prince.

“Oh, when one’s asleep one stands excused,” said East Wind; and thereupon they flew on yet faster: you could hear the going in the tops of the woods, when they flew over them, every bough and leaf rustled: you could hear it on the sea and on the lakes, for where they flew the waves rolled higher and the great ships bowed deep in the water like swimming swans.

Towards evening, when it grew dark, it was very amusing to see the big towns. Lights burned below them, now here, now there: it was just as when one has burned a bit of paper and sees all the little sparks, which are children coming out of school. The Prince clapped his hands, but East Wind begged him to stop that and hold tight instead, or he might easily fall down and be left hanging on a church steeple.

Swift flew the eagle in the dark forest, but swifter flew East Wind. The Cossack on his little horse coursed over the Steppes, but far swifter was the pace the Prince went.

“Now you can see the Himalayas,” said East Wind, “they’re the highest mountains in Asia: we shall soon get to the Garden of Eden now.” And then they wheeled further to the southward, and soon there came a perfume of spices and flowers. The fig and the pomegranate grew wild, and on the wild vines were red and blue clusters. Here they both alighted and stretched themselves on the soft grass where the flowers nodded to the wind as if to say: “Welcome back again.”

“Are we in the Garden of Eden now?” asked the Prince.

“No, of course not,” replied East Wind, “but we shall soon be there now. Do you see that wall of rocks and that big cave where the creepers hang down like great green curtains? That’s what we have to go through. Wrap yourself up in your cloak: the sun is burning hot here, but a step further on and it’s icy cold. A bird that flits past the cave has one wing out here in the warm summer, and the other inside in the cold of winter.”

“So that’s the way to the Garden of Eden, is it?” asked the Prince. Then they entered the cave. Hoo, how icy cold it was! But that didn’t last long. East Wind spread out his wings and they shone like the brightest flame. Why, what a cave it was! The great masses of stone from which water dripped hung above them in the strangest shapes: here it was so narrow that they had to crawl on their hands and knees, here it stretched above them seemingly as high as the open air. Elsewhere were places like funeral chapels, with silent organ pipes and banners turned to stone.

“We seem to be going by the path of Death to the Garden of Eden,” said the Prince, but East Wind answered not a word, only pointed ahead, and there the most beautiful blue light flashed out to meet them. The masses of stone overhead became more and more like a mist, which finally was as light as a white cloud in the moonlight. And now they were in the most delightful soft air, cool as on a mountain-top, fragrant as among the roses of a valley.

There flowed a stream, clear as the air itself, and the fishes in it were like silver and gold. Eels of purple-red hue that flashed like blue sparks at every bend of their bodies, played about in the water below, and the broad water-lily leaves had the colours of the rainbow, while the flower itself glowed with burning yellow-red, nourished by the water, as oil keeps a lamp ever burning. A bridge of marble, firm but so artfully and finely carved as if it were of filigree and beads of glass, led over the stream to the Island of Happiness, where the Garden of Eden blossomed.

East Wind took the Prince in his arms and bore him across, and there the flowers and leaves sang him the sweetest songs of his childhood, but so overwhelmingly lovely were they as no human voice can sing the like here.

Were those palm trees or gigantic water plants that grew there? Trees so full of sap and so large the Prince had never yet seen. The strangest creeping plants hung down in long wreaths like those you find painted in gold and colours in the margins of the old hymn books, or twining themselves about the initial letters. There were the quaintest blendings of birds, flowers and tendrils. Close by in the grass stood a flock of peacocks with their radiant tails spread out.

Yes, it really was so! Yet no, when the Prince touched them he found they were not animals but plants; they were the great dock leaves which here shone like the beautiful tail of the peacock. The lion and the tiger darted like lithe cats through the green thicket that smelt like the blossom of the olive, and the lion and the tiger were tame; the wild wood-pigeon shining like the fairest of pearls fluttered the lion’s mane with its wings, and the antelope, that elsewhere is so timid, stood still and nodded its head, as if it too would like to join in the play.

Now came forth the Fairy of Eden: her dress shone like the sun, and her face was kind as that of a happy mother rejoicing over her child. Young and fair was she, and beautiful girls, each with a shining star in her hair, followed her.

East Wind gave her the written leaf from the Phoenix, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure: she took the Prince’s hand and led him into the palace where the walls were of the colour of the most splendid tulip-petals when held against the sunlight. The very roof was one great shining flower, and the more one gazed up into it the deeper seemed its cup. The Prince walked over to a window and looked through one of the panes, and there he beheld the Tree of Knowledge with the serpent and Adam and Eve standing close by.

“Were they not driven out?” he asked.

The Fairy smiled and showed him that on every pane, time had burned in its picture, but not so as one is used to see it; no, there was life in it, the leaves of the trees moved, the people came and went as they do in a looking-glass. He looked through another pane, and there was Jacob’s dream, where the ladder reached into heaven and the angels with their broad wings hovered up and down. Everything that has happened in the world lived and moved in these panes of glass; such skilful painting only time could have imprinted.

The Fairy smiled and led him into a hall, great and high, whose walls seemed to be of transparent imagery, each face more lovely than the last. Here were millions of happy ones, who laughed and sang so that their voices flowed together into a single melody. Those at the top were so tiny that they seemed smaller than the least rosebud that is drawn like a dot on the paper. And in the midst of the hall stood a mighty tree with hanging boughs. Lovely golden apples, large and small, hung like oranges among the green leaves. This was the Tree of Knowledge of whose fruit Adam and Eve had eaten. From every leaf dripped a bright-red dewdrop: it seemed as if the tree were weeping tears of blood.

“Now let us take the boat,” said the Fairy, “there we shall enjoy the coolness of the heaving water. The boat swings, yet does not leave its place, but all the countries of the world glide along before our eyes.” And it was marvellous to see how the whole shore moved. There were the high Swiss Alps, the clouds and the dark pine forests: the sound of the horn came deep and melancholy, and the yodel of the shepherd rose sweet from the valley. Again, the banyan trees bowed their long hanging branches over the boat. Coal-black swans swam in the water, and the strangest beasts and flowers showed themselves on the brink. It was New Holland, the fifth continent of the world, that glided by, showing its blue mountains far away. One heard the song of the priests and watched the wild men dance to the sound of drums and pipes of bone. The Pyramids of Egypt, piercing the clouds, fallen pillars and Sphinxes half-buried in the sand, slid by. The northern lights blazed above the craters of the North—a show of fireworks such as none could equal. The Prince was at the height of happiness—he beheld a hundredfold more than we are telling of here.

“And can I stay here always?” he asked.

“That depends on yourself,” said the Fairy. “If you do not, like Adam, let yourself be tempted to do the forbidden thing, you can stay here always.”

“I shall not touch the apples on the Tree of Knowledge,” said the Prince, “there are thousands of fruits here as fair as they.”

“Test yourself, and if you are not strong enough, then go with East Wind who brought you: he is to fly back now, and will not come again for a hundred years. That time will pass by you in this place as if it were only a hundred hours, but even that is a long time for temptation and for sin. Every evening when I part from you I must call to you, ‘come with me’. I must beckon with this hand to you; but stay where you are, do not come with me, for at every step your longing will become stronger: you will come to the hall where the Tree of Knowledge grows: I shall sleep beneath its fragrant hanging boughs: you will bend over me, and I must smile: but if you imprint a kiss on my mouth, Eden will sink deep into the earth, and be lost to you. The keen wind of the desert will howl around you, the cold rain will drip from your hair. Sorrow and trouble will be your lot.”

“I shall stay here,” said the Prince: and East Wind kissed his brow and said, “Be strong, and we shall meet here again in a hundred years. Farewell! Farewell!” So East Wind spread his mighty wings: they shone like ripe corn in harvest or the northern lights in the depth of winter. Farewell! Farewell! rang out from the flowers and trees. Storks and pelicans flew in long rows like a fluttering ribbon, and followed him to the boundaries of the garden.

“Now our dances begin,” said the Fairy. “At the end of them, when I shall dance with you, you will see, as the sun sinks, that I beckon to you: you will hear me call to you, ‘Come with me’, but do it not. For a hundred years I must repeat it every evening, and every time that moment passes by, you will gain more strength, and at last you will heed it no more. Tonight is the first time; now I have warned you.”

So the Fairy led him into a great hall of transparent white lilies, in each of which the yellow pistil was a pure gold harp that rang with the note of strings and flute. Beautiful girls, lissom and slim, clad in billowy silk, that showed their lovely limbs, swayed in the dance and sang how sweet was life, how they would never die, and the Garden of Eden would ever bloom.

The sun went down; all heaven was pure gold, that gave the lilies the hue of the fairest roses, and the Prince drank of the foaming wine that the maidens brought, and felt such happiness as never before. He saw the further wall of the hall opened, and how the Tree of Knowledge stood forth in a brightness that blinded his eyes. The song that came from it was soft and lovely as his mother’s voice, as if she were singing, “My child, my darling child!”

Then the Fairy beckoned and called lovingly, “Follow me! Follow me!” and he rushed towards her, forgetting his promise, forgetting it all on that first evening, as she beckoned and smiled. The perfume, the spicy perfume about him grew stronger, the harps rang yet more beautifully, and it seemed as if the millions of smiling heads in the hall where the tree grew nodded and sang: “Man should know all things. Mankind is the lord of the world.” It was no longer tears of blood that were falling from the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge, he thought—they were red sparkling stars.

“Follow me! Follow me!” said the thrilling notes, and at every step the Prince’s cheeks burned hotter and his blood coursed quicker. “I must,” he said, “it is no sin, it cannot be! Why not follow beauty and joy? I will see her asleep; nothing is lost, if only I do not kiss her, and I will not, I am strong, I have a firm will.”

The Fairy let fall her radiant robe, thrust the branches aside, and the next moment was hidden among them.

“Not yet have I transgressed,” said the Prince, “nor will I,” and he too pushed the branches aside. There she was, asleep already, beautiful, as only the Fairy of the Garden of Eden can be. She smiled in her dreams, and he bent over her and saw tears trickling between her eyelashes.

“Dost thou weep for me?” he whispered. “Weep not, thou loveliest of women. Now at last I feel the happiness of Paradise, streaming through my blood and through my thoughts. I feel in my mortal limbs the might of a cherub, and immortal life. Let eternal night come on! One moment like this is wealth enough.” He kissed the tear from her eye, his mouth touched hers.

A clap of thunder sounded out, deep and terrible, such as none had ever heard. All about him fell in ruin. The beautiful Fairy, the flowering Eden sank, sank deep, deep—the Prince saw it sink into black night; far, far away it sparkled like a little shining star. A deathly chill ran through his limbs: he closed his eyes and long he lay as dead.

The cold rain fell on his face, the keen wind blew about his head, and consciousness came to him again. “What have I done?” he sighed. “I have sinned like Adam, sinned so that Eden is sunk deep down below.” He opened his eyes: far off he still saw the star that sparkled like the sunken Eden. It was the morning star in the heaven.

He rose. There he was in the great forest, hard by the cave of the winds, and the Mother of the Winds was sitting beside him. Wrathful she looked, and raised her arm on high.

“Already, the first evening!” said she. “Well, I expected it. If you were my boy, you should go into the bag at once.”

“He must go there,” said Death: a mighty ancient he was, with a scythe in his hand, and great black wings. “He must be laid in the coffin, but not now. I shall but mark him and let him wander yet about the world for a season and atone for his sin, and grow good and yet better. One day I shall come, when he least looks for it; I shall put him into the black coffin and set it on my head and fly up towards the star. There also does the Garden of Eden bloom, and if he is good and dutiful he can enter it then: but if his thoughts are evil and his heart still full of sin, he will sink with the coffin, deeper than Eden sank, and only each thousandth year shall I bring him back again, either to sink deeper yet, or to dwell in the Star, the Star that sparkles overhead.”

[ 1838 ]

The Stone of the Wise Men

—

You know the story of Holger the Dane? Then we will not repeat it, but ask you if you recollect how “Holger the Dane wandered over the great land of India, east as far as the world’s end, to the tree that is called The Tree of the Sun,” as Christen Pedersen says. Do you know Christen Pedersen? It doesn’t matter if you don’t. Holger the Dane gave Prester John his power and authority over India. Do you know about Prester John? Yes; well, it doesn’t matter either if you don’t, for he doesn’t come into our story at all. You are to hear of the Tree of the Sun “in India, eastward at the end of the world,” as it was then understood by those who had not learned their geography as we have, but that also does not matter at the present time.

•  •  •

Far away towards the east, in India, which seemed in those days the world’s end, stood the Tree of the Sun; a noble tree, such as we have never seen, and perhaps never may see.

The summit of this tree spread itself for miles like an entire forest, each of its smaller branches forming a complete tree. Palms, beech trees, pines, plane trees, and various other kinds, which are found in all parts of the world, were here like small branches, shooting forth from the great tree; while the larger boughs, with their knots and curves, formed valleys and hills, clothed with velvety green and covered with flowers. Everywhere it was like a blooming meadow or a lovely garden. Here were birds from all quarters of the world assembled together; birds from the primeval forests of America, from the rose gardens of Damascus, and from the deserts of Africa, in which the elephant and the lion may boast of being the only rulers. Birds from the Polar regions came flying here, and of course the stork and the swallow were not absent. But the birds were not the only living creatures. There were stags, squirrels, antelopes, and hundreds of other beautiful and light-footed animals here found a home.

The summit of the tree was a wide-spreading garden, and in the midst of it, where the green boughs formed a kind of hill, stood a castle of crystal, with a view from it towards every quarter of heaven. Each tower was erected in the form of a lily, and within the stern was a winding staircase, through which one could ascend to the top and step out upon the leaves as upon balconies. The calyx of the flower itself formed a most beautiful, glittering, circular hall, above which no other roof arose than the blue firmament and the sun and stars.

Just as much splendour, but of another kind, appeared below, in the wide halls of the castle. Here, on the walls, were reflected pictures of the world, which represented numerous and varied scenes of everything that took place daily, so that it was useless to read the newspapers, and indeed there were none to be obtained in this spot. All might be seen in living pictures by those who wished it, but “all” would have been too much for even the wisest man, and this man dwelt here. His name is very difficult; you would not be able to pronounce it, so it may remain unmentioned. He knew everything that a man on earth can know or imagine. Every invention already in existence or yet to be, was known to him, and much more; still, everything on earth has a limit. The wise king Solomon was not half so wise as this man. He could govern the powers of nature and held sway over potent spirits; even Death itself was obliged to give him every morning a list of those who were to die during the day. King Solomon was obliged to die too; and it was this fact which so often occupied the thoughts of of this great man in the castle on the Tree of the Sun. He knew that however high he might tower above men in wisdom, he also must die one day. He knew that his children would fade away like the leaves of the forest and become dust. He saw the human race wither and fall like leaves from the tree; he saw new men come to fill their places, but the leaves that fell off never sprouted forth again; they crumbled to dust or were absorbed into other plants.

“What happens to man,” the Wise Man asked himself, “when the angel of death touches him! What may death be? The body is dissolved. And the soul? Yes, what is the soul? whither doth it go? To eternal life, says the comforting voice of religion; but what is the transition? where does one live, and how? Above, in heaven, says the pious man; thither we go. Thither?” repeated the Wise Man, and fixed his eyes upon the moon and stars; “up yonder?”

“Above!” repeated the Wise Man, fixing his eyes upon the moon and stars above him. He saw that to this earthly sphere, above and below were constantly changing places, and that the position varied according to the spot on which a man found himself. He knew, also, that even if he ascended to the top of the highest mountain which rears its lofty summit on this earth, the air, which to us seems clear and transparent, would there be dark and cloudy; the sun would have a coppery glow and send forth no rays, and our earth would lie beneath him wrapped in an orange-coloured mist. How narrow are the limits which confine the bodily sight, and how little can be seen by the eye of the soul. How little do the wisest among us know of that which is so important to us all.

In the most secret chamber of the castle lay the greatest treasure on earth—the Book of Truth. The Wise Man had read it through, page by page. Every man may read in this book, but only in fragments. To many eyes the characters seem so mixed in confusion that the words cannot be distinguished. On certain pages the writing often appears so pale or so blurred that the page becomes a blank. The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most.

The Wise Man knew how to unite the sunlight and the moonlight with the light of reason and the hidden powers of nature; and through this stronger light, many things in the pages were made clear to him. But in the section of the book entitled “Life after Death” not a single point could he see distinctly. This pained him. Should he never be able here on earth to obtain a light by which everything written in the Book of Truth should become clear to him?

Like the wise King Solomon, he understood the language of animals, and could interpret their talk into song; but that made him none the wiser. He found out the nature of plants and metals, and their power in curing diseases and arresting death, but none to destroy death itself. In all created things within his reach he sought the light that should shine upon the certainty of an eternal life, but he found it not. The Book of Truth lay open before him, but, its pages were to him as blank paper. Christianity placed before him in the Bible a promise of eternal life, but he wanted to read it in his book, and in that he saw nothing.

He had five children—four sons, educated as the children of such a wise father should be, and a daughter, fair, gentle, and intelligent, but she was blind; yet this seemed no deprivation to her; her father and brothers were outward eyes to her, and a vivid imagination made everything clear to her mental sight.

The sons had never gone farther from the castle than the branches of the trees extended, and the sister had scarcely ever left home. They were happy children in that home of their childhood, the beautiful and fragrant Tree of the Sun. Like all children, they loved to hear stories related to them, and their father told them many things which other children would not have understood; but these were as clever as most grown-up people are among us. He explained to them what they saw in the pictures of life on the castle walls—the doings of man, and the progress of events in all the lands of the earth; and the sons often expressed a wish that they could be present, and take a part in these great deeds. Then their father told them that in the world there was toil and difficulty: that it was not quite what it appeared to them, as they looked upon it from their beautiful home. He spoke to them of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and told them that these three held together in the world, and by that union they became crystallized into a precious jewel, clearer than a diamond of the first water—a jewel, whose splendour had a value even in the sight of God, in whose brightness all things are dim. This jewel was called the Stone of the Wise. He told them that, by searching, man could attain to a knowledge of the existence of God, and that it was in the power of every man to discover the certainty that such a jewel as the Stone of the Wise really existed. This information would have been beyond the perception of other children; but these children understood, and others will learn to comprehend its meaning after a time.

They questioned their father about the true, the beautiful, and the good; and he explained it to them in many ways. He told them that God, when He made man out of the dust of the earth, gave five kisses to His work—fiery kisses, heart kisses—which we call the five senses. Through these, the true, the beautiful, and the good are seen, perceived, and understood, and through these they are valued, protected, and encouraged. Five senses have been given mentally and bodily, inwardly and outwardly, to body and soul.

The children thought deeply on all these things, and meditated upon them day and night. Then the eldest of the brothers dreamed a splendid dream. Strange to say, not only the second brother but also the third and fourth brothers all dreamed exactly the same thing; namely, that each went out into the world to find the Stone of the Wise. Each dreamed that he found it, and that, as he rode back on his swift horse, in the morning dawn, over the velvety green meadows, to his home in the castle of his father, that the stone gleamed from his forehead like a beaming light; and threw such a bright radiance upon the pages of the Book of Truth that every word was illuminated which spoke of the life beyond the grave. But the sister had no dream of going out into the wide world; it never entered her mind. Her world was her father’s house.

•  •  •

“I shall ride forth into the wide world,” said the eldest brother. “I must try what life is like there, as I mix with men. I will practise only the good and true; with these I will protect the beautiful. Much shall be changed for the better while I am there.”

Now these thoughts were great and daring, as our thoughts generally are at home, before we have gone out into the world, and encountered its storms and tempests, its thorns and its thistles. In him, and in all his brothers, the five senses were highly cultivated, inwardly and outwardly; but each of them had one sense which in keenness and development surpassed the other four. In the case of the eldest, this was Sight, which he hoped would be of special service. He had eyes for all times and all people; eyes that could discover in the depths of the earth hidden treasures, and look into the hearts of men, as through a pane of glass; he could read more than is often seen on the cheek that blushes or grows pale, in the eye that droops or smiles. Stags and antelopes accompanied him to the western boundary of his home, and there he found the wild swans. These he followed, and found himself far away in the north, far from the land of his father, which extended eastward to the ends of the earth.

How he opened his eyes with astonishment! How many things were to be seen here! and so different to the mere representation of pictures such as those in his father’s house. At first he nearly lost his eyes in astonishment at the rubbish and mockery brought forward to represent the beautiful; but he kept his eyes, and soon found full employment for them. He wished to go thoroughly and honestly to work in his endeavour to understand the true, the beautiful, and the good. But how were they represented in the world? He saw that the wreath which rightly belonged to the beautiful was often given the hideous; that the good was often passed by unnoticed, while mediocrity was applauded when it should have been hissed. People look at the dress, not at the wearer; thought more of a name than of doing their duty; and trusted more to reputation than to real service. It was everywhere the same.

“I see I must make a regular attack on these things,” said he; and he accordingly did not spare them. But while looking for the truth, came the Evil One, the father of lies, to intercept him. Gladly would the fiend have plucked out the eyes of this Seer, but that would have been a too straightforward path for him; he works more cunningly. He allowed the young man to seek for, and discover, the beautiful and the good; but while he was contemplating them, the Evil Spirit blew one mote after another into each of his eyes; and such a proceeding would injure even the strongest sight. Then he blew upon the motes, and they became beams, so that the clearness of his sight was gone, and the Seer was like a blind man in the world, and had no longer any faith in it. He had lost his good opinion of the world, as well as of himself; and when a man gives up the world, and himself too, it is all over with him.

“All over,” said the wild swan, who flew across the sea to the east.

“All over,” twittered the swallows, who were also flying eastward towards the Tree of the Sun. It was no good news which they carried home.

•  •  •

“I think the Seer has fared badly,” said the second brother, “but the Hearer may be more successful.” This one possessed the sense of hearing to a very high degree: he could hear the grass grow, so quick was he to hear.

He took a fond leave of all at home, and rode away, provided with good abilities and good intentions. The swallows escorted him, and he followed the swans till he found himself out in the world, and far away from home. But he soon discovered that one may have too much of a good thing. His hearing was too fine. He not only heard the grass grow, but could hear every man’s heart beat, whether in sorrow or in joy. The whole world was to him like a clockmaker’s great workshop, in which all the clocks were going “tick, tick,” and all the turret clocks striking “ding, dong.” It was unbearable. For a long time his ears endured it, but at last all the noise and tumult became too much for one man to bear.

Then came rascally boys of sixty years old—for years do not alone make a man—who raised a tumult, which might have made the Hearer laugh, but for the applause which followed, echoing through every street and house, and was even heard in country roads. Falsehood thrust itself forward and played the hypocrite; the bells on the fool’s cap jingled, and declared they were church-bells, and the noise became so bad for the Hearer that he thrust his fingers into his ears. Still, he could hear false notes and bad singing, gossip and idle words, scandal and slander, groaning and moaning, without and within. Heaven help us! He thrust his fingers farther and farther into his ears, till at last the drums burst. And now he could hear nothing more of the true, the beautiful, and the good; for his hearing was to have been the means by which he hoped to acquire his knowledge. He became silent and suspicious, and at last trusted no one, not even himself, and no longer hoping to find and bring home the costly jewel, he gave it up, and gave himself up too, which was worse than all.

The birds in their flight towards the east, carried the tidings, and the news reached the castle in the Tree of the Sun.

•  •  •

“I will try now,” said the third brother; “I have a keen nose!” Now that was not a very elegant expression, but it was his way, and we must take him as he was. He had a cheerful temper, and was, besides, a real poet; he could make many things appear poetical, by the way in which he spoke of them, and ideas struck him long before they occurred to the minds of others. “I can smell,” he would say; and he attributed to the sense of smelling, which he possessed in a high degree, a great power in the region of the beautiful. “I can smell fire,” he would say, “and many places are fragrant or beautiful according to the taste of the frequenters. One man feels at home in the atmosphere of the tavern, among the flaring tallow candles, and when the smell of spirits mingles with the fumes of bad tobacco. Another prefers sitting amidst the overpowering scent of jasmine, or perfuming himself with scented olive oil. This man seeks the fresh sea breeze, while that one climbs the lofty mountain-top, to look down upon the busy little life beneath.”

As he spoke in this way, it seemed as if he had already been out in the world, as if he had already known and associated with man. But this experience was intuitive—it was the poetry within him, a gift from Heaven bestowed on him in his cradle.

He bade farewell to his parental roof in the Tree of the Sun, and departed on foot, from the pleasant scenes that surrounded his home. Arrived at its confines, he mounted on the back of an ostrich, which runs faster than a horse, and afterwards, when he fell in with the wild swans, he swung himself on the strongest of them, for he loved change, and away he flew over the sea to distant lands, where there were great forests, deep lakes, lofty mountains, and proud cities. Wherever he came it seemed as if sunshine travelled with him across the fields, for every flower, every bush, exhaled a renewed fragrance, as if conscious that a friend and protector was near; one who understood them, and knew their value. The stunted rose-bush shot forth twigs, unfolded its leaves, and bore the most beautiful roses; everyone could see it, and even the black damp Wood Snail noticed its beauty. “I gave my approval to the flower,” said the Snail, “I have spit upon it, I can do no more.

“Thus it always fares with the beautiful in this world,” said the Poet. And he sang a song about it, and sang it in his own way, but nobody listened. Then he gave a Drummer twopence and a peacock’s feather, and set the song for the drum, and the drummer beat it through the streets of the town; and when the people heard it they said, “That is a capital tune.” The Poet wrote many songs about the true, the beautiful, and the good. His songs were listened to in the tavern, where the tallow candles flared, in the fresh clover field, in the forest, and on the high seas; and it appeared as if this brother was to be more fortunate than the other two.

But the Evil Spirit was angry at this, so he set to work with soot and incense, which he can mix so artfully as to confuse an angel, and how much more easily a poor poet! The evil one knew how to manage such people. He so completely surrounded the Poet with incense that the man lost his head, forgot his mission and his home, and at last lost himself and vanished in smoke.

But when the little birds heard of it, they mourned, and for three days they sang not one song. The black Wood Snail became blacker still; not for grief, but for envy. “They should have offered me incense,” he said, “for it was I who gave him the idea of the most famous of his songs—the drum song of ‘The Way of the World;’ and it was I who spat upon the rose; I can bring a witness to that fact.”

But no tidings of all this reached the Poet’s home in India. The birds had all been silent for three days, and when the time of mourning was over, so deep had been their grief, that they had forgotten for whom they wept. That’s the usual way!

•  •  •

“Now I must go out into the world, to disappear like the rest,” said the fourth brother. He was as good-tempered as the third, but no poet, though he could be witty.

The two eldest had filled the castle with joyfulness, and now the last brightness was going away. Sight and hearing have always been considered two of the chief senses among men, and those which they wish to keep bright; the other senses are looked upon as of less importance.

But the younger son had a different opinion; he had cultivated his taste in every way, and taste is very powerful. It rules over what goes into the mouth, as well as over all which is presented to the mind; and, consequently, this brother took upon himself to taste everything stored up in bottles or jars; this he called his rough-work. He looked upon every man’s mind as a kind of stock-pot in which something was brewing, and every country was a kind of mental kitchen to him.

“There are no delicacies here,” he said; so he wished to go out into the world to find something delicate to suit his taste. “Perhaps fortune may be more favourable to me than it was to my brothers. I shall start on my travels, but what conveyance shall I choose? Are air balloons invented yet?” he asked of his father, who knew of all inventions that had been made, or would be made.

Air balloons had not then been invented, nor steam-ships, nor railways.

“Good,” said he; “then I shall choose an air balloon; my father knows how they are to be made and guided. Nobody has invented one yet, and the people will believe that it is an aerial phantom. When I have done with the balloon I shall burn it, and for this purpose, you must give me a few pieces of another invention, which will come next; I mean a few chemical matches.”

He obtained what he wanted, and flew away. The birds accompanied him farther than they had the other brothers. They were curious to know how this flight would end. Many more of them came swooping down; they thought it must be some new bird, and he soon had a goodly company of followers. They came in clouds till the air became darkened with birds as it was with the cloud of locusts over the land of Egypt.

And now he was out in the wide world. The balloon descended over one of the greatest cities, and the aeronaut took up his station at the highest point, on the church steeple. The balloon rose again into the air, which it ought not to have done; what became of it is not known, neither is it of any consequence, for balloons had not yet been invented.

There he sat on the church steeple. The birds no longer hovered over him; they had got tired of him, and he was tired of them. All the chimneys in the town were smoking merrily.

“There are altars erected to thy honour,” said the Wind, who wished to say something agreeable to him. He sat there boldly looking down upon the people in the street. There was one stepping along, proud of his purse; another, of the key he carried behind him, though he had nothing to lock up; another took a pride in his moth-eaten coat; and another, in his mortified body. “Vanity, all vanity!” he exclaimed. “I must go down there by-and-by, and touch and taste; but I shall sit here a little while longer, for the wind blows pleasantly at my back. I shall remain here as long as the wind blows, and enjoy a little rest. ‘It is comfortable to sleep late in the morning when one had a great deal to do,’ says the sluggard; but laziness is the root of all evil, and there is no evil in our family. I’ll just stay here as long as this wind blows, for it pleases me.”

And there he stayed. But because he was sitting on the weathercock of the steeple, which kept turning round and round with him, he was under the false impression that the same wind still blew, and that he might just as well stay there.

•  •  •

But in India, in the castle on the Tree of the Sun, all was solitary and still, since the brothers had gone away one after the other.

“Nothing goes well with them,” said the father; “they will never bring the glittering jewel home, it is not made for me; they are all dead and gone.” Then he bent down over the Book of Truth, and gazed on the page on which he should have read of the life after death, but for him there was nothing to be read or learned upon it.

His blind daughter was his consolation and joy; she clung to him with sincere affection, and for the sake of his happiness and peace she wished the costly jewel could be found and brought home.

With longing tenderness she thought of her brothers. Where were they? Where did they live? How she wished she might dream of them; but it was strange that not even in dreams could she be brought near to them. But at last one night she dreamed that she heard the voices of her brothers calling to her from the distant world, and she could not refrain, but went out to them, and yet it seemed in her dream that she still remained in her father’s house. She did not see her brothers, but she felt as it were a fire burning in her hand, which, however, did not hurt her, for it was the jewel she was bringing to her father. When she awoke she thought for a moment that she still held the stone, but she only grasped the knob of her distaff.

During the long evenings she had spun constantly, and round the distaff were woven threads finer than the web of a spider; human eyes could never have distinguished these threads when separated from each other. But she had wetted them with her tears, and the twist was as strong as a cable. She rose with the impression that her dream must be a reality, and her resolution was taken.

It was still night, and her father slept; she pressed a kiss upon his hand, and then took her distaff and fastened the end of the thread to her father’s house. But for this, blind as she was, she would never have found her way home again; to this thread she must hold fast, and trust not to others or even to herself. From the Tree of the Sun she broke four leaves; which she gave up to the wind and the weather, that they might be carried to her brothers as letters and a greeting, in case she did not meet them in the wide world. Poor blind child, what would become of her in those distant regions? But she had the invisible thread, to which she could hold fast; and she possessed a gift which all the others lacked. This was thoroughness, a determination to throw herself entirely into whatever she undertook, and it made her feel as if she could see to the tips of her fingers and hear down into her very heart.

Quietly she went forth into the noisy, bustling, wonderful world, and wherever she went the skies grew bright, and she felt the warm sunbeam, and a rainbow above in the blue heavens seemed to span the dark world. She heard the song of the birds, and smelt the scent of the orange groves and apple orchards so strongly that she seemed to taste it. Soft tones and charming songs reached her ear, as well as harsh sounds and rough words—thoughts and opinions in strange contradiction to each other. Into the deepest recesses of her heart penetrated the echoes of human thoughts and feelings. Now she heard the following words sadly sung:

“Our life on earth is a shadow vain,

A night of sorrow and bitter pain.”

But then would follow brighter thoughts:

“Our life on earth is a fragrant rose

With its sunshine, joy, and sweet repose.”

And if one stanza sounded painfully—

“Each mortal thinks of himself alone,

This truth, alas, is clearly shown;”

Then, on the other hand, came the answer—

“Love, like a mighty flowing stream,

Fills every heart with its radiant gleam.”

he heard, indeed, such words as these—

“In the pretty turmoil here below,

All is a vain and paltry show.”

Then came also words of comfort—

“Great and good are the actions done

By many whose worth is never known.”

And if sometimes the mocking strain reached her—

“Why not join in the jesting cry

That disdains all gifts from the throne on high?”

In the Blind Girl’s heart a stronger voice repeated—

“To trust in thyself and God is best,

In His holy will forever to rest.”

And whenever she came among human beings, men or women, young or old, the knowledge of the true, the beautiful, and the good entered their hearts; wherever she went, whether it was into the artist’s studio, the festive decorated hall, or the crowded factory with its whirring wheels, it seemed as if a ray of sunlight came shining in. Kind words were uttered, the flowers gave forth a sweeter fragrance, and a living dewdrop fell upon the exhausted heart.

But the Evil Spirit could not see this and remain content. He has more cleverness than ten thousand men, and he found means to compass his end. He betook himself to the marsh, and collected a few little bubbles of stagnant water. Then he uttered over them a sevenfold echo of lying words that they might become strong. He mixed up together paid-for eulogies with lying epitaphs, as many as he could find, boiled them in tears shed by envy; put upon them rouge which he had scraped from faded cheeks, and from these he produced a maiden, in form and appearance like the Blind Girl, the angel of completeness, as men called her. The evil one’s stratagem succeeded; no one knew the true one from the imitation, and indeed, how could they??

“To trust in thyself and God is best,

In his Holy will forever to rest.”

So sang the Blind Girl in full faith. She had entrusted the four green leaves from the Tree of the Sun to the winds, as letters of greeting to her brothers, and she had full confidence that the leaves would reach them. She fully believed that the jewel which outshines all the glories of the world would yet be found, and that upon the forehead of humanity it would glitter even in the castle of her father.

“Even in my father’s house,” she repeated. “Yes, the place in which this jewel is to be found is earth, and I shall bring more than the promise of it with me. I feel it glow and swell more and more in my closed hand. Every grain of truth which the keen wind carried up and whirled towards me I caught and treasured. I allowed it to be penetrated with the fragrance of the beautiful, of which there is so much in the world, even for the blind. I took the beatings of a heart engaged in a good action, and added them to my treasure. All that I can bring is but dust; still, it is a part of the jewel we seek, and there is plenty, my hand is quite full of it.”

She soon found herself again at home; carried thither in a flight of thought, never having loosened her hold of the invisible thread fastened to her father’s house. As she stretched out her hand to her father, the powers of evil dashed with the fury of a hurricane over the Tree of the Sun; a blast of wind rushed through the open doors, and into the sanctuary, where lay the Book of Truth.

“It will be blown to dust by the wind,” said the father, as he seized the open hand she held towards him.

“No,” she replied, with quiet confidence, “it is indestructible. I feel its beam warming my very soul.”

Then her father observed that a dazzling flame gleamed from the white page on which the shining dust had passed from her hand. It was there to prove the certainty of eternal life, and on the book glowed one shining word, and only one, the word Faith. And soon the four brothers were again with the father and daughter. When the green leaf from home fell on the bosom of each, a longing had seized them to return. They had arrived, accompanied by the birds of passage, the stag, the antelope, and all the creatures of the forest who wished to have a part in their joy.

We have often seen, when a sunbeam bursts through a crack in the door into a dusty room, how a whirling column of dust seems to circle round. But this was not poor, insignificant, common dust, for even the rainbow’s colours are dim when compared with the beauty which shone from the page on which it had fallen. The glowing word Faith, from every grain of truth, had the brightness of the beautiful and the good, more bright than the mighty pillar of flame that led Moses and the children of Israel to the land of Canaan, and from the word Faith the bridge of Hope arose, reaching even to the immeasurable Love in the realms of the Infinite.

[ 1859 ]

The Dryad

A WONDER STORY
OF THE TIME OF
THE EXHIBITION IN PARIS, 1867.

—

We are travelling to Paris to the Exhibition.

Now we are there. That was a journey, a flight without magic. We flew on the wings of steam over the sea and across the land.

Yes, our time is the fairy-tale time.

We are in the midst of Paris, in a great hotel. Blooming flowers ornament the staircases, and soft carpets cover the floors.

Our room is a very cosy one, and through the open balcony door we have a view of a great square. Spring lives down there; it has come to Paris, and arrived at the same time with us. It has come in the shape of a glorious young chestnut tree, with delicate leaves newly opened. How the tree gleams, dressed in its spring garb, before all the other trees in the place! One of these latter had been struck out of the list of living trees. It lies on the ground with roots exposed. On the place where it stood, the young chestnut tree shall be planted and grow.

It still stands towering aloft on the heavy wagon which has brought it this morning a distance of several miles to Paris. For years it had stood there, in the protection of a mighty oak tree, under which the old venerable clergyman had often sat, with children listening to his stories.

The young chestnut tree had also listened to the stories; for the Dryad who lived in it was a child also. She remembered the time when the tree was so little that it could scarcely peep over the grass and ferns around. These were as tall as they would ever be; but the tree grew every year, and enjoyed the air and the sunshine, and drank the dew and the rain. Several times it was also, as it must be, well shaken by the wind and the rain; for that is a part of education.

The Dryad rejoiced in her life, and rejoiced in the sunshine, and the singing of the birds; but she was most rejoiced at human voices; she understood the language of men as well as she understood that of animals.

Butterflies, cockchafers, dragon-flies, everything that could fly came to pay a visit. They could all talk. They told of the village, of the vineyard, of the forest, of the old castle with its parks and canals and ponds. Down in the water dwelt also living beings, which, in their way, could fly under the water from one place to another—beings with knowledge and delineation. They said nothing at all, so wise were they!

And the swallow, who had dipped down into the water, told about the pretty little goldfish, of the thick turbot, the fat brill, and the old moss-grown carp. The swallow could describe all that very well, but, “One ought to see these things oneself,” she said. But how was the Dryad ever to see such beings? She was obliged to be satisfied with being able to look over the beautiful country and see the busy industry of men.

It was glorious; but most glorious of all when the old clergyman sat under the oak tree and talked of France, and of the great deeds of her sons and daughters, whose names will be mentioned with admiration through all time. Then the Dryad heard of the shepherd girl, Joan of Arc, and of Charlotte Corday; she heard about Henry the Fourth, and Napoleon the First; she heard names whose echo sounds in the hearts of the people.

The village children listened attentively, and the Dryad no less attentively; she became a school-child with the rest. In the clouds that went sailing by she saw, picture by picture, everything that she heard talked about. The cloudy sky was her picture-book.

She felt so happy in beautiful France, the fruitful land of genius, with the crater of freedom. But in her heart the sting remained that the bird, that every animal that could fly, was much better off than she. Even the fly could look about more in the world, far beyond the Dryad’s horizon.

France was so great and so glorious, but she could only look across a little piece of it. The land stretched out, world-wide, with vineyards, forests and great cities. Of all these Paris was the most splendid and the mightiest. The birds could get there; but she, never!

Among the village children was a little ragged, poor girl, but a pretty one to look at. She was always laughing or singing and twining red flowers in her black hair.

“Don’t go to Paris!” the old clergyman warned her. “Poor child! if you go there, it will be your ruin.”

But she went for all that.

The Dryad often thought of her; for she had the same wish, and felt the same longing for the great city. Spring came, summer, autumn, winter; two or three years passed.

The Dryad’s tree was bearing its first chestnut blossoms; the birds were twittering round them in the most beautiful sunshine. Then a stately carriage came rolling along that way, and in it sat a grand lady driving the spirited, light-footed horses; a smart little groom sat behind her. The Dryad knew the lady, and the old clergyman knew her also. He shook his head gravely when he saw her, and said:

“So you went there after all, and it was your ruin, poor Mary!”

“That one poor?” thought the Dryad. “No; she wears a dress fit for a countess” (she had become one in the city of magic changes). “Oh, if I were only there, amid all the splendour and pomp! They shine up into the very clouds at night; when I look up, I can tell in what direction the city lies.”

Towards that direction the Dryad looked every evening. She saw in the dark night the gleaming cloud on the horizon; in the clear moonlight nights she missed the sailing clouds, which showed her pictures of the city and pictures from history.

The child grasps at the picture-books, the Dryad grasped at the cloud-world, her thought-book. A sudden, cloudless sky was for her a blank page; and for several days she had only such pages before her.

It was in the warm summertime: not a breeze moved through the glowing hot days. Every leaf, every flower, lay as in a doze, and the people were like that too.

Then the clouds arose and covered the region round about where the gleaming mist announced “Here lies Paris.”

The clouds piled themselves up like a chain of mountains, hurried on through the air, and spread themselves abroad over the whole landscape, as far as the Dryad could see.

Like enormous blue-black blocks of rock, the clouds lay piled over one another. Gleams of lightning shot forth from them.

“These also are the servants of the Lord God,” the old clergyman had said. And there came a bluish dazzling flash of lightning, a lighting up as if of the sun itself, which could burst blocks of rock asunder. The lightning struck and split to the roots the old venerable oak. The crown fell asunder. It seemed as if the tree were stretching forth its arms to clasp the messengers of the light.

No bronze cannon can sound over the land at the birth of a royal child as the thunder sounded at the death of the old oak. The rain streamed down; a refreshing wind was blowing; the storm had gone by, and there was quite a holiday glow on all things. The old clergyman spoke a few words for honourable remembrance, and a painter made a drawing, as a lasting record of the tree.

“Everything passes away,” said the Dryad, “passes away like a cloud, and never comes back!”

The old clergyman, too, did not come back. The green roof of his school was gone, and his teaching-chair had vanished. The children did not come; but autumn came, and winter came, and then spring also. In all this change of seasons the Dryad looked toward the region where, at night, Paris gleamed with its bright mist far on the horizon.

Forth from the town rushed engine after engine, train after train, whistling and screaming at all hours in the day. In the evening, towards midnight, at daybreak, and all the day through, came the trains. Out of each one, and into each one, streamed people from the country of every king. A new wonder of the world had summoned them to Paris.

In what form did this wonder exhibit itself?

“A splendid blossom of art and industry,” said one, “has unfolded itself in the Champ de Mars, a gigantic sunflower, from whose petals one can learn geography and statistics, and can become as wise as a lord mayor, and raise oneself to the level of art and poetry, and study the greatness and power of the various lands.”

“A fairy tale flower,” said another, “a many-coloured lotus-plant, which spreads out its green leaves like a velvet carpet over the sand. The opening spring has brought it forth, the summer will see it in all its splendour, the autumn winds will sweep it away, so that not a leaf, not a fragment of its root shall remain.”

In front of the Military School stretches the arena of war in time of peace—a field without a blade of grass, a piece of sandy plain, as if cut out of the Desert of Africa, where Fata Morgana [34] displays her strange castles in the air and hanging gardens. In the Champ de Mars, however, these stand more brilliant and more wonderful, because genius had made them real.

“The Aladdin’s Palace of the present has been built,” it was said. “Day by day, hour by hour, it unfolds more of its wonderful splendour.”

The endless halls shine in marble and many colours. “Master Bloodless” here moves his limbs of steel and iron in the great circular hall of machinery. Works of art in metal, in stone, in Gobelins tapestry, announce the vitality of mind that is stirring in every land. Halls of paintings, splendour of flowers, everything that mind and skill can create in the workshop of the artisan, has been placed here for show. Even the memorials of ancient days, out of old graves and turf-moors, have appeared at this general meeting.

The overpowering great variegated whole must be divided into small portions, and pressed together like a plaything, if it is to be understood and described.

Like a great table on Christmas Eve, the Champ de Mars carried a wonder-castle of industry and art, and around this, knickknacks from all countries had been ranged, knickknacks on a grand scale, for every nation found some remembrance of home.

Here stood the royal palace of Egypt, there the caravanserai of the desert land. The Bedouin had quitted his sunny country, and hastened by on his camel. Here stood the Russian stables, with the fiery glorious horses of the steppe. Here stood the simple straw-thatched dwelling of the Danish peasant, with the Dannebrog flag, next to Gustavus Vasa’s beautifully carved wooden house from Dalarne, in Sweden. American huts, English cottages, French pavilions, kiosks, theatres, churches, all strewn around, and between them the fresh green turf, the clear springing water, blooming bushes, rare trees, hothouses, in which one might fancy oneself transported into the tropical forest; whole gardens brought from Damascus, and blooming under one roof. What colours, what fragrance!

Artificial grottoes surrounded bodies of fresh or salt water, and gave a glimpse into the empire of the fishes; the visitor seemed to wander at the bottom of the sea, among fishes and reptiles and polyps.

“All this,” they said, “the Champ de Mars offers;” and around the great richly-spread table the crowd of human beings moves like a busy swarm of ants, on foot or in little carriages, for not all feet are equal to such a fatiguing journey.

Hither they swarm from morning till late in the evening. Steamer after steamer, crowded with people, glides down the Seine. The number of carriages is continually on the increase. The swarm of people on foot and on horseback grows more and more dense. Carriages and omnibuses are crowded, stuffed and embroidered with people. All these tributary streams flow in one direction—towards the Exhibition. On every entrance the flag of France is displayed; around the world’s bazaar wave the flags of all nations. There is a humming and a murmuring from the hall of the machines; from the towers the melody of the chimes is heard; with the tones of the organs in the churches mingle the hoarse nasal songs from the cafés of the East. It is a kingdom of Babel, a wonder of the world!

In very truth it was. That’s what all the reports said, and who did not hear them? The Dryad knew everything that is told here of the new wonder in the city of cities.

“Fly away, ye birds! fly away to see, and then come back and tell me,” said the Dryad.

The wish became an intense desire—became the one thought of a life. Then, in the quiet silent night, while the full moon was shining, the Dryad saw a spark fly out of the moon’s disc, and fall like a shooting star. And before the tree, whose leaves waved to and fro as if they were stirred by a tempest, stood a noble, mighty, and grand figure. In tones that were at once rich and strong, like the trumpet of the Last Judgment bidding farewell to life and summoning to the great account, it said:

“Thou shalt go to the city of magic; thou shalt take root there, and enjoy the mighty rushing breezes, the air and the sunshine there. But the time of thy life shall then be shortened; the line of years that awaited thee here amid the free nature shall shrink to but a small tale. Poor Dryad! It shall be thy destruction. Thy yearning and longing will increase, thy desire will grow more stormy, the tree itself will be as a prison to thee, thou wilt quit thy cell and give up thy nature to fly out and mingle among men. Then the years that would have belonged to thee will be contracted to half the span of the ephemeral fly, that lives but a day: one night, and thy life-taper shall be blown out—the leaves of the tree will wither and be blown away, to become green never again!”

Thus the words sounded. And the light vanished away, but not the longing of the Dryad. She trembled in the wild fever of expectation.

“I shall go there!” she cried, rejoicingly. “Life is beginning and swells like a cloud; nobody knows whither it is hastening.”

•  •  •

When the grey dawn arose and the moon turned pale and the clouds were tinted red, the hour of fulfilment struck, and the promise was redeemed.

People came with spades and poles; they dug round the roots of the tree, deep and deeper, right under it. A wagon was brought out, drawn by many horses, and the tree was lifted up, with its roots and the lumps of earth that adhered to them; matting was placed around the roots, as though the tree had its feet in a warm bag. And now the tree was lifted on the wagon and secured with chains. The journey began—the journey to Paris. There the tree was to grow as an ornament to the city of French glory.

The twigs and the leaves of the chestnut tree trembled in the first moments of its being moved; and the Dryad trembled in the pleasurable feeling of expectation.

“Away! away!” it sounded in every beat of her pulse. “Away! away” sounded in words that flew trembling along. The Dryad forgot to bid farewell to the regions of home; she thought not of the waving grass and of the innocent daisies, which had looked up to her as to a great lady, a young Princess playing at being a shepherdess out in the open air.

The chestnut tree stood upon the wagon, and nodded his branches; whether this meant “farewell” or “forward,” the Dryad knew not; she dreamed only of the marvellous new things, that seemed yet so familiar, and that were to unfold themselves before her. No child’s heart rejoicing in innocence—no heart whose blood danced with passion—had set out on the journey to Paris more full of expectation than she.

Her “farewell” sounded in the words “Away! away!”

The wheels turned; the distant approached; the present vanished. The region was changed, even as the clouds change. New vineyards, forests, villages, villas appeared—came nearer—vanished!

The chestnut tree moved forward, and the Dryad went with it. Steam-engine after steam-engine rushed past, sending up into the air vaporous clouds, that formed figures which told of Paris, whence they came, and whither the Dryad was going.

Everything around knew it, and must know where she was bound. It seemed to her as if every tree she passed stretched out its leaves towards her, with the prayer—“Take me with you! take me with you!” for every tree enclosed a longing Dryad.

What changes during this flight! Houses seemed to be rising out of the earth—more and more—thicker and thicker. The chimneys rose like flower-pots ranged side by side, or in rows one above the other, on the roofs. Great inscriptions in letters a yard long, and figures in various colours, covering the walls from cornice to basement, came brightly out.

“Where does Paris begin, and when shall I be there?” asked the Dryad.

The crowd of people grew; the tumult and the bustle increased; carriage followed upon carriage; people on foot and people on horseback were mingled together; all around were shops on shops, music and song, crying and talking.

The Dryad, in her tree, was now in the midst of Paris. The great heavy wagon all at once stopped on a little square planted with trees. The high houses around had all of them balconies to the windows, from which the inhabitants looked down upon the young fresh chestnut tree, which was coming to be planted here as a substitute for the dead tree that lay stretched on the ground.

The passers-by stood still and smiled in admiration of its pure vernal freshness. The older trees, whose buds were still closed, whispered with their waving branches, “Welcome! welcome!” The fountain, throwing its jet of water high up in the air, to let it fall again in the wide stone basin, told the wind to sprinkle the newcomer with pearly drops, as if it wished to give him a refreshing draught to welcome him.

The Dryad felt how her tree was being lifted from the wagon to be placed in the spot where it was to stand. The roots were covered with earth, and fresh turf was laid on top. Blooming shrubs and flowers in pots were ranged around; and thus a little garden arose in the square.

The tree that had been killed by the fumes of gas, the steam of kitchens, and the bad air of the city, was put upon the wagon and driven away. The passers-by looked on. Children and old men sat upon the bench, and looked at the green tree. And we who are telling this story stood upon a balcony, and looked down upon the green spring sight that had been brought in from the fresh country air, and said, what the old clergyman would have said, “Poor Dryad!”

“I am happy! I am happy!” the Dryad cried, rejoicing; “and yet I cannot realize, cannot describe what I feel. Everything is as I fancied it, and yet not quite as I expected.”

The houses stood there, so lofty, so close! The sunlight shone on only one of the walls, and that one was stuck over with bills and placards, before which the people stood still; and this made a crowd.

Carriages rushed past, carriages rolled past; light ones and heavy ones mingled together. Omnibuses, those over-crowded moving houses, came rattling by; horsemen galloped among them; even carts and wagons asserted their rights.

The Dryad asked herself if these high-grown houses, which stood so close around her, would not remove and take other shapes, like the clouds in the sky, and draw aside, so that she might cast a glance into Paris, and over it. Notre Dame must show itself, the Vendôme Column, and the wondrous building which had called and was still calling so many strangers to the city.

But the houses did not stir from their places. It was still daylight when the lamps were lit. The gas-jets gleamed from the shops, and shone even into the branches of the trees, so that it was like sunlight in summer. The stars above made their appearance, the same to which the Dryad had looked up in her home. She thought she felt a clear pure stream of air which went forth from them. She felt herself lifted up and strengthened, and felt an increased power of seeing through every leaf and through every fibre of the root. Amid all the noise and the turmoil, the colours and the lights, she knew herself watched by kindly eyes.

From the side streets sounded the merry notes of fiddles and wind instruments. Up! to the dance, to the dance! to jollity and pleasure! that was their invitation. Such music it was, that horses, carriages, trees, and houses would have danced, if they had known how. they could dance. An intoxicating joy arose in the Dryad’s breast.

“How glorious, how splendid it is!” she cried, rejoicingly. “Now I am in Paris!”

•  •  •

The next day that dawned, the next night that fell, offered the same spectacle, similar bustle, similar life; changing, indeed, yet always the same; and thus it went on through the sequence of days.

“Now I know every tree, every flower on the square here! I know every house, every balcony, every shop in this narrow cut-off corner, where I am denied the sight of this great mighty city. Where are the triumphal arches, the Boulevards, the wondrous building of the world? I see nothing of all this. As if shut up in a cage, I stand among the high houses, which I now know by heart, with their inscriptions, signs, and placards; all the painted confectionery, that is no longer to my taste. Where are all the things of which I heard, for which I longed, and for whose sake I wanted to come hither? what have I seized, found, won? I feel the same longing I felt before; I feel that there is a life I should wish to grasp and to experience. I must go out into the ranks of living men, and mingle among them. I must fly about like a bird. I must see and feel, and become human altogether. I must enjoy the one half-day, instead of vegetating for years in every-day sameness and weariness, in which I become ill, and at last sink and disappear like the dew on the meadows. I will gleam like the cloud, gleam in the sunshine of life, look out over the whole like the cloud, and pass away like it, no one knoweth whither.”

Thus sighed the Dryad; and she prayed:

“Take from me the years that were destined for me, and give me but half of the life of the ephemeral fly! Deliver me from my prison! Give me human life, human happiness, only a short span, only the one night, if it cannot be otherwise; and then punish me for my wish to live, my longing for life! Strike me out of thy list. Let my shell, the fresh young tree, wither, or be hewn down, and burned to ashes, and scattered to all the winds!”

A rustling went through the leaves of the tree; there was a trembling in each of the leaves; it seemed as if fire streamed through it. A gust of wind shook its green crown, and from the midst of that crown a female figure came forth. In the same moment she was sitting beneath the brightly-illuminated leafy branches, young and beautiful to behold, like poor Mary, to whom the clergyman had said, “The great city will be thy ruin.”

•  •  •

The Dryad sat at the foot of the tree—at her house door, which she had locked, and whose key she had thrown away. So young! so fair! The stars saw her, and blinked at her. The gas-lamps saw her, and gleamed and beckoned to her. How delicate she was, and yet how blooming!—a child, and yet a grown maiden! Her dress was fine as silk, green as the freshly-opened leaves on the crown of the tree; in her nut-brown hair clung a half-opened chestnut blossom. She looked like the Goddess of Spring.

For one short minute she sat motionless; then she sprang up, and, light as a gazelle, she hurried away. She ran and sprang like the reflection from the mirror that, carried by the sunshine, is cast, now here, now there. Could anyone have followed her with his eyes, he would have seen how marvellously her dress and her form changed, according to the nature of the house or the place whose light happened to shine upon her.

She reached the Boulevards. Here a sea of light streamed forth from the gas-flames of the lamps, the shops and the cafés. Here stood in a row young and slender trees, each of which concealed its Dryad, and gave shade from the artificial sunlight. The whole vast pavement was one great festive hall, where covered tables stood laden with refreshments of all kinds, from champagne and Chartreuse down to coffee and beer. Here was a display of flowers, statues, books, and coloured fabrics.

From the crowd close by the lofty houses she looked forth over the terrific stream beyond the rows of trees. Yonder heaved a stream of rolling carriages, cabriolets, coaches, omnibuses, cabs, and among them riding gentlemen and marching troops. To cross to the opposite shore was an undertaking fraught with danger to life and limb. Now lanterns shed their radiance abroad; now the gas had the upper hand; suddenly a rocket rises! Whence? Whither?

Here are sounds of soft Italian melodies; yonder, Spanish songs are sung, accompanied by the rattle of the castanets; but strongest of all, and predominating over the rest, the street-organ tunes of the moment, the exciting “Can-Can” music, which Orpheus never knew, and which was never heard by the “Belle Helénè.” Even the barrow was tempted to hop upon one of its wheels.

The Dryad danced, floated, flew, changing her colour every moment, like a humming-bird in the sunshine; each house, with the world belonging to it, gave her its own reflections.

As the glowing lotus-flower, torn from its stem, is carried away by the stream, so the Dryad drifted along. Whenever she paused, she was another being, so that none was able to follow her, to recognize her, or to look more closely at her.

Like cloud-pictures, all things flew by her. She looked into a thousand faces, but not one was familiar to her; she saw not a single form from home. Two bright eyes had remained in her memory. She thought of Mary, poor Mary, the ragged merry child, who wore the red flowers in her black hair. Mary was now here, in the world-city, rich and magnificent as in that day when she drove past the house of the old clergyman, the Dryad’s tree, and the old oak. Here she was certainly living, in the deafening tumult. Perhaps she had just stepped out of one of the gorgeous carriages in waiting. Handsome equipages, with coachmen in gold braid and footmen in silken hose, drove up. The people who alighted from them were all richly-dressed ladies. They went through the opened gate, and ascended the broad staircase that led to a building resting on marble pillars. Was this building, perhaps, the wonder of the world? There Mary would certainly be found.

“Sancta Maria!” resounded from the interior. Incense floated through the lofty painted and gilded aisles, where a solemn twilight reigned.

It was the Church of the Madeleine.

Clad in black garments of the most costly fabrics, fashioned according to the latest mode, the rich feminine world of Paris glided across the shining pavement. Coats of arms were engraved on silver shields on the velvet-bound prayer-books, and embroidered in the corners of perfumed handkerchiefs bordered with Brussels lace. A few of the ladies were kneeling in silent prayer before the altars; others resorted to the confessionals.

Anxiety and fear took possession of the Dryad; she felt as if she had entered a place where she had no right to be. Here was the abode of silence, the hall of secrets. Everything was said in whispers, every word was a mystery.

The Dryad saw herself enveloped in lace and silk, like the women of wealth and of high birth around her. Had, perhaps, every one of them a longing in her breast, like the Dryad?

A deep, painful sigh was heard. Did it escape from some confessional in a distant corner, or from the bosom of the Dryad? She drew the veil closer around her; she breathed incense, and not the fresh air. Here was not the abiding-place of her longing.

Away! away—a hastening without rest. The ephemeral fly knows not repose, for her existence is flight.

•  •  •

She was out again among the gas candelabra, by a magnificent fountain.

“All its streaming waters are not able to wash out the innocent blood that was spilt here.”

Such were the words spoken. Strangers stood around, carrying on a lively conversation, such as no one would have dared to carry on in the gorgeous hall of secrets whence the Dryad came.

A heavy stone slab was turned and then lifted. She did not understand why. She saw an opening that led into the depths below. The strangers stepped down, leaving the starlit air and the cheerful life of the upper world behind them.

“I am afraid,” said one of the women who stood around, to her husband, “I cannot venture to go down, nor do I care for the wonders down yonder. You had better stay here with me.”

“Indeed, and travel home,” said the man, “and quit Paris without having seen the most wonderful thing of all—the real wonder of the present period, created by the power and resolution of one man!”

“I will not go down for all that,” was the reply.

“The wonder of the present time,” it had been called. The Dryad had heard and had understood it. The goal of her ardent longing had thus been reached, and here was the entrance to it. Down into the depths below Paris? She had not thought of such a thing; but now she heard it said, and saw the strangers descending, and went after them.

The staircase was of cast iron, spiral, broad and easy. Below there burned a lamp, and farther down, another. They stood in a labyrinth of endless halls and arched passages, all communicating with each other. All the streets and lanes of Paris were to be seen here again, as in a dim reflection. The names were painted up; and every, house above had its number down here also, and struck its roots under the macadamised quays of a broad canal, in which the muddy water flowed onward. Over it the fresh streaming water was carried on arches; and quite at the top hung the tangled net of gas-pipes and telegraph-wires.

In the distance lamps gleamed, like a reflection from the world-city above. Every now and then a dull rumbling was heard. This came from the heavy wagons rolling over the entrance bridges.

Whither had the Dryad come?

You have, no doubt, heard of the catacombs? Now they are vanishing points in that new underground world—that wonder of the present day—the sewers of Paris. The Dryad was there, and not in the world’s Exhibition in the Champ de Mars.

She heard exclamations of wonder and admiration.

“From here go forth health and life for thousands upon thousands up yonder! Our time is the time of progress, with its manifold blessings.”

Such was the opinion and the speech of men; but not of those creatures who had been born here, and who built and dwelt here: the rats, who squeaked from the rifts in a piece of old wall, so clearly, distinctly and intelligibly to the Dryad.

A big old Father-Rat, with his tail bitten off, was relieving his feelings in loud squeaks; and his family gave their tribute of concurrence to every word he said:

“I am disgusted with this man-mewing,” he cried—“with these outbursts of ignorance. A fine magnificence, truly! all made up of gas and petroleum! I can’t eat such stuff as that. Everything here is so fine and bright now, that one’s ashamed of oneself, without exactly knowing why. Ah, if we only lived in the days of tallow candles! and it does not lie so very far behind us. That was a romantic time, as one may say.”

“What are you talking of there?” asked the Dryad. “I have never seen you before. What is it you are talking about?”

“Of the glorious days that are gone,” said the Rat—“of the happy time of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Then it was a great thing to get down here. That was a rat’s nest quite different from Paris. Mother Plague used to live here then; she killed people, but never rats. Robbers and smugglers could breathe freely here. Here was the meeting-place of the most interesting personages, whom one now only gets to see in the theatres where they act melodrama, up above. The time of romance is gone even in our rat’s nest; and here also fresh air and petroleum have broken in.”

A carriage stopped, a kind of open omnibus, drawn by swift horses. The company mounted and drove away along the Boulevard de Sebastopol, that is to say, the underground boulevard, over which the well-known crowded street of that name extended.

The carriage disappeared in the twilight; the Dryad disappeared, lifted to the cheerful freshness above. Here, and not below in the vaulted passages, filled with heavy air, the wonder work must be found which she was to seek in her short lifetime. It must gleam brighter than all the gas-flames, stronger than the moon that was just gliding past.

Yes, certainly! she saw it yonder in the distance, it gleamed before her, and twinkled and glittered like the evening star in the sky.

•  •  •

She saw a glittering portal open, that led to a little garden, where all was brightness and dance music. Coloured lamps surrounded little lakes, in which were water-plants of coloured metal, from whose flowers jets of water spurted up. Beautiful weeping willows, real products of spring, hung their fresh branches over these lakes like a fresh, green, transparent, and yet screening veil. In the bushes burned an open fire, throwing a red twilight over the quiet huts of branches, into which the sounds of music penetrated—an ear tickling, intoxicating music, that sent the blood coursing through the veins.

Beautiful girls in festive attire, with pleasant smiles on their lips, and the light spirit of youth in their hearts—“Marys” with roses in their hair, but without carriage and postilion—flitted to and fro in the wild dance. Where were the heads, where the feet? As if bitten by the Tarantella, they sprang, laughed, rejoiced, as if in their ecstasies they were going to embrace all the world.

The Dryad felt herself torn with them into the whirl of the dance. Round her delicate foot clung the silken boot, chestnut brown in colour, like the ribbon that floated from her hair down upon her bare shoulders. The green silk dress waved in large folds, but did not entirely hide the pretty foot and ankle.

Had she come to the enchanted Garden of Armida? What was this place called? The name glittered in gas-jets over the entrance.

“Mabille”

The soaring of rockets, the splashing of fountains, and the popping of champagne corks accompanied the wild bacchantic dance. Over the whole glided the moon through the air, serene but with a somewhat wry face.

A wild joviality seemed to rush through the Dryad, as though she were intoxicated with opium. Her eyes spoke, her lips spoke, but the sound of violins and of flutes drowned the sound of her voice. Her partner whispered words to her which she did not understand, nor do we understand them. He stretched out his arms to draw her to him, but he embraced only the empty air.

The Dryad had been carried away, like a rose-leaf on the wind. Before her she saw a flame in the air, a flashing light high up on a tower. The beacon light shone from the goal of her longing, shone from the red lighthouse tower of the Fata Morgana of the Champ de Mars. Thither she was carried by the wind. She circled round the tower; the workmen thought it was a butterfly that had come too early, and that now sank down dying.

•  •  •

The moon shone bright, gas-lamps spread light around, through the halls, over the all-world’s buildings scattered about, over the rose-hills and the rocks produced by human ingenuity, from which waterfalls, driven by the power of “Master Bloodless,” fell down. The caverns of the sea, the depths of the lakes, the kingdom of the fishes were opened here. Men walked as in the depths of the deep pond, and held converse with the sea, in the diving-bell of glass. The water pressed against the strong glass walls above and on every side. The polyps, eel-like living creatures, had fastened themselves to the bottom, and stretched out arms, fathoms long, for prey. A big turbot was making himself broad in front, quietly enough, but not without casting some suspicious sideways glances. A crab clambered over him, looking like a gigantic spider, while the shrimps wandered about in restless haste, like the butterflies and moths of the sea.

In the fresh water grew water-lilies, sedges, and reeds; the gold-fishes stood up below in rank and file, all turning their heads one way, that the streaming water might flow into their mouths. Fat carps stared at the glass wall with stupid eyes. They knew that they were here to be exhibited, and that they had made the somewhat toilsome journey hither in tubs filled with water; and they thought with dismay of the land-sickness from which they had suffered so cruelly on the railway, just as people are seasick on the sea.

They had come to see the Exhibition, and now contemplated it from their own fresh or salt-water box. They looked attentively at the crowds of people who passed by them early and late. All the nations in the world, they thought, had made an exhibition of their inhabitants, for the edification of the soles and haddocks, pike and carp, that they might give their opinions upon the different kinds.

“They are shellfish!” said a little slimy Whiting. “They change their shells two or three times a day, and they emit sounds which they call speaking. We don’t put on scales, and we make ourselves understood in an easier way, simply by twitching the corners of our mouths and staring with our eyes. We have a great many advantages over mankind.”

“But they have learned swimming from us,” remarked a well-educated Codling. “You must know I come from the great sea outside. In the hot time of the year the people yonder go into the water; first they take off their shells, and then they swim. They have learned from the frogs to kick out with their hind legs, and row with their forepaws. But they cannot keep it up long. They want to be like us, but they cannot come up to us. Poor people!”

And the fishes stared. They thought that the whole swarm of people whom they had seen in the bright daylight were still moving around them; they were certain they still saw the same forms that had first caught their attention.

A pretty Barbel, with spotted skin, and an enviably round back, declared that the “human fry” were still there.

“I can see a well set-up human figure quite well,” said the Barbel. “She was called ‘contumacious lady,’ or something of that kind. She had a mouth and staring eyes, like ours, and a great balloon at the back of her head, and something like a shut-up umbrella in front; there were a lot of dangling bits of seaweed hanging about her. She ought to take all the rubbish off, and go as we do; then she would look something like a respectable barbel, so far as it is possible for a human person to look like one!”

“What’s become of that one whom they dragged away with the hook? He sat on a wheel-chair, and had paper, and pen, and ink, and wrote down everything. They called him a ‘writer.’”

“They’re going about with him still,” said a hoary old maid of a Carp, who carried her misfortune about with her, so that she was quite hoarse. In her youth she had once swallowed a hook, and still swam patiently about with it in her throat. “A writer? That means, as we fishes describe it, a kind of cuttle or ink-fish among men.”

Thus the fishes gossiped in their own way; but in the artificial water-grotto the labourers were busy; they were obliged to take advantage of the hours of night to get their work done by daybreak. They accompanied with blows of their hammers and with songs the parting words of the vanishing Dryad.

“So, at any rate, I have seen you, you pretty goldfish,” she said. “Yes, I know you;” and she waved her hand to them. “I have known about you a long time in my home; the swallow told me about you. How beautiful you are! how delicate and shining! I should like to kiss every one of you. You others, also. I know you all; but you do not know me.”

The fishes stared out into the twilight. They did not understand a word of it.

The Dryad was there no longer. She had been a long time in the open air, where the different countries—the country of black bread, the codfish coast, the kingdom of Russia leather, and the banks of eau-de-Cologne, and the gardens of rose oil—exhaled their perfumes from the world-wonder flower.

•  •  •

When, after a ball, we drive home half asleep and half awake, the melodies still sound plainly in our ears; we hear them, and could sing them all from memory. When the eye of the murdered man closes, the picture of what it saw last clings to it for a time like a photographic picture.

So it was likewise here. The bustling life of day had not yet disappeared in the quiet night. The Dryad had seen it; she knew, thus it will be repeated tomorrow.

The Dryad stood among the fragrant roses, and thought she knew them, and had seen them in her own home. She also saw red pomegranate flowers, like those that little Mary had worn in her dark hair.

Remembrances from the home of her childhood flashed through her thoughts; her eyes eagerly drank in the prospect around, and feverish restlessness chased her through the wonder-filled halls.

•  •  •

A weariness that increased continually, took possession of her. She felt a longing to rest on the soft Oriental carpets within, or to lean against the weeping willow without by the clear water. But for the ephemeral fly there was no rest. In a few moments the day had completed its circle.

Her thoughts trembled, her limbs trembled, she sank down on the grass by the rippling water.

“Thou wilt ever spring living from the earth,” she said mournfully. “Moisten my tongue—bring me a refreshing draught.”

“I am no living water,” was the answer. “I only spring upward when the machine wills it.”

“Give me something of thy freshness, thou green grass,” implored the Dryad; “give me one of thy fragrant flowers.”

“We must die if we are torn from our stalks,” replied the Flowers and the Grass.

“Give me a kiss, thou fresh stream of air—only a single life-kiss.”

“Soon the sun will kiss the clouds red,” answered the Wind; “then thou wilt be among the dead—blown away, as all the splendour here will be blown away before the year shall have ended. Then I can play again with the light loose sand on the place here, and whirl the dust over the land and through the air. All is dust!”

The Dryad felt a terror like a woman who in the bath has cut an artery, but is filled again with the love of life, even while she is bleeding to death. She raised herself, tottered forward a few steps, and sank down again at the entrance to a little church. The gate stood open, candles were burning upon the altar, and the organ pealed.

What music! Such notes the Dryad had never yet heard; and yet it seemed to her as if she recognized a number of well-known voices among them. They came deep from the heart of all creation. She thought she heard the stories of the old clergyman, of great deeds, and of the celebrated names, and of the gifts that the creatures of God must bestow upon posterity, if they would live on in the world.

The tones of the organ swelled, and in their song there sounded these words:

“Thy wishing and thy longing have torn thee, with thy roots, from the place which God appointed for thee. That was thy destruction, thou poor Dryad!”

The notes became soft and gentle, and seemed to weep and die away in tears.

In the sky the clouds showed themselves with a ruddy gleam. The Wind sighed:

“Pass away, ye dead! now the sun is going to rise!”

The first ray fell on the Dryad. Her form was irradiated in changing colours, like the soap-bubble when it is bursting and becomes a drop of water; like a tear that falls and passes away like a vapour.

Poor Dryad! Only a dew-drop, only a tear, poured upon the earth, and vanished away!

•  •  •

The sun shone upon the Champ de Mars; Fata Morgana shone over great Paris, over the little square, with a few trees and a prattling fountain; over the high houses, where the chestnut tree stood, its branches hanging, its leaves dried up—the tree that only yesterday stood erect and fresh, resembling spring itself. “Now it is dead,” said people; the Dryad had left it, passed away like the clouds, none knows whither.

And low upon the earth there lay a withered, broken chestnut-flower. The holy water of the church could not recall it to life again. Man’s foot soon stepped upon it, and crushed it in the dust

•  •  •

All this actually happened, we saw it ourselves at the Paris Exhibition in 1867—in our time, in the great and wonderful time of Fairy-tale.

[ 1868 ]

Elder-tree Mother

—

There was once a little boy who had caught cold: he had gone out and got wet feet. Nobody had the least idea how he had got them wet; the weather was quite dry. His mother undressed him, put him to bed, and ordered the teapot to be brought in that she might make him a good cup of tea from elder-tree blossoms, which is so warming. At the same time the kind-hearted old man who lived by himself in the upper story of the house came in. He led a lonely life, for he had no wife and children; but he loved the children of others very much, and he could tell so many fairy tales and stories that it was a pleasure to hear him.

“Now, drink your tea,” said the mother; “perhaps you will hear a story.”

“Yes, if I only knew a fresh one,” said the old man, and nodded smilingly. “But how did the little fellow get his wet feet?” he then asked.

“Yes, how indeed!” said the mother. “That, nobody can understand.”

“Will you tell me a story?” asked the boy.

“Yes, if you can tell me as nearly as possible how deep is the gutter in the little street where you go to school.”

“Just half as high as my top-boots,” replied the boy; “but then I must stand in the deepest holes.”

“There, now we know where you got your wet feet,” said the old man. “I ought by rights to tell you a story now, but I do not know any more.”

“You can make one up,” said the little boy. “Mother says everything you look at you can turn into a fairy tale, and that you can tell a story about anything you touch.”

“That is all very well, but such tales or stories are worth nothing! No, the right ones come by themselves and knock at my forehead, saying, ‘Here I am.’”

“Will one knock soon?” asked the boy; and the mother laughed while she put elder-tree blossoms into the teapot and poured boiling water over them. “A story! A story!”

“Yes, if stories came by themselves; but they are so proud, they only come when they please. Wait,” he said suddenly, “there is one. Look at the teapot; there is a story in it now.”

And the little boy looked at the teapot; the lid rose up gradually, the elder-tree blossoms sprang forth one by one, fresh and white; long boughs came forth; even out of the spout they grew up in all directions, and formed a bush—nay, a large elder tree, which stretched its branches up to the bed and pushed the curtains aside; and there were so many blossoms and such a sweet fragrance! In the midst of the tree sat a kindly looking old woman with a strange dress: it was as green as the leaves, and trimmed with large white elder-blossoms, so that it was difficult to say whether it was real cloth or the leaves and blossoms of the elder tree.

“What is this woman’s name?” asked the little boy.

“Well, the Romans and Greeks used to call her a Dryad,” said the old man; “but we do not understand that. Out in the sailors’ quarter they give her a better name: there she is called Elder-tree Mother. It is to her you must pay attention now and look at the beautiful elder tree.

“Just such a large tree, covered with flowers, stands out at Nyboder. It grew in the corner of a poor little yard; under this tree sat two old people one afternoon in the beautiful sunshine. He was an old, old sailor and she his old, old wife; they had already great-grandchildren, and were soon to celebrate their golden wedding, [35] but they could not remember the date, and the Elder-tree Mother was sitting in the tree and looked pleased, just as she does here. ‘I know very well when the golden wedding is,’ she said; but they did not hear it—they were talking of bygone days.

“‘Well, do you remember?’ said the old sailor, ‘when we were quite small and used to run about and play—it was in the very same yard where we now are—we used to put little branches into the ground and make a garden.’

“‘Yes,’ said the old woman, ‘I remember it very well; we used to water the branches, and one of them, an elder-tree branch, took root, and grew and became the large tree under which we are now sitting as old people.’

“‘Certainly, you are right,’ he said; ‘and over there in the corner stood a large water-tub. There I used to sail my boat, which I had cut out myself—how well it sailed. But soon I had to sail somewhere else.’

“‘But first we went to school to learn something,’ she said, ‘and then we were confirmed. We both cried on that day, but in the afternoon we went hand in hand up the Round Tower and looked out upon the world over Copenhagen and the sea; then we walked to Fredericksberg, where the King and Queen were sailing about in their magnificent boat on the canals.’

“‘But soon I had to sail about somewhere else, and for many years I was travelling about far away from home.’

“‘And I often cried for you, for I was afraid you were dead and gone and lying rocked by the waves at the bottom of the sea. Many a time I got up in the night to look if the weathercock had turned; it turned often, but you did not return. I remember one day clearly: the rain was pouring down in torrents; the dustman had come to the house where I was in service; I went down with the dust-bin and stood for a moment in the doorway. What dreadful weather it was! As I stood there the postman came up and gave me a letter; it was from you. How it had travelled about! I tore it open and read it; I cried and laughed at the same time, I was so happy! There it was written that you were staying in the hot countries, where the coffee grows. They must be marvellous countries. You said a great deal about them, and I read it all while the rain was pouring down and I was standing there with the dust-bin. Then suddenly someone put his arm round my waist’

“‘Yes, and you gave him a hearty smack on the cheek!’ said the old man.

“‘I did not know that it was you—you had come as quickly as your letter; and you looked so handsome, and so you do still. You had a large yellow silk handkerchief in your pocket and a shining hat on. You were so fine! What weather it was—what a horrible state the weather was in!’

“‘Then we got married,’ he said. ‘Do you remember how we got our first boy, and then Mary and Niels and Peter and Hans Christian?’

“‘Oh, yes; and now they have all grown up, and have become useful members of society, and everybody likes them.’

“‘And their children have had little ones too,’ said the old sailor. ‘Yes, those great-grandchildren, they are of the right sort. If I am not mistaken, our wedding took place at this season of the year.’

“‘Yes, today is your golden wedding-day,’ said the little Elder-tree Mother, stretching her head down between the two old people, who thought that she was their neighbour who was nodding to them; they looked at each other and held each other’s hands. Soon afterwards the children and grandchildren came, for they knew very well that it was the golden wedding-day. They had already wished them joy and happiness in the morning, but the old people had forgotten it, although they remembered things so well that had happened many years ago. The elder tree smelled sweetly, and the setting sun shone on the faces of the two old people, so that they looked quite rosy. The youngest of the grandchildren danced round them, and cried merrily that there would be a feast in the evening, for they were to have hot potatoes. And the Elder-tree Mother nodded in the tree and cried ‘Hooray’ with the others.”

“But that was not a fairy tale,” said the little boy who had listened to it.

“Yes, it is, if you understand it,” said the old man who told the story. “But let us ask Elder-tree Mother about it.”

“That was not a fairy tale,” said the little Elder-tree Mother; “but now it comes! Out of real life come the most wonderful fairy tales; for otherwise my beautiful elder-bush could not have sprung from the teapot.”

And then she took the little boy out of bed and held him to her bosom. The elder branches, full of blossoms, closed over them; it was as if they sat in a thick leafy bower, and away it flew with them through the air; it was beautiful beyond all description. Elder-tree Mother had suddenly become a charming young girl, but her dress was still of the same green material, covered with white blossoms as Elder-tree Mother had worn; she had a real elder-blossom on her bosom, and a wreath of elder-flowers on her curly yellow hair. Her eyes were so large and so blue that it was wonderful to look at them. She and the boy kissed each other, and then they became the same age and felt the same joys. They walked hand in hand out of the bower, and now stood in their beautiful flower-garden at home. Near the green lawn, their father’s walking-stick was tied to a post. There was life in this stick for the little ones, for as soon as they seated themselves upon it the polished knob turned into a neighing horse’s head, a long black mane was fluttering in the wind, and four strong slender legs grew out. The animal was fiery and spirited; they galloped round the lawn. “Hooray! now we’re going to ride many miles away!” said the boy; “we’ll ride to the nobleman’s estate where we were last year.” And they rode round the lawn again, and the little girl, who, as we know, was no other than Elder-tree Mother, kept crying out, “Now we are in the country! Do you see the farmhouse there, with the large baking-stove which projects like a gigantic egg out of the wall into the road? The elder tree spreads its branches over it, and the cock struts about and scratches for the hens. Look how proudly he struts! Now we are near the church; it stands on a high hill, under the spreading oak trees; one of them is half dead! Now we are at the smithy, where the fire roars and the half-naked men beat with their hammers, so that the sparks fly far and wide. Let’s be off to the beautiful farm!” And they passed by everything the little girl, who was sitting behind on the stick, described, and the boy saw it, and yet they only went round the lawn. Then they played in a side-walk, and marked out a little garden on the ground; she took elder-blossoms out of her hair and planted them, and they grew exactly like those the old people planted when they were children, as we have heard before. They walked about hand in hand, just as the old couple had done when they were little, but they did not go to the Round Tower nor to the Fredericksberg garden. No; the little girl seized the boy round the waist, and then they flew far into the country. It was spring, and it became summer; it was autumn, and it became winter; and thousands of pictures reflected themselves in the boy’s eyes and heart, and the little girl always sang again, “You will never forget that!” And during their whole flight the elder tree smelled so sweetly; he noticed the roses and the fresh beeches, but the elder tree smelled much stronger, for its flowers hung near the little girl’s heart, against which the boy often rested his head during the flight.

“It is beautiful here in spring,” said the little girl, and they were again in the green beechwood, where the thyme breathed forth sweet fragrance at their feet, and the pink anemones looked lovely in the green moss. “Oh! that it was always spring in the fragrant beechwood!”

“Here it is beautiful in summer!” she said, and they passed by old castles of the age of chivalry. The high walls and indented gables were reflected in the water of the canals, on which swans were swimming and peering into the old shady avenues. The corn waved in the fields like a yellow sea. Red and yellow flowers grew in the ditches, wild hops and convolvulus in full bloom in the hedges. In the evening the moon rose, large and round, and the hayricks in the meadows smelled sweet. “One can never forget it!”

“Here it is beautiful in autumn!” said the little girl, and the sky seemed twice as high and blue, while the wood shone with crimson, green, and gold. The hounds were running, flocks of wild fowl flew screaming over the barrows, while the bramble bushes twined round the old stones. The dark blue sea was covered with white-sailed ships, and in the barns sat old women, girls, and children picking hops into a large tub; the young ones sang songs, and the old people told fairy tales about goblins and trolls. It could not be more pleasant anywhere.

“Here it’s beautiful in winter!” said the little girl, and all the trees were covered with hoar-frost, so that they looked like white coral. The snow creaked under one’s feet, as if one had new boots on. One shooting star after another crossed the sky. In the room, the Christmas tree was lit, and there were presents and merriment. In the peasant’s cottage the violin sounded, and games were played for slices of apples; even the poorest child said, “It is beautiful in winter!”

And indeed it was beautiful! And the little girl showed everything to the boy, and the elder tree continued to breathe forth sweet perfume, while the red flag with the white cross was streaming in the wind; it was the flag under which the old sailor had served. The boy became a youth; he was to go out into the wide world, far away to the countries where the coffee grows. But at parting the little girl took an elder-blossom from her breast and gave it to him as a keepsake. He placed it in his prayer-book, and when he opened it in distant lands it was always at the place where the flower of remembrance was lying; and the more he looked at it the fresher it became, so that he could almost smell the fragrance of the woods at home. He distinctly saw the little girl, with her bright blue eyes, peeping out from behind the petals, and heard her whispering, “Here it is beautiful in spring, in summer, in autumn, and in winter,” and hundreds of pictures passed through his mind.

Thus many years rolled by. He had now become an old man, and was sitting, with his old wife, under an elder tree in full bloom. They held each other by the hand exactly as the great-grandfather and the great-grandmother had done, and, like them, they talked about bygone days and of their golden wedding. The little girl with the blue eyes and elder-blossoms in her hair was sitting high up in the tree, and nodded to them, saying, “Today is the golden wedding!” And then she took two flowers out of her wreath and kissed them. They glittered at first like silver, then like gold, and when she placed them on the heads of the old people each flower became a golden crown. There they both sat like a king and queen under the sweet-smelling tree, which looked exactly like an elder tree, and he told his wife the story of the elder-tree mother as it had been told him when he was a little boy. They were both of opinion that the story contained many points like their own, and these similarities they liked best.

“Yes, so it is,” said the little girl in the tree. “Some call me Elder-tree Mother; others a Dryad; but my real name is ‘Remembrance.’ It is I who sit in the tree which grows and grows. I can remember things and tell stories! But let’s see if you have still got your flower.”

And the old man opened his prayer-book; the elder-blossom was still in it, and as fresh as if it had only just been put in. Remembrance nodded, and the two old people, with the golden crowns on their heads, sat in the glowing evening sun. They closed their eyes and—and—

Well, now the story is ended! The little boy in bed did not know whether he had dreamed it or heard it told. The teapot stood on the table, but no elder tree was growing out of it, and the old man who had told the story was on the point of leaving the room, and he did go out.

“How beautiful it was!” said the little boy. “Mother, I have been to warm countries!”

“I believe you,” said the mother; “if one takes two cups of hot elder-tea it is quite natural that one gets into warm countries!” And she covered him up well, so that he might not take cold. “You have slept soundly while I was arguing with the old man whether it was a story or a fairy tale!”

“And what has become of Elder-tree Mother?” asked the boy.

“She is in the teapot,” said the mother; “and there she may remain.”

[ 1845 ]

The Daisy

—

Now listen! In the country, close by the highroad, stood a farmhouse; perhaps you have passed by and seen it yourself. There was a little flower garden with a painted wooden fence in front of it; close by was a ditch, on its fresh green bank grew a little Daisy; the sun shone as warmly and brightly upon it as on the magnificent garden flowers, and therefore it thrived well. One morning it had quite opened, and its little snow-white petals stood round the yellow centre, like the rays of the sun. It did not mind that nobody saw it in the grass, and that it was a poor despised flower; on the contrary, it was quite happy, and turned towards the sun, looking upward and listening to the song of the Lark high up in the air.

The little Daisy was as happy as if the day had been a great holiday, but it was only Monday. All the children were at school, and while they were sitting at their desks and learning their lessons, it sat on its thin green stalk and learned from the sun and from its surroundings how kind God is, and it rejoiced that the song of the little Lark expressed so sweetly and distinctly its own feelings. With a sort of reverence the Daisy looked up to the bird that could fly and sing, but it did not feel envious. “I can see and hear,” it thought; “the sun shines upon me, and the forest kisses me. How rich I am!”

In the garden close by grew many large and magnificent flowers, and, strange to say, the less fragrance they had the haughtier and prouder they were. The peonies puffed themselves up in order to be larger than the roses, but size is not everything! The tulips had the finest colours, and they knew it well, too, for they were standing bolt upright like candles, that one might see them the better. In their pride they did not see the little Daisy, which looked over to them and thought, “How rich and beautiful they are! I am sure the pretty bird will fly down and call upon them. Thank God, that I stand so near and can at least see all the splendour.” And while the Daisy was still thinking, the Lark came flying down, crying “Tweet,” but not to the peonies and tulips—no, into the grass to the poor Daisy. Its joy was so great that it did not know what to think. The little bird hopped round it and sang, “How beautifully soft the grass is, and what a lovely little flower with its golden heart and silver dress is growing here.” The yellow centre in the Daisy did indeed look like gold, while the little petals shone as brightly as silver.

How happy the Daisy was! No one has the least idea. The bird kissed it with his beak, sang to it, and then rose again up to the blue sky. It was certainly more than a quarter of an hour before the Daisy recovered its senses. Half ashamed, yet glad at heart, it looked over to the other flowers in the garden; surely they had witnessed its pleasure and the honour that had been done to it; they understood its joy. But the tulips stood more stiffly than ever, their faces were pointed and red, because they were vexed. The peonies were sulky; it was well that they could not speak, otherwise they would have given the Daisy a good lecture. The little flower could very well see that they were ill at ease, and pitied them sincerely.

Shortly after this a girl came into the garden, with a large sharp knife. She went to the tulips and began cutting them off, one after another. “Ugh!” sighed the Daisy, “that is terrible; now they are done for.”

The girl carried the tulips away. The Daisy was glad that it was outside, and only a small flower—it felt very grateful. At sunset it folded its petals, and fell asleep, and dreamed all night of the sun and the little bird.

On the following morning, when the flower once more stretched forth its tender petals, like little arms, towards the air and light, the Daisy recognised the bird’s voice, but what it sang sounded so sad. Indeed the poor bird had good reason to be sad, for it had been caught and put into a cage close by the open window. It sang of the happy days when it could merrily fly about, of fresh green corn in the fields, and of the time when it could soar almost up to the clouds. The poor Lark was most unhappy as a prisoner in a cage. The little Daisy would have liked so much to help it, but what could be done? Indeed, that was very difficult for such a small flower to find out. It entirely forgot how beautiful everything around it was, how warmly the sun was shining, and how splendidly white its own petals were. It could only think of the poor captive bird, for which it could do nothing. Then two little boys came out of the garden; one of them had a large sharp knife, like that with which the girl had cut the tulips. They came straight towards the little Daisy, which could not understand what they wanted.

“Here is a fine piece of turf for the Lark,” said one of the boys, and began to cut out a square round the Daisy, so that it remained in the centre of the grass.

“Pluck the flower off,” said the other boy, and the Daisy trembled for fear, for to be pulled off meant death to it; and it wished so much to live, as it was to go with the square of turf to cage of the poor captive Lark.

“No, let it stay,” said the other boy, “it looks so pretty.”

And so it stayed, and was brought into the Lark’s cage. The poor bird was lamenting his lost liberty, and beating his wings against the wires; and the little Daisy could not speak or utter a consoling word, much as it would have liked to do so. So the forenoon passed.

“I have no water,” said the captive Lark, “they have all gone out, and forgotten to give me anything to drink. My throat is dry and burning. I feel as if I had fire and ice within me, and the air is so oppressive. Alas! I must die, and part with the warm sunshine, the fresh green meadows, and all the beauty that God has created.” And he thrust his beak into the piece of grass, to refresh himself a little. Then it noticed the little Daisy, and nodded to it, and kissed it with his beak and said: “You must also fade in here, poor little flower. You and the piece of grass are all they have given me in exchange for the whole world, which I enjoyed outside. Each little blade of grass shall be a green tree for me, each of your white petals a fragrant flower. Alas! you only remind me of what I have lost.”

“I wish I could console the poor Lark,” thought the Daisy. It could not move one of its leaves, but the fragrance of its delicate petals streamed forth, and was much stronger than such flowers usually have: the bird noticed it, although it was dying with thirst, and in his pain tore up the green blades of grass, but did not touch the flower.

The evening came, and nobody appeared to bring the poor bird a drop of water; he opened his beautiful wings, and fluttered about in his anguish; a faint and mournful “Tweet, tweet,” was all he could utter, then he bent his little head towards the flower, and his heart broke for want and longing. The flower could not, as on the previous evening, fold up its petals and sleep; it drooped sorrowfully.

Not until the next morning did the boys come; when they saw the dead bird, they wept bitterly—wept many tears—and dug him a nice grave, and adorned it with flowers. The bird’s body was placed in a pretty red box; they wished to bury him with royal honours. While he was alive and singing, they forgot him, and let him suffer want in the cage; now, they cried over him and covered him with flowers. The piece of turf, with the little Daisy in it, was thrown out on the dusty roadside. Nobody thought of the flower which had felt the most for the little bird, and had so greatly desired to comfort him.

[ 1838 ]

The Snowdrop
or, THE SUMMER-GOWK  [36]

—

Deep lay the snow, for it was wintertime, the air was cold, the wind sharp: but within doors all was snug and warm. And within doors lay the flower; in its bulb it lay, under earth and snow.

One day there fell rain; the drops trickled through the snow coverlet, down into the earth, and stirred against the flower-bulb, telling of the world of light above. And presently a sunbeam, pointed and slender, came piercing its way to the bulb, and tapped on it.

“Come in,” said the Flower.

“That I can’t,” said the Sunbeam: “I am not strong enough to lift the latch. I shall be strong in summer.”

“When will it be summer?” asked the Flower; and it asked this again, whenever a sunbeam pierced down to it. But summer was still far away: the ground was covered with snow, and every night there was ice on the water.

“How long it is! how long it is!” said the Flower. “I feel quite cribbed and cramped. I must stretch myself: I must raise myself: I must lift the latch and look out, and nod good-morrow to the summer; and that will be a merry time!”

And the Flower rose and strained from within, against the thin shell that had been softened by the rain, warmed by the earth and snow, and tapped upon by the sunbeam. It shot up from under the snow, with a pale-green bud on its tender stalk, and narrow thick leaves, that curled around it for a screen. The snow was cold, but glittering with light, and easy enough to push through: and here came the sunbeams with greater strength than before.

“Welcome! welcome!” sang every Sunbeam: and the Flower raised itself above the snow, up into the world of light. The sunbeams kissed and caressed it, till it fully unfolded itself, white as snow, and decked with green stripes. It bowed its head in gladness and humility.

“Beautiful flower!” sang the Sunbeams. “How fresh thou art, and pure! Thou art the first one: thou art the only one! Thou art our darling! Thou art like a bell ringing up the summer, lovely summer, over towns and fields. All snow shall melt: the cold winds be chased away: we shall reign, and all things will grow green. Then thou wilt have fellowship, the lilacs and laburnums, and last of all the roses. But thou art the first, so tender and so pure!”

This was a deep delight to the Flower. It seemed as if the air it breathed was music, and as if its leaves and stem were full of thrilling sunbeams. There it stood, so fine and fragile, and yet so vigorous, in the beauty of youth: stood in its white kirtle with green bands, and praised the summer. But summer was not yet come; clouds began to hide the sun: sharp winds blew down upon the flower.

“Thou art a little too soon,” said Wind and Weather. “We still hold sway: this thou shalt feel to thy cost! Thou shouldst have kept indoors, instead of running out here in thy finery it is not time for that yet!”

It was biting cold! The days came, and never brought a sunbeam. It was weather to freeze it to pieces, such a delicate little flower! But there was more strength in it than it knew of. It was strong in its glad faith in the summer, that must be near; for thus its own heart had foretold it, and the sunbeams had confirmed the tale. And so with patient hope it stood in its white dress, in the white snow, bowing its head when the flakes fell thick and heavy, and when icy blasts came driving over it.

“Crouch, cringe!” they howled. “Wither and starve! What doest thou here in the cold? Thou hast been lured abroad; the sunbeam hath mocked thee. Now make the best of it, thou summer-gowk!”

“Summer-gowk!” echoed the keen airs of morning.

“A summer-gowk!” shouted children, who came down into the garden; “there it stands so pretty, so beautiful: the first, the only one!”

And the words did good to the Flower; they were like warm sunbeams. In its gladness it never once noticed that it was being plucked. It lay in a child’s hand, was kissed by a child’s mouth, brought into a warm room, gazed at by kind eyes, and set in water—so strengthening, so enlivening. The Flower thought it had passed right into the middle of summer.

The daughter of the house was a pretty little lass, just confirmed, and she had a little sweetheart, also just confirmed, who was studying for his livelihood. “He shall be my summer-gowk,” said she; and took the fine flower, and laid it in a scented paper, that was written all over with verses about the flower, beginning with summer-gowk, and ending with summer-gowk—“now, sweetheart, be my winter-fool!”—she had mocked him with the summer. Yes, that was the meaning of the verses. They were folded up as a letter, and the Flower was slipped inside, and there it lay all in the dark, as dark as when it lay in the bulb. It had to go on a journey, squeezed into the corner of a post-bag; this was not at all pleasant, but it came to an end at last.

The journey was over, the letter was opened, and read by the young sweetheart. He was so delighted, he kissed the Flower. It was locked up, with the verses around it, in a drawer, where there were many charming letters, but without a single flower in them. Here again it was the first, the only one, as the sunbeams had called it, and that was something to think about!

It was left to think at leisure for a long time; and it went on thinking throughout the summer, and throughout the winter, till another summer came round: then it was drawn forth again. But this time the youth looked by no means delighted. He gripped hold of the papers, and flung away the verses, so that the Flower dropped out on the floor. Flattened and withered as it was, still it ought not to have been thrown down on the floor; yet, after all, it was better off there than in the fire, where the verses and letters were blazing. What could have happened? What happens so often. The flower had mocked him; that was a joke: the maiden had mocked him; that was no joke: she had chosen another sweetheart for this midsummer.

The next morning the sun shone in on the little flattened Summer-gowk, that looked as if it was painted on the floor. The servant girl, who was sweeping, picked it up and placed it in one of the books on the table; for she fancied it must have fallen while she was routing about and putting things in order. And again the Flower lay between verses—printed verses, and those are grander than written ones—at all events they cost more.

Years passed away, and the book stood still on its shelf. At length it was taken down, opened, and read. It was a good book: songs and poems by the Danish poet, Ambrosius Stub, who is well worth knowing. The man who was reading turned a page of the book. “So here is a flower!” said he; “a summer-gowk! Not without meaning does it lie here. Poor Ambrosius Stub; he too was a summer-gowk, a poet-gowk. He came before his time; and so he had to face sharp winds and sleet, on his rounds among the gentlemen of Fünen. Set up for a show, like the Flower in a glass; sent on for a jest, like the flower in a valentine; he was a summer-gowk, a winter-fool, all fun and foolery; and yet the first, the only Danish poet of the time; and still, in his youthful freshness, the first, the only one! Aye, lie as a mark in this book, little Summer-gowk: thou art laid here with some meaning.”

And thus the Summer-gowk was put back again into the book, and felt honoured and delighted with learning that it was a mark in a beautiful song-book; and that he who had first written and sung about the Flower had himself been a summer-gowk, and played the fool in winter. Now the Flower understood this in its own way, just as we understand anything in our way.

This is the fairy-tale of the Summer-gowk.

[ 1863 ]

The Nightingale

—

In China, as you know, the Emperor is a Chinaman, and all those he has about him are Chinamen too. The following story happened many years ago, but that is just why it is worth hearing before it is forgotten. The emperor’s castle was the most beautiful in the world and was entirely of fine porcelain; it was very costly, but so brittle and delicate to touch, that one had to be very careful. In the garden were seen the most wonderful flowers, to the finest of which tinkling silver bells were tied, lest people should pass without noticing them. Indeed, everything in the Emperor’s garden was well thought out, and it was such a large one that the gardener himself did not know where it ended. If you kept on walking you came to a noble forest with high trees and deep lakes. The forest sloped straight down to the deep blue sea, and large ships could sail right up under the branches of the trees. In one of these trees there lived a Nightingale who sang so beautifully that even the poor Fisherman, who had plenty of other things to do, would stop and listen when he went at night to spread his nets. “Heavens! how beautiful that is,” he would say; but he had to attend to his work and forget the bird. So if it sang again next night, and the Fisherman came that way, he would again exclaim, “How beautifully that bird sings!”

Travellers came from every country in the world to the Emperor’s city, which they admired very much, as well as the castle and the garden. But when they heard the Nightingale, they would exclaim, “That is the best of all!” And when the travellers returned home they told of these things, and the learned ones wrote many books about the town, the castle and the garden. Neither did they forget the Nightingale: that was praised most of all, and those who could write poetry wrote most beautiful poems about the Nightingale in the wood by the deep sea.

These books travelled all over the world, and some of them came into the hands of the Emperor. He sat in his golden chair reading and reading on; every moment he nodded his head, for it pleased him to find the beautiful descriptions of the city, the castle and the garden. Then he came to the words:

“But the Nightingale is the best of all!”

“What is this?” said he. “I don’t know the Nightingale at all. Is there such a bird in my empire, and even in my garden? I have never heard of it. Fancy learning such a thing for the first time from a book!”

Hereupon he called his Chamberlain, who was so important that when anyone of lower rank than himself dared to speak to him or to ask him anything, he would only answer, “Pooh!” and that meant nothing.

“There is said to be a most remarkable bird here, called the Nightingale,” said the Emperor. “They say it is the finest thing in my great empire. Why have I never been told about it?”

“I have never heard it mentioned before,” said the Chamberlain. “It has never been presented at court.”

“I wish it to come and sing before me this evening,” said the Emperor. “The whole world knows what I possess, while I myself do not.”

“I have never heard it mentioned before,” said the Chamberlain; “but I shall look for it and I shall find it.”

But where was it to be found? The Chamberlain ran up and down all the stairs, through halls and corridors, but not one of those whom he met had heard of the Nightingale. So he ran back to the Emperor, and said that it must certainly be an invention of those people who wrote books.

“Your Imperial Majesty will scarcely believe,” said he, “what things are written in books. It is all fiction and something that is called the black art.”

“But the book in which I have read this,” said the Emperor, “has been sent to me by the high and mighty Emperor of Japan, and there cannot therefore be anything untrue in it. I will hear the Nightingale! It must be here this evening! It has my highest favour, and if it does not come, the whole court shall be trampled upon after supper.”

“Tsing pe!” said the Chamberlain, and ran up and down all the stairs again, and through all the halls and corridors; and half the court ran with him, for they were not at all desirous of being trampled upon. Then there was a great inquiry after the remarkable Nightingale which was known to all the world except to the people at court.

At last they came upon a poor little girl in the kitchen, who said, “Dear me, I know the Nightingale well, and it can sing too! Every evening I have leave to take home to my poor sick mother the scraps from the table; she lives down by the seashore, and when I am tired I sit down to rest in the wood as I come back, and then I hear the Nightingale sing. It makes the tears come into my eyes, and I feel just as if my mother were kissing me.”

“Little Kitchen Girl,” said the Chamberlain, “I will get you an appointment in the kitchen, and permission to see the Emperor dine, if you will lead us to the Nightingale, for it has been commanded to appear this evening.”

So they all went out into the wood, where the Nightingale was accustomed to sing; half the court was there. When they were well on their way a cow began to low.

“Oh,” said the courtiers, “now we’ve got it! What wonderful power in such a small creature! I have certainly heard it before.”

“No, those are cows lowing,” said the little Kitchen Girl; “we are a long way from the place yet.”

Some frogs then began to croak in the marsh.

“Beautiful!” said the Chinese Court Preacher. “Now I hear it; it sounds exactly like little church bells.”

“No,” said the little Kitchen Girl, “those are frogs. But I think we shall soon hear it now.”

And then the Nightingale began to sing.

“That’s it!” said the little Girl. “Hark, hark; there it sits!” And she pointed out a little grey bird up in the branches.

“Is it possible?” said the Chamberlain. “I should never have imagined it like that. How simple it looks! I suppose it has lost its colour at seeing so many grand people around it.”

“Little Nightingale,” the little Kitchen Maid called out in a loud tone, “our most gracious Emperor wishes you to sing to him.”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said the Nightingale, and sang so nicely that it was a pleasure to hear it.

“It sounds exactly like glass bells,” said the Chamberlain. “And look at its little throat, how it works. It is remarkable that we never heard it before; it will be a great success at court.”

“Shall I sing before the Emperor again?” asked the Nightingale, believing that the Emperor was also present.

“My excellent little Nightingale,” said the Chamberlain, “I have great pleasure in inviting you to a court festival this evening, when you will bewitch His Imperial Majesty with your charming song.”

“That is best heard in the woods,” said the Nightingale; but still it came willingly when it heard the Emperor wished it.

The castle had been elegantly decorated. The walls and the floors, which were of porcelain, glittered in the light of many thousands of golden lamps; the most beautiful flowers, which tinkled merrily, stood in the corridors. In fact, what with the running to and fro and the draught, the bells tinkled so loudly that you could not hear yourself speak.

In the centre of the great hall in which the Emperor sat, a golden perch had been fixed for the Nightingale. The whole court was present, and the little Kitchen Maid, having now received the title of a real court cook, had obtained permission to stand behind the door. All were dressed in their very best, and all had their eyes on the little grey bird, to whom the Emperor nodded.

The Nightingale sang so beautifully that tears came into the Emperor’s eyes and ran down his cheeks, and when the bird sang still more beautifully it went straight to one’s heart. The Emperor was so pleased that he said the Nightingale should have his golden slipper to wear round its neck. But the Nightingale declined with thanks, saying that it had already received sufficient reward.

“I have seen tears in the Emperor’s eyes, and that is the greatest treasure for me. An Emperor’s tears have a wonderful power. Heaven knows, I have been sufficiently rewarded.” Thereupon she again sang in her beautiful, sweet voice.

“That is the sweetest coquetry that we know,” said the ladies who were standing round, and then took water in their mouths to make them gurgle when anyone spoke to them. This made them think they were nightingales too. Even the footmen and the chambermaids allowed themselves to express their satisfaction—that is saying a good deal, for they are the hardest to please. In a word, the Nightingale was a great success.

It was now to remain at court, have its own cage, and liberty to go out twice a day and once during the night. It was then accompanied by twelve servants, each of whom held it fast by a silken string attached to its leg. There was by no means any pleasure in such flying.

The whole city talked about the wonderful bird, and if two people met, one would say to the other “Nightin,” and the other would answer “gale.” And then they sighed and understood each other. Eleven pedlars’ children had even been named after the bird, though not one of them could sing a note.

One day the Emperor received a large parcel, on which was written: “The Nightingale.”

“Here we have a new book about our celebrated bird,” said the Emperor. It was no book, however, but a small work of art, which lay in a casket: an artificial nightingale, supposed to look like the living one, but covered all over with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. As soon as the imitation bird had been wound up, it could sing one of the pieces that the real bird sang, and then it would move its tail up and down, all glittering with silver and gold. Round its neck hung a little ribbon on which was written: “The Emperor of Japan’s nightingale is poor compared with that of the Emperor of China.”

“How beautiful!” they all cried; and he who had brought the artificial bird immediately received the title of Imperial Head-Nightingale-Bringer.

“Now they must sing together; what a lovely duet that will be!”

And so they had to sing together; but it did not go very well, for the real bird sang in its own way, and the imitation one sang only waltzes.

“That is not the new one’s fault,” said the Music-master; “it sings in perfect time, and quite according to my method.” So the imitation bird had to sing alone. It had quite as great a success as the real one; besides, it was much prettier to look at glittering like bracelets and breast-pins.

Thirty-three times it sang one and the same tune and still was not tired.

The courtiers would like to have heard it all over again, but the Emperor thought that the live Nightingale ought now to sing something as well. But where was it? No one had noticed it flying out of the window back to its green woods.

“But how is that?” said the Emperor. And all the courtiers blamed the Nightingale, and thought it a most ungrateful creature. “In any way, we have the best bird,” they said; and so the imitation one had to sing again, which made the thirty-fourth time that they had heard the same tune. Even then they did not know it by heart, for it was much too difficult. The Music-master praised the bird exceedingly; indeed, he assured them that it was better than a nightingale, not only in its dress and the number of beautiful diamonds, but also in its inside.

“For, see, your Imperial Majesty and my lords, with a real nightingale we never know what is coming next, but with the artificial one everything is arranged. You can open it, you can explain it, and make people understand how the waltzes lie, how they work, and why one note follows the other.”

“That is just what we think too,” they all said; and the Music-master received permission to show the bird to the people on the following Sunday. The Emperor commanded that they should also hear it sing. When they did so, they were as pleased as if they had all got drunk on tea, which is a Chinese fashion; and they all said “Oh!” and held up their first fingers and nodded. But the poor fishermen, who had heard the real Nightingale, said, “It sounds pretty enough, the tunes are all alike too, but there is something wanting—I don’t know what.”

The real Nightingale was banished from the country and the empire. The imitation bird had its place on a silk cushion close to the Emperor’s bed; and all the presents which it had received lay around it, and it had been promoted to the rank of Number One on the Left, with the title of Grand Imperial Toilet-table Singer. The Emperor considered the left side, on which the heart lies, as the most noble, and an Emperor has his heart on the left just like other people. The Music-master, too, wrote a work of twenty-five volumes about the artificial bird; it was so learned and so long, so full of the most difficult Chinese words, that all the people said they had read it and understood it, for fear of being considered stupid, and having their bodies trampled on.

For a whole year it went on like that. The Emperor, the court, and all the other Chinamen knew every turn in the artificial bird’s song by heart, and that was just why it pleased them now more than ever. They could sing with it, and often did so, too. The street boys sang “Tsee-tsee-tsee! Cluck, cluck, cluck!” and the Emperor did just the same. It was really most beautiful.

One evening, when the artificial bird was singing its best and the Emperor was lying in bed and listening to it, something inside the bird snapped with a bang. All the wheels ran round with a “whirr-r-r,” and then the music stopped.

The Emperor immediately jumped out of bed and sent for his physician; but what could he do? Then they fetched the watchmaker, and, after a good deal of talking and examining, he got the bird into something like order; but he said that it must not be used too much, as the barrels were worn out, and it was impossible to put in new ones with any certainty of the music going right. Now there was great sorrow; the imitation bird could only be allowed to sing once a year, and even that was almost too much. On these occasions the Music-master would make a little speech full of big words, and say that the singing was just as good as ever; and after that of course the court were as well pleased as before.

Five years had now passed, and a great sorrow fell upon the land. The Chinese were all really very fond of their Emperor, and now he was ill and could not live long, they said. A new Emperor had already been chosen, and the people stood out in the street and asked the Chamberlain how their old Emperor was.

“Pooh!” he said, and shook his head.

Cold and pale lay the Emperor in his great, splendid bed; the whole court thought he was dead, and everyone ran away to greet the new Emperor. The pages ran out to gossip about it, and the maids-of-honour had a grand tea-party. Cloth had been laid down in all the halls and corridors, so that no footstep should be heard, and it was therefore very, very quiet. But the Emperor was not dead yet; stiff and pale he lay on the splendid bed with the long velvet curtains and the heavy gold tassels, and high up a window stood open, and the moon shone in upon him and the artificial bird.

The poor Emperor could hardly breathe; he felt as though something were sitting on his chest. He opened his eyes and saw that it was Death who was sitting there; he had put on the Emperor’s golden crown, and held his golden sword in one hand, and his beautiful flag in the other.

All around, strange heads peeped out from the folds of the large velvet bed-curtains: some were hideous, others were sweet and gentle.

These were all the Emperor’s bad and good deeds, which were staring at him now that Death was sitting on his heart.

“Do you remember this?” they whispered one after another. “Do you recollect that?” And then they told him of so much that the perspiration ran down from his brow.

“That I did not know,” cried the Emperor. “Music! music! the great Chinese drum!” he shouted; “so that I may not have to hear what they say.”

But they went on, and Death nodded like a Chinaman to all that was said.

“Music! music!” shrieked the Emperor. “You precious little golden bird! Sing, do sing! I have given you gold and jewels, I have hung even my gold slipper round your neck. Sing, I say, sing!”

But the bird was silent; it could not sing without being wound up, and there was no one to do it. Death continued to stare at the Emperor with his large, hollow eyes, and all was still, terribly still. Suddenly from the window came the sound of sweetest singing; it was the real little Nightingale sitting on a bough outside. It had heard how the Emperor was suffering, and had therefore come to console him and bring him hope by its singing. And as it sang, the ghostly heads grew paler and paler, the blood began to flow faster and faster through the Emperor’s weak limbs and even Death listened and said: “Go on, little Nightingale, go on.”

“Yes, but will you give me the beautiful golden sword? Will you give me the rich banner? Will you give me the Emperor’s rich crown?”

And Death gave up each of these treasures for a song, whilst the Nightingale still went on singing. It sang of the quiet churchyard where the white roses grow, where the elder tree scents the air, and where the fresh grass is moistened by the tears of those who are left behind. Then Death longed to be in his garden, and floated out through the window like a cold white mist.

“Thanks, thanks,” said the Emperor. “You heavenly little bird! I know you well. It was you that I drove out of my country and my empire. And still you have charmed away the evil faces from my bed, and removed Death from my heart. How can I reward you?”

“You have rewarded me,” said the Nightingale. “I drew tears from your eyes when for the first time I sang to you; that I shall never forget. They are jewels that gladden the heart of a singer. But sleep now and get well and strong again. I will sing you something.”

And as it sang the Emperor fell into a sweet slumber. Oh, how mild and refreshing was that sleep! The sun shone in upon him through the window when he awoke strong and well. None of his servants had yet returned, for they believed he was dead; only the Nightingale was still sitting by him singing.

“You must always stay with me,” said the Emperor. “You shall now sing only when you like, and I shall smash the imitation bird into a thousand pieces.”

“Don’t do that,” said the Nightingale. “It did its best, as long as it could. Keep it, as before. I cannot build my nest and live in the castle; but let me come just when I like. In the evening I will sit on that bough near your window and sing something to you, so that you shall be joyful and pensive at the same time. I will sing of those who are happy and of those who suffer. I will sing of the good and of the bad that are hidden all around you. The little singing bird flies far away, to the poor fisherman, to the peasant’s cottage, to all who are far removed from you and your court. I love your heart more than your crown, and yet the crown has almost a halo of holiness around it. I will come and I will sing to you. But you must promise me one thing.”

“Everything,” said the Emperor, and standing there in his imperial robes, which he had himself put on, he pressed his sword, all heavy with gold, to his heart.

“I only ask one thing. Let no one know that you have a little bird that tells you everything; it will be for the best.” With that, the Nightingale flew away.

The attendants came in to look after their dead Emperor. When they saw him, they stood astonished, and the Emperor said, “Good morning!”

[ 1844 ]

The Storks

—

On the roof of the last house in a little village was a Stork’s nest. [37]  A Mother-Stork sat in it, and four young ones were stretching forth their little heads with the pointed black beaks, which had not yet turned red like those of the old birds. At a little distance the Father-Stork stood upright and almost immovable on the ridge of the roof; he had drawn up one leg, in order not to be quite idle, while he was watching over his nest like a sentry. He stood so still that one might have thought he was carved in wood. “Surely, it must look very important, that my wife has a sentry before her nest,” he thought. “Nobody knows that I am her husband. People will think that I am commanded to stand here. That looks so distinguished.” And he continued to stand on one leg.

A crowd of children were playing below in the street; no sooner had they noticed the Storks than one of the pluckiest boys began to sing an old ditty to tease them; soon all his playmates joined in; but they only repeated what he could remember of it:

“Fly away, stork, fly away!

Stand not on one leg all day,

While your dear wife in the nest

Gently rocks her babes to rest.

The first little stork they will hang,

The second will fry by the fire,

The third will be shot with a bang,

The fourth will be roast for the squire.”

“Do you hear what those boys are singing?” said the young Storks, “they say we shall be hanged and roasted.”

“Never mind what they say,” replied the Mother-Stork; “if you do not listen to them, they can do you no harm.”

The boys went on singing, and pointed at the Storks with their fingers; only one of them, named Peter, said that it was wrong of them to tease the birds, and did not join them. The Mother-Stork comforted her children. “You must not pay attention to them; look at your father, how quietly he stands there on one leg!”

“Oh, we are so frightened,” said the young ones, and then they hid their heads in the nest.

On the following day, when the children had come out to play and saw the Storks, they sang again the song:

“The third will be shot with a bang,

The fourth will be roast for the squire.”

“Shall we really be hanged and roasted?” asked the young Storks.

“Certainly not,” replied the mother, “you will learn how to fly; I shall teach you myself. Then we shall fly into the meadows and go to see the frogs, who will bow to us in the water and cry: ‘Croak, croak’; and then we shall eat them up. That will be delightful.”

“And then?” asked the young ones.

“Then,” continued the Mother-Stork, “all the Storks of this country will come together, and the great autumn manoeuvre will be gone through; every Stork must be able to fly well, for that is of great importance. All those who cannot fly, the general kills with his beak. Therefore you must take great pains to learn it well, when the drilling begins.”

“Why, then we shall be stabbed after all as the boys sing; listen, they are singing it again.”

“Only listen to me, and not to them,” said the Mother-Stork.

“After the great autumn manoeuvre we shall fly away from here to warmer countries, far away over mountains and woods. We shall fly to Egypt, where you shall see three-cornered stone houses, the pointed tops of which almost touch the clouds; people call them Pyramids, and they are much older than a stork can imagine. There is a river in that country which rises every year over its banks, covering the whole land with mud. We shall walk about in the mud and eat frogs.”

“Oh, how splendid,” cried the young ones.

“Yes, indeed, that country is very pleasant; we shall do nothing there but eat all day long; and while we shall be so comfortable there, they will not have a single leaf on the trees in this country, and it will be so cold that the clouds will freeze all to pieces, and fall down on the ground in little white bits.” She meant, of course, the snow, but she could not otherwise explain it.

“Will the naughty boys also freeze to pieces?” asked the young Storks.

“No,” answered the mother, “they will not freeze to pieces, but they will not be very far from it. They will have to stay all day long indoors, in the gloomy room; whereas you will fly about in foreign lands, where the warm sun shines and many flowers are blooming.”

After some time the young ones had grown so tall that they could stand upright in the nest and look about into the neighbourhood; the Father-Stork returned every day with frogs and little snakes and all sorts of stork-dainties which he had picked up. Oh, it was so funny to see him perform tricks for their amusement; he used to place his head quite back on his tail and clatter with his beak as if it had been a rattle; and then he used to tell them stories about the marsh-land.

“Come along,” the Stork-Mother said one day, “now you must learn to fly.” The four young ones had to come out of the nest on to the ridge of the roof. At first they tottered about a good deal, and although they balanced themselves with their wings, they nearly fell down.

“You have only to look at me,” said the mother. “You must hold your heads like this, and place your feet thus: one, two, one, two—that’s right; that is what will enable you to get on in the world.” Then she flew a short distance away from them, and the young ones made a little jump, but they fell down with a thud, for their bodies were still too heavy.

“I don’t want to fly,” said one of the young ones, and crept back into the nest; “I don’t care about going to the warm countries.”

“Would you prefer to freeze to death here, when the winter comes; or shall the boys come to hang and roast you? I will call them.”

“Oh no, no, dear mother,” said the young Stork, hopping out on the roof again to the others. On the third day they could already fly a little, and now they thought they would be able to soar in the air like their parents. They tried to do so, but they tumbled down, and had quickly to move their wings again. The boys in the street began to sing again:

“Fly away, stork, fly away,

Stand not on one leg all day,” …

“Shall we fly down and peck their eyes out?” asked the young Storks.

“No,” said the mother; “do not mind them. Only listen to me, that is far more important. One, two, three, now we turn to the right; one, two, three, to the left; now round the chimney-top. That was very good indeed! The last clap with the wings was so correctly and well done that I shall let you come tomorrow with me to the marshes. There you will see several respectable storks with their families; you must let them see that my children are the prettiest and best-behaved. You must proudly stride about; that will look well, and by this you will gain respect”

“But shall we not punish those wicked boys?” asked the young Storks.

“Let them cry as much as they like; you will rise high into the clouds and fly away to the country of the pyramids while they are freezing, and have not a single green leaf nor a sweet apple.”

“We shall take our revenge upon them,” whispered the little ones, and went on practising.

Of all the boys in the street none was more bent upon singing the song than the one who had first started it, and he was quite a mite and not more than six years old. The young Storks thought he was more than a hundred years old, because he was so much taller than their father and mother, and what did they know about the age of children and grown-up people? They made up their minds to take their revenge upon this boy, because he was the first to sing the song and was never tired of going on with it. The young Storks were very angry with him, and the older they became the less they would suffer it; at last the mother had to give them the promise that they should be revenged, but not until the day before their departure.

“We must first see how you will behave at the great manoeuvre. If you do badly, so that the general has to thrust his beak through you, the boys will be right, at least in a way. But let us see.”

“You shall see,” said the young ones, and took still greater pains; they practised every day, and soon they could fly so well that it was a pleasure to see them.

Autumn came at last: all the Storks began to assemble and to set out for the warm countries, to pass the winter. That was a great manoeuvre! They had to fly over woods and villages, only to see what they could do, for their journey was a very long one. They acquitted themselves so well that they passed the review excellently, and received frogs and snakes as a reward. That was the best certificate, and they could eat the frogs and the snakes, which was better still.

“Now we shall take our revenge,” they said.

“Certainly,” cried the Mother-Stork. “I have already thought of the best way. I know where the pond is in which all the little children are lying until the storks come and take them to their parents. The pretty little babies sleep there and dream so sweetly, much more sweetly than they will dream ever after. All the parents wish for such a little child, and the children wish for a brother or a sister. Now we shall go to the pond and fetch one for every child who has not sung that wicked song to tease the storks.”

“But what shall we do to the bad boy who began to sing the song?”

“In the pond lies a little dead baby that has dreamed itself to death, that we will take to him; then he will cry, because we have brought him a dead little brother. But the good boy—I hope you have not forgotten him, who said that it was wrong to tease animals—we will bring him a brother as well as a sister. And as this boy’s name was Peter, you shall all be called Peter too.”

It happened just as she said, and all the storks are called Peter to this day.

[ 1838 ]

The Fir Tree

—

Far out in the forest grew a pretty little Fir Tree. It had a favourable place; the sun shone brightly on it, and there was plenty of fresh air, while many taller comrades, both pines and firs, were thriving around it. The little Fir Tree was in such a hurry to grow taller! It was indifferent to the warm sun and the fresh air, it took no notice of the peasant children, who ran about and chattered, when they had come out to gather strawberries and raspberries. Often they came with a basket full, and had threaded strawberries on a straw like beads; then they used to sit down near the little Fir Tree and say: “What a pretty little tree this one is!” But this the tree did not like to hear at all.

In the following year it had grown a great joint, and the following year it was longer still, for in fir trees one can always tell by the number of joints they have how many years they have been growing.

“Oh, that I were as tall a tree as the others!” sighed the little Fir; “then I might spread out my branches far around, and look with my crown out into the wide world! The birds would build their nests in my boughs, and when the wind blew I could proudly nod, just like the others yonder!”

It took no delight in the sunshine, in the birds, nor in the red clouds which in the morning and evening passed over it. When the winter had come and the snow was lying white and sparkling on the ground, often a hare came running and jumped right over the little Fir Tree—oh, that annoyed it so much! But two winters passed, and in the third the little Tree was already so high that the hare had to run round it. “To grow, to grow, to become tall and old, this is the most desirable thing in the world,” thought the Tree.

Every year in autumn woodcutters came and felled several of the biggest trees; the young Tree, now well grown, shuddered, for the tall magnificent trees fell to the ground with a crash; and when their branches were hewn off, the trees looked so naked, long and slender, they were hardly to be recognised. Then they were placed upon carts, and horses drew them out of the wood. Where were they going? What was to become of them? In spring, when the Swallows and Storks returned, the Tree asked them: “Can you not tell me where they have taken them? Have you not met them?”

The Swallows knew nothing about them; but the Stork looked pensive, nodded his head and said: “Yes, I think I know. When I left Egypt I passed by many new ships, and on the ships were splendid masts; I suppose these were the trees, for they smelt like fir, and they looked very stately indeed!”

“I wish I were tall enough to go over the sea! I should like to know what the sea is. What does it look like?”

“To explain that,” replied the Stork, “would take me too long,” and he flew away.

“Enjoy thy youth!” said the Sunbeams; “take pleasure in thy vigorous growth, in the fresh life that is within thee.”

The wind kissed the Tree, and the dew shed tears over it; but the Fir Tree did not understand them.

When Christmas-time approached, people cut down many trees which were quite young and smaller than the Fir Tree, which had no rest and always wished to be off. These young trees, the very best that could be found, kept all their branches; they were placed upon carts and drawn out of the wood by horses.

“What are they doing with them?” asked the Fir Tree. “They are not taller than I am—nay, there was one much smaller! Why did they retain all their branches? Where are they taking them?”

“We can tell you; we know!” chirped the Sparrows. “Down below in the town we have looked through the windows: We know where they go! They come to the greatest splendour you can imagine! We have looked in at the windows and have seen them standing in the middle of a warm room covered with the most beautiful things: gilded apples, gingerbread, toys, and many hundreds of candles.”

“And then,” asked the Fir Tree, trembling all over, “what happens after that?”

“Why, that is all we have seen! But that was very beautiful.”

“Why, that is all we have seen! But that was very beautiful.”

“I wonder whether I am destined to receive such great splendour,” exclaimed the Fir Tree merrily. “That is far better than crossing the sea! How much I am longing for the time! I wish it were Christmas now! Now I am tall and have grown to a good length like the others which they took away last year! I wish I were already placed on the cart or in the warm room adorned with all the bright and beautiful things! And then there is something much better and brighter to come, or why would they decorate the trees so beautifully? Yes, indeed, there is something more splendid and grand to follow! But what can it be? Oh, how I suffer with longing! I don’t know myself what is the matter with me!”

“Rejoice in us,” said Air and Sunshine; “delight in thy young life here in the forest.”

But the Fir Tree did not enjoy anything, it grew and grew; winter and summer it was green, and people who saw it said that it was a beautiful tree.

Christmas came at last, and the Tree was the first to be cut down. The axe entered deeply into its stem; the Tree fell groaning to the ground; a pain and a faintness overcame it; it was unable to think of the happiness to come, it was sad that it had to leave its home, the spot where it had grown up; it knew well enough that it would never see again the dear old comrades, the little bushes and the flowers, and perhaps not even the birds. Parting was not at all pleasant. The Tree did not recover until it was taken from the cart in a court-yard with other trees and heard a man say: “This one is very fine, we only want this one.”

Two servants in livery soon came and carried the Fir Tree into a large, beautiful room. The walls were all covered with pictures, and by the side of the tile-stove stood big Chinese vases with lions on the lids; there were rocking-chairs, couches covered with silk, on a large table were displayed picture-books and toys of very great value—at least, so the children said. The Fir Tree was put into a large vessel filled with sand; but nobody could see that it was a vessel, for it was covered all over with green cloth and placed on a handsome carpet of many colours. How the Fir Tree trembled! What was to happen now? The young ladies of the house, aided by the servants, adorned the tree. They hung on its branches little nets cut out of coloured paper and filled with sweets; gilded apples and walnuts were fastened to the tree, as if they grew on it, and more than a hundred small candles, red, blue, and white, were fixed to the branches. Dolls looking exactly like human beings—the tree had never seen anything of the like before-were hanging in the green foliage, and on the very top of the tree they fixed a glittering star of tinsel. It was splendid, particularly splendid.

“Tonight,” they all said—“tonight it will shine!”

“Oh, that the evening had come!” thought the Tree. “I wish the candles were lighted! And what will happen then? I wonder if the trees will come from the wood to look at me, or if the sparrows will look in at the windows. Am I to grow fast here and remain winter and summer adorned as I am now?”

Indeed, that was not a bad guess! Its longing made its bark ache; and bark-ache for a Tree is just as bad as a headache for us.

At last the candles were lighted. What a blaze of light! What a splendour! The Tree trembled so much with joy in all its branches that one of the candles set fire to a twig and scorched it.

“Heaven preserve us!” exclaimed the young ladies, and quickly extinguished the flame.

Now the Tree was no longer allowed to tremble! That was dreadful. It was so afraid of losing any of its ornaments, and it was quite dazzled with all the brilliance. Then the folding doors were thrown open, and the children rushed into the room as if they wished to overturn the Tree; the older people followed more deliberately. For a moment the children stood silent with surprise, but only for a moment; then they shouted for joy till the room rang; they danced gleefully round the Tree, and present after present was plucked from it.

“What are they doing?” thought the Tree. “What is going to happen?” The candles burned gradually down to the twigs, and were put out, and then the children were allowed to plunder the Tree. Oh, how they rushed at it; all its branches cracked, and had it not been fastened with the glittering star to the ceiling, they would have upset it.

The children danced about with their pretty toys. Nobody took any more notice of the tree, except the old nurse, who came and looked at the branches, but that was only to see if there was a fig or an apple left on them.

“A story! a story!” cried the children, while they pulled a small stout man towards the tree. He seated himself just beneath the tree, “for there we are in its green shade” he said, “and it will be an advantage to the tree to listen! But I shall only tell one story. Would you like to hear Ivedy-Avedy or Humpty Dumpty, who fell downstairs, but came to honours after all and married the Princess?”

“Ivedy-Avedy!” cried some, “Humpty Dumpty!” cried others; there was a good deal of crying and shouting. Only the Fir Tree was quite silent and thought to itself: “Am I not to take part in this?” but it had already done what it was expected to do.

And the man told the story of Humpty Dumpty who fell downstairs, and after all came to honours and married the Princess. And the children clapped their hands and cried: “Go on, tell us another!” They wished also to hear the story of Ivedy-Avedy, but he only told that of Humpty Dumpty. The Fir Tree was standing quite silent and thoughtful; the birds of the wood had never told such stories. “Humpty Dumpty fell downstairs, and yet married the Princess. Thus it happens in the world,” thought the Fir Tree, and believed that it was all true, because such a nice man had told the story. “Well, well! Who knows? Perhaps I shall also fall downstairs and marry a Princess!” And it looked forward with joy to being adorned again on the following day with candles and toys, glitter and fruit.

“Tomorrow I shall not tremble!” it thought; “I shall enjoy all my splendour thoroughly. Tomorrow I shall hear the story of Humpty Dumpty again, and perhaps also that of Ivedy-Avedy.”

All night the Tree stood silent and thoughtful. In the morning the man-servants and housemaids entered the room. “Now,” thought the Tree, “they will adorn me again!” But they dragged it out of the room, upstairs into the garret, and placed it there in a dark corner, where no daylight reached it.

“What does this mean?” thought the Tree. “What am I to do here? What can I hear in such a place?” and it leaned against the wall, and thought and thought. And, indeed, it had time enough to think; for days and nights passed, but nobody came upstairs, and when at last somebody did come, it was only to store away some big chests. Thus the Tree was quite hidden; one would think that it was quite forgotten.

“Now it is winter,” thought the Tree. “The ground is so hard and covered with snow that people cannot plant me again! Therefore, I think, they shelter me here until spring comes. How thoughtful! How kind people are to me! I only wish it was not quite so dark and so dreadfully lonely here! Not even a small hare is to be seen! How nice it was in the wood, when the snow covered the ground and the hare was running by; I should not even mind his jumping right over me, although then I could not bear the thought of it. It is awfully lonely here, indeed!”

“Squeak, squeak,” a little Mouse said just then, creeping timidly forward; another one soon followed. They sniffed at the Fir Tree and slipped among its branches.

“Oh, if it were not so bitter cold,” said the Mice, “then we should feel quite comfortable here. Don’t you think so, you old Fir Tree?”

“I am not old at all!” replied the Fir Tree; “there are many much older than myself.”

“Where do you come from?” asked the Mice; “what do you know?” for they were very inquisitive. “Tell us about the most beautiful place on earth! Have you been there? Have you been in the pantry where cheeses lie on the shelves, and hams hang from the ceiling, where one can dance on tallow candles, and go in thin and come out fat?”

“I have not been there,” said the Tree; “but I know the wood where the sun shines and the birds sing.” And then the Tree told them all about its youth. The little Mice, who had never heard anything like it before, listened attentively and exclaimed:

“You have seen a great deal, indeed; how happy you must have been!”

“Do you think so?” said the Tree, and reflected on its own story. “After all, those days were not unhappy.” Then it told them all about Christmas-eve, when it was so beautifully adorned with sweetmeats and lights.

“You must have been very happy, you old Fir Tree,” replied the mice.

“I am not old at all,” repeated the Tree, “I only left the wood this winter; I am somewhat forward in my growth.”

“How well you can tell stories,” said the little Mice. Next night they returned with four more little Mice, whom they wished to hear what the tree had to relate; the more the tree told them, the more it remembered distinctly all that had happened, and it thought, “Those days were happy indeed, but they may come again. Humpty Dumpty fell downstairs, and married the Princess after all; perhaps I may also marry a Princess!” And then the Fir Tree thought of a pretty little birch in the forest, which appeared to it a beautiful Princess.

“Who is Humpty Dumpty?” asked the little Mice. And then the Fir Tree had to relate the whole tale. It remembered every word of it, and the little Mice were so delighted that they nearly jumped to the top of the tree for joy. The next night many more Mice came to listen to the tree; and on Sunday two Rats came; they, however, said the story was not pretty. The little Mice were sorry for that, for now they began to think less of the story.

“Do you know only that one story?” asked the Rats.

“Only that one,” said the Tree, “and that I heard on the happiest night of my life; but then I did not know how happy I was.”

“That is a very poor tale,” said the Rats. “Don’t you know one about bacon and tallow candles—a sort of store-room story?”

“No,” said the Tree.

“We do not care for this one,” said the Rats; and they went home.

At last the little Mice stayed away also, and the tree sighed and said: “How pleasant it was to see all the lively little Mice sitting round me when I talked! Now all that’s past. I should be very pleased if they came to fetch me away from here.”

But whenever would that happen? One morning people came to tidy the garret; the chests were put aside, the Tree was dragged out of its corner and thrown roughly to the ground; a man-servant carried it at once towards the staircase, where the sun was shining.

“Now life is beginning again,” thought the Tree.

It felt the fresh air and the first sunbeams, and soon it was carried into the courtyard. Everything happened so quickly that the Tree forgot to look at itself; there was so much around it to look at. The courtyard bordered on a garden, where all plants were in flower; the roses hung fresh and fragrant over the small fence; the lime trees were blooming, and the swallows flew about, saying, “Twit, twit, twit, my husband has come!” but they did not mean the Fir Tree.

“Now I shall live,” exclaimed the Fir Tree joyfully, spreading out its branches; but alas! they were all withered and yellow; and it lay between weeds and nettles. The tinsel star was still fixed to its top and glittered in the sunshine. Some of the children who had been dancing round the tree so merrily on Christmas-eve were playing in the courtyard. One of the smallest came and tore the gilt star off.

“Look, what is still sticking to the ugly old Fir Tree!” said the child, treading on the branches, which cracked under his boots. And the tree looked at all the fresh and beautiful flowers in the garden; it looked at itself and wished that it had remained in the dark corner of the garret; it remembered its bright youth in the forest, the delightful Christmas-eve, the little Mice, which had so quietly listened to the story of Humpty Dumpty.

“All is over,” said the old tree. “Oh, that I had enjoyed myself while I could do so! All is passed away.”

A man-servant came and chopped the Tree into small pieces, until a large bundle was lying on the ground; then he placed them in the fire, under a large kettle, where they blazed up brightly; the Tree sighed deeply, and each sigh was as loud as a little pistol-shot. The children, who were playing near, came and sat down before the fire, and looking into it cried, “Pop, pop.” But at each little shot, which was a deep sigh, the Tree thought of a summer day in the wood, or a winter night there, when the stars sparkled; it remembered the Christmas-eve and Humpty Dumpty, the only fairy tale which it had heard and knew to tell, and then it was all burned up.

The boys played in the garden, and the smallest of them had on his chest the gold star which the Tree had worn on the happiest evening of its life. Now all had come to an end, the Tree had come to an end, and also the story, for all stories come to an end!

[ 1845 ]

The Snowman

—

“It is so delightfully cold that my whole body creaks,” said the Snowman. “The wind is wonderfully invigorating. How that glowing thing up there is staring at me!” He meant the sun, which was just setting. “He shall not make me wink; I will hold my bits tight.” For you must know that he had two large triangular pieces of red tile in the place of eyes in his head; his mouth was a piece of old rake, and so he also had teeth. He was born amid the cheering of the boys, and greeted by the tinkling of sleigh-bells and the cracking of whips.

The sun set, the full moon rose large, round, and clear in the blue sky. “There he is again on the other side!” said the Snowman. Of course he fancied the sun was showing himself again. “I thought I had cured him of staring. Now let him hang there, and give me a light, so that I may see myself. I wish I knew how to move: I should so much like to walk about. If I could, I should like to go down and slide on yonder ice, as I have seen the boys do. But I don’t know how—I can’t even walk.”

“Go! Go!” barked the old Dog in the yard; he was somewhat hoarse, and could no longer well pronounce the proper “bow, wow.” He had become hoarse since the days when he used to live indoors and lie all day long under the warm stove. “The sun will soon teach you how to run; I saw him teach your predecessor last year, and his predecessors before him. Go! Go! They all go.”

“I do not understand you, friend,” said the Snowman. “Do you mean to say that he up there is to teach me to run?” He meant the moon. “I certainly saw him walk a little while ago when I looked him straight in the face, but now he comes creeping from the other side.”

“You are dreadfully ignorant,” replied the Dog; “but that is no wonder, for you have only just been put up. She whom you see up there is the moon; the one who went before was the sun; he is returning tomorrow, and is sure to teach you how to run down into the ditch. We shall soon have a change in the weather; I feel it by the pain I have in my left hind leg; the weather is going to change.”

“I do not understand him,” thought the Snowman; “but it strikes me that he speaks of something disagreeable. He who was so staring at me and afterwards went off—the sun, as he calls him—is not my friend; that much I know for certain.”

“Go! Go!” barked the Dog, turned three times round, and crept back into his kennel to sleep.

The weather really changed. On the next morning the whole country was enveloped in a dense fog. Later on an icy wind began to blow, it was bitter cold; but when the sun rose, what a splendour! Trees and bushes were covered with hoar-frost—they looked like a wood of white coral; all the branches seemed to be covered with shiny white blossoms. The many delicate boughs and twigs, which are in the summer completely hidden by the rich foliage, were all visible now. It looked very much like a snowy white cobweb; every twig seemed to send forth rays of white light. The birch tree moved its branches in the wind, as the trees do in the summer; it was marvellously beautiful to look at.

And when the sun rose, everything glittered and sparkled as if small diamonds had been strewed over everything, with large diamonds on the snowy carpet below. Or as if innumerable lights were shining even more white than the snow itself,

“How lovely!” said a young girl who stepped out into the garden with a young man. They stopped near the Snowman, and looked admiringly at the glittering trees. “There is no more beautiful scene in the summer,” she said, and her eyes were beaming. “And we can’t possibly have such a fellow there in the summer,” replied the young man, pointing at the Snowman.

The girl laughed, nodded to the Snowman, and then both walked over the snow, so that it creaked under their feet like starch.

“Who were those two?” asked the Snowman of the Dog. “You have been longer in the yard than I; do you know them?”

“Certainly I do,” replied the Dog. “She has stroked me, and he has given me a meat-bone. I shall never bite those two.”

“But what are they?” asked the Snowman again.

“Lover-r-r-r-s,” said the Dog. “They are going to live together in one kennel, and gnaw on the same bone. Go! Go!”

“Are they beings like ourselves?” asked the Snowman.

“They are members of the master’s family,” said the Dog. “Of course, one knows very little if one has only been born yesterday. I can see that from you! I have the age and the knowledge too. I know all in the house. I also knew a time when I was not obliged to be chained up here in the cold. Go! Go!”

“The cold is splendid,” said the Snowman. “Go on, tell me more. But you must not rattle so with the chain, for you make me shudder if you do.”

“Go! Go!” barked the Dog. “They say I was once a dear little puppy. Then I used to lie on a chair covered with velvet, up in the mansion, or sit on the mistress’s lap. They kissed me on the nose and wiped my paws with an embroidered handkerchief. They called me Ami, dear, sweet Ami. But later on I became too big for them, and they gave me to the housekeeper; and so I came down into the basement. You can look in at the window from where you are standing. You can look down into the room where I was one day master, for master I was at the housekeeper’s. The rooms were not so grand as upstairs in the mansion, but they were more homely. I was not continually mauled and pulled about by the children, and the food was just as good, if not better. I had my own cushion, and there was a stove in the room, which is at this time of the year the best thing in the world. I used to creep under the stove; there was enough room for me. I am still dreaming of this stove. Go! Go!”

“Does a stove look nice?” asked the Snowman. “Does it resemble me?”

“The very contrary of you! It is as black as a raven, and has a long neck with a broad brass band round it. It eats so much fuel that the fire comes out of its mouth. One must keep at its side, close by or underneath it; there one is very comfortable. Perhaps you can see it from where you stand.”

The Snowman looked and saw something, brightly polished, with a broad brass band round it; in its lower parts the fire was visible. A strange feeling overcame the Snowman. He had no idea what it was, nor could he explain the cause of it; but all people know it, even those who are not snow men.

“Why did you leave her?” asked the Snowman, for he had a notion that the stove was a woman. “How could you leave such a place?”

“I had to,” said the Dog. “They turned me out of the house and fastened me up here with the chain. I had bitten the youngest son of the squire in the leg, because he kicked away the bone which I was gnawing. Bone for bone, I thought. But this they took very ill, and from that time forward I was chained up. And I have lost my voice too—do you not hear how hoarse I am? Go! Go! I can no longer bark like other dogs. Go! Go! That’s how it went.”

The Snowman was no longer listening to him; he looked down unswervingly into the basement, into the housekeeper’s room, where the stove was standing on its four legs, as tall as the Snowman.

“What a strange noise I hear within me,” he said. “Shall I never get in there? It is such an innocent wish of mine, and they say innocent wishes are sure to be fulfilled. I must go in there, and nestle up against her, even if I must break the window.”

“You will never get in there,” said the Dog; “and if you went close to the stove you’d be gone. Go! Go!”

“I am already as good as gone now,” replied the snowman. “I believe I am am breaking up as it is.”

All day, the Snowman looked in through the window. In the twilight the room appeared still more inviting; a gentle light shone out of the stove, not like that of the moon or the sun, but such light as only a stove can give after being well fed. When the door of the room was opened the flame burst out at the mouth of the stove—that was its custom. In the light of the flames, the snow man’s white face blushed crimson, while a red glare shone out from his bosom.

“I can’t stand it,” he said. “How pretty she looks when she puts out her tongue!”

The night was long, but it did not appear so to the Snowman, for he was standing there deeply lost in his pleasant thoughts, crackling with the cold.

In the morning the windowpanes of the basement were covered with ice: the most beautiful ice-flowers that one could wish for were upon them; but they concealed the stove.

The ice on the windowpanes would not thaw; the Snowman could not see the stove which he imagined to be such a lovely woman. It groaned and creaked within him; it was the very weather to please a snowman; but he did not rejoice—how could he enjoy anything when he was so stove-sick?

“That is a dreadful disease for a Snowman,” said the Dog. “I have suffered from it myself, but I got over it. Go! Go! We shall soon have a change in the weather.”

The weather changed; it was beginning to thaw. As the warmth increased, the Snow Man decreased. He said nothing, he did not complain, and that is the surest sign.

One morning he broke down; and lo! in the place where he had stood something like a broomstick was sticking in the ground, around which the boys had built him up.

“Well, now I understand why he had such a great longing,” said the Dog. “I see there is an iron scraper attached to the stick, which people use to clean stoves with. The Snowman had a stove-scraper in his body, that was what moved him so. Now he has got over that too. Go! Go!”

And soon they had got over the winter. “Go! Go!” barked the hoarse Dog, but the girls in the house were singing:

Thyme, green thyme, come out, we sing,

Soon will come the gentle spring.

Willow trees, your catkins don;

The sun shines bright and the days roll on.

Cuckoo and lark sing merrily too;

We also will sing cuckoo! cuckoo!

And nobody thought any more of the Snowman.

[ 1861 ]

The Nis and the Dame

—

You have all heard of the Nis, [38] but have you ever heard of the Dame—the Gardener’s Dame? She had plenty of reading; knew verses by heart; aye, and could write them herself with ease; except that the rhymes, “clinchings,” as she called them, cost her a little trouble. She had gifts of writing, and gifts of speech; she could well have been a preacher, or, at all events, the preacher’s wife.

“The earth is beauteous in her Sunday gown,” said she, and this thought she had set in regular form and “clinching;” set it up in a ditty, that was ever so fine and long.

The Under-schoolmaster, Mr. Kisserup (not that it matters about his name), was a cousin of hers, and on a visit at the Gardener’s; he heard the Dame’s poem, and it did him good, he said—a world of good. “You have soul, ma’am!” said he.

“Fiddle-de-dee!” said the Gardener. “Don’t be putting such stuff in her head. Soul indeed! a wife should be a body, a plain, decent body, and watch the pot to see that the porridge is not burned.”

“The burnt taste I can take out of the porridge with a little charcoal,” said the Dame, “and out of you with a little kiss. One might fancy you thought of nothing but greens and potatoes; and yet you love the flowers;” and so saying, she kissed him. “Flowers are all soul!” said she.

“Mind your porridge-pot,” said he, and went off into the garden. This was his porridge-pot, and this he minded.

But the Under-schoolmaster sat in the Dame’s parlour, and talked with the Dame. Her fine words, “Earth is beauteous,” he made the text of a whole sermon, after his own fashion.

“Earth is beauteous, make it subject unto you! was said, and we became the lords. Some rule it with the mind, others with the body. This man is sent into the world like an incorporate note of admiration! that man like a dash of hesitation: we pause, and ask, Why is he here? One of us becomes a bishop; another only a poor under-master; but all is for the best. Earth is beauteous, and always in her Sunday gown! That was a thought-stirring poem, ma’am; full of feeling and cosmography!”

“You have soul, Mr. Kisserup,” said the Dame, “a great deal of soul, I assure you. One gains clearness of perception by talking with you.”

And so they went on in the same strain, as grand and excellent as ever. But out in the kitchen there was somebody else talking; and that was the Nis, the little grey-jacketed Nis with his red cap—you know him. The Nis sat in the kitchen, playing the pot-watcher. He talked, but nobody heard him except the great black tom-cat, “Cream-thief,” as the Dame called him.

The Nis was snarling at her, because she did not believe in his existence, he found. True, she had never seen him; but still, with all her reading, she ought to have known he did exist, and have shown him some little attention. She never thought, on Christmas Eve, of setting so much as a spoonful of porridge for him; though all his forefathers had got this, and from dames, too, who had had no reading at all: their porridge used to be swimming with cream and butter. It made the cat’s mouth water to hear of it.

“She calls me an idea!” said the Nis: “that’s quite beyond the reach of my ideas. In fact, she denies me. I’ve caught her saying so before, and again just now, yonder, where she sits droning to that boy-whipper, that understrapper. I say with Daddy, ‘Mind your porridge-pot.’ That she doesn’t do: so now for making it boil over.”

And the Nis puffed at the fire till it burned and blazed. “Hubble—bubble—hish!” the pot boiled over.

“And now for picking holes in Daddy’s sock,” said the Nis. “I’ll unravel a long piece, from toe to heel; so there’ll be something to darn when she’s not too busy poetizing. Dame poetess, please darn Daddy’s stockings.”

The Cat sniggered and sneezed; he had caught cold somehow, though he always went in furs.

“I’ve unlatched the pantry door,” said the Nis. “There’s clotted cream there as thick as gruel! If you won’t have a lick, I will.”

“If I am to get all the blame and beating,” said the Cat, “I’ll have my share of the cream.”

“A sweet lick is worth a kick!” said the Nis. “But now I’ll be off to the Schoolmaster’s room, hang his braces on the looking-glass, put his socks in the water-jug, and make him believe that the punch has set his brain spinning. Last night: I sat on the woodstack by the kennel. I dearly love to bully the watch-dog; so I swung my legs about in front of him. His chain was so short he could not reach them, however high he sprang: he was furious, and went on bark-barking, and I went on dingle-dangling; that was rare sport! Schoolmaster awoke, and jumped up, and looked out three times; but he couldn’t see me, though he had got barnacles on; he sleeps in his barnacles.”

“Say mew, if Dame is coming,” said the Cat; “I am hard of hearing: I feel sick today.”

“You have the licking sickness,” said the Nis; “lick away: lick the sickness away. Only be sure to wipe your beard, that the cream mayn’t hang on it. Now I’ll go for a bit of eavesdropping.”

And the Nis stood behind the door, and the door stood ajar. There was no one in the parlour except the Dame and the Under-master. They were talking about things which—as the Schoolmaster finely observed—ought in every household to rank far above pots and pans—the Gifts of the Soul.

“Mr. Kisserup,” said the Dame, “I will now show you something in that line, which I have never yet shown to any living creature—least of all to a man—my smaller poems—some of which, however, are rather long. I have called them ‘Clinchings by a Gentlewoman.’ I cling to those old designations.”

“And so one ought,” said the Schoolmaster; “one ought to root the German out of our language.”

“I do my best toward it,” said the Dame. “You will never hear me speak of Butterdeig or Kleiner; no, I call them paste-leaves and fatty-cakes.”

And she took out of her drawer a writing-book, in a bright green binding, with two blotches of ink on it.

“There is much in the book that is earnest,” said she: “my mind inclines toward the sorrowful. Here now is my ‘Midnight Sigh,’ my ‘Evening Red, and here ‘When I was wedded to Klemmensen’—my husband, you know; you may pass that over, though it has thought and feeling. ‘The Housewife’s Duties’ is the best piece—sorrowful, like all the rest; I am strongest in that style. Only one single piece is jocular: it contains some lively thoughts—one must indulge in them now and then—thoughts about—don’t laugh at me—about being a poetess! It has hitherto been all between me and my drawer; and now you make the third of us, Mr. Kisserup. Poetry is my ruling passion; it haunts and worries me—it reigns over me. This I have expressed in my title ‘The Little Nis.’ You know the old cottage tales about the Nis, who is always playing pranks in the house. I have depicted myself as the house, and my poetical feelings as the Nis, the spirit that possesses me. His power and strength I have sung in ‘The Little Nis;’ but you must pledge me with hands and mouth never to reveal my secret, either to my husband or anyone else. Read it aloud, so that I may hear whether you understand the composition.”

And the Schoolmaster read, and the Dame listened, and so did the little Nis. He was eavesdropping, you know; and he came up just in time to hear the title of “The Little Nis.”

“Ho! ho!” said he; “that’s my name! what has she been writing about me? Oh, I’ll give her tit for tat; chip her eggs, nip her chickens, hunt the fat off her fatted calf: fie Upon such a Dame!”

And he listened with pursed-up lips and pricked-up ears; but as he heard of the Nis’s power and glory, and his lordship over the Dame (it was poetry, you know, she meant, but the Nis took the name literally), the little fellow began smiling more and more; his eyes glistened with pleasure; then came lines of dignity in the corners of his mouth; he drew up his heels, and stood on his toes an inch or two higher than usual; he was delighted with what was said about the little Nis.

“I have done her wrong! She is a Dame of soul and high breeding! She has put me into her ‘Clinchings,’ and they will be printed and read! No more cream for Master Cat: I shall let nobody touch it but myself. One drinks less than two, so that will be a saving: and that I shall carry out, and pay respect and honour to our Dame.”

“Ah, he’s a man all over, that Nis,” said the old Cat. “Only one soft mew from the Dame, a mew about himself, and he changes his mind in a jiffy! And that Dame of ours, isn’t she sly!”

But the Dame was not sly; it was all because the Nis was a man.

If you cannot understand this story, ask somebody to help you; but do not ask the Nis—no, nor yet the Dame.

[ 1868 ]

The Neighbours

—

Anyone might have thought that something important was going on in the duck-pond, but it was nothing after all. All the ducks lying quietly on the water or standing on their heads in it—for they could do that—at once swam to the sides; the traces of their feet were seen in the wet earth, and their cackling was heard far and wide. The water, which a few moments before had been as clear and smooth as a mirror, became very troubled. Before, every tree, every neighbouring bush, the old farmhouse with the holes in the roof and the swallows’ nest, and especially the great rose-bush full of flowers, had been reflected in it. The rose-bush covered the wall and hung out over the water, in which everything was seen as if in a picture, except that it all stood on its head; but when the water was troubled everything got mixed up, and the picture was gone. Two feathers which the fluttering ducks had lost floated up and down; suddenly they took a rush as if the wind were coming, but as it did not come they had to lie still, and the water once more became quiet and smooth. The Roses were again reflected; they were very beautiful, but they did not know it, for no one had told them. The sun shone among the delicate leaves; everything breathed forth the loveliest fragrance, and all felt as we do when we are filled with joy at the thought of our happiness.

“How beautiful existence is!” said each Rose. “The only thing that I wish for is to be able to kiss the sun, [39] because he is so warm and bright. I should also like to kiss those roses down in the water, which are so much like us, and the pretty little birds down in the nest. There are some up above too; they put out their heads and pipe softly; they have no feathers like their father and mother. We have good neighbours, both below and above. How beautiful existence is!”

The young ones above and below—those below were really only shadows in the water—were Sparrows; their parents were Sparrows too, and had taken possession of the empty swallows’ nest of last year, and now lived in it as if it were their own property.

“Are those the ducks’ children swimming there?” asked the young Sparrows, when they saw the feathers on the water.

“If you must ask questions, ask sensible ones,” said their mother. “Don’t you see that they are feathers, such as I wear and you will wear too? But ours are of finer quality. Still, I should like to have them up in the nest, for they keep one warm. I am very curious to know what the ducks were so startled about; not about us, certainly, although I did say ‘peep’ to you pretty loudly. The thick-headed roses ought to know why, but they know nothing at all; they only look at themselves and smell. I am heartily tired of such neighbours.”

“Listen to the dear little birds up there,” said the Roses; “they begin to want to sing too, but are not able to manage it yet. But it will soon come. What a pleasure that must be! It is fine to have such cheerful neighbours.”

Suddenly two horses came galloping up to be watered. A peasant boy rode on one, and he had taken off all his clothes except his large broad black hat. The boy whistled like a bird, and rode into the pond where it was deepest, and as he passed the rose-bush he plucked a rose and stuck it in his hat. Now he looked dressed, and rode on. The other Roses looked after their sister, and asked each other, “Where can she be going to?” But none of them knew.

“I should like to go out into the world for once,” said one; “but here at home among our green leaves it is beautiful too. The whole day long the sun shines bright and warm, and in the night the sky shines more beautifully still; we can see that through all the little holes in it.”

They meant the stars, but they knew no better.

“We make it lively about the house,” said the Sparrow-mother; “and people say that a swallows’ nest brings luck; so they are glad of us. But such neighbours as ours! A rose-bush on the wall like that causes damp. I daresay it will be taken away; then we shall, perhaps, have some corn growing here. The roses are good for nothing but to be looked at and to be smelt, or at most to be stuck in a hat. Every year, as I have been told by my mother, they fall off. The farmer’s wife preserves them and strews salt over them; then they get a French name which I neither can pronounce nor care to, and are put into the fire to make a nice smell. You see, that’s their life; they exist only for the eye and the nose. Now you know.”

In the evening, when the gnats were dancing merrily in the warm air and in the red clouds, the Nightingale came and sang to the Roses that the beautiful was like sunshine to the world, and that the beautiful lived forever. The Roses thought that the Nightingale was singing about itself, and that one might easily have believed; they had no idea that the song was about them. But they were very pleased with it, and wondered whether all the little Sparrows could become nightingales.

“I understand the song of that bird very well,” said the young Sparrows. “There was only one word that was not clear to me. What does ‘the beautiful’ mean?”

“Nothing at all,” answered their mother; “that’s only something external. Up at the Hall, where the pigeons have their own house, and corn and peas are strewn before them every day—I have dined with them myself, and that you shall do in time, too; for tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you who you are—up at the Hall they have two birds with green necks and a crest upon their heads; they can spread out their tails like a great wheel, and these are so bright with various colours that it makes one’s eyes ache. These birds are called peacocks, and that is ‘the beautiful.’ If they were only plucked a little they would look no better than the rest of us. I would have plucked them already if they had not been so big.”

“I’1l pluck them,” piped the young Sparrow, who had no feathers yet.

In the farmhouse lived a young married couple; they loved each other dearly, were industrious and active, and everything in their home looked very nice. On Sundays the young wife came down early, plucked a handful of the most beautiful roses, and put them into a glass of water, which she placed upon the cupboard.

“Now I see that it is Sunday,” said the husband, kissing his little wife. They sat down, read their hymn-book, and held each other by the hand, while the sun shone down upon the fresh roses and upon them.

“This sight is really too tedious,” said the Sparrow-mother, who could see into the room from her nest; and she flew away.

The same thing happened on the following Sunday, for every Sunday fresh roses were put into the glass; but the rose-bush bloomed as beautifully as ever.

The young Sparrows now had feathers, and wanted very much to fly with their mother; but she would not allow it, and so they had to stay at home. In one of her flights, however it may have happened, she was caught, before she was aware of it, in a horse-hair net which some boys had attached to a tree. The horse-hair was drawn tightly round her leg—as tightly as if it would cut the leg through. Oh, what pain, what fright she was in! The boys came running up and seized her, and in no gentle way either.

“Its only a Sparrow,” they said; they did not, however, let her go, but took her home with them, and every time she cried they hit her on the beak.

In the farmhouse was an old man who understood making soap into cakes and balls, both for shaving and washing. A merry, careless old fellow he was, and a merry, wandering life he led. When he saw the Sparrow which the boys had brought, and which they said they did not want, he asked, “Shall we make it look very beautiful?”

At these words an icy shudder ran through the Sparrow-mother.

Out of his box, in which were the most beautiful colours, the old man took a quantity of shining leaf gold, while the boys were sent to fetch some egg-white, with which the Sparrow was smeared all over; the gold was stuck onto this, and the Sparrow-mother was now gilded all over. But she took no pleasure in her finery—she shook with fear. Then the soap-man tore off a small piece from the red lining of his old jacket, and cutting it so as to make it look like a cock’s comb, he stuck it to the bird’s head.

“Now you will see the gold-jacket fly,” said the old man, letting the Sparrow go, and away she flew away in deadly terror, with the sun shining upon her. How she glittered! All the Sparrows, and even a Crow—and a knowing old boy he was too—were startled at the sight; but still they flew after her to learn what kind of a strange bird she was.

Driven by fear and horror, she flew homeward; she was almost sinking fainting to the earth, while the flock of pursuing birds increased, some even attempting to peck at her.

“Look at her! Look at her!” they all cried.

“Look at her! Look at her!” cried her little ones, as she approached the nest. “That is certainly a young peacock, for it glitters in all colours; it makes one’s eyes ache, as mother told us. Peep! that’s ‘the beautiful.’”

And then they pecked at the bird with their little beaks so that it was impossible for her to get into the nest; she was so exhausted that she could not even say “Peep!” much less “I am your own mother!” The other birds, too, now fell upon the Sparrow and plucked off feather after feather until she fell bleeding into the rose-bush.

“Poor creature!” said all the Roses; “only be still, and we will hide you. Lean your little head against us.”

The Sparrow spread out her wings once more, then drew them closely to her, and lay dead near the neighbouring family, the beautiful fresh Roses.

“Peep!” sounded from the nest. “Where can mother be so long? It’s more than I can understand. It cannot be a trick of hers, and mean that we are now to take care of ourselves. She has left us the house as an inheritance; but to which of us is it to belong when we have families of our own?”

“Yes, it won’t do for you to stay with me when I increase my household with a wife and children,” said the smallest.

“I daresay I shall have more wives and children than you,” said the second.

“But I am the eldest!” exclaimed the third. Then they all got excited; they hit out with their wings, pecked with their beaks, and flop! one after another was thrown out of the nest. There they lay with their anger, holding their heads on one side and blinking the eye that was turned upwards. That was their way of being sulky.

They could fly a little; by practice they improved, and at last they agreed upon a sign by which to recognise each other if they should meet in the world later on. It was to be one “Peep!” and three scratches on the ground with the left foot.

The young one who had remained behind in the nest made himself as broad as he could, for he was the proprietor. But this greatness did not last long. In the night the red flames burst through the window and seized the roof; the dry straw blazed up high, and the whole house was burned, and the young Sparrow too; but the others escaped with their lives.

When the sun rose again and everything looked as refreshed as if it had had a quiet sleep, there remained of the farmhouse nothing but a few black charred beams leaning against the chimney, which was now its own master. Thick smoke still rose from the ruins, but the rose-bush stood yonder, fresh, blooming, and untouched, and every flower and every twig was reflected in the clear water.

“How beautifully the roses bloom before the ruined house,” exclaimed a passer-by. “A pleasanter picture cannot be imagined. I must have that.” And the man took out of his portfolio a little book with white leaves: he was a painter, and with his pencil he drew the smoking house, the charred beams and the overhanging chimney, which bent more and more; in the foreground he put the large, blooming rose-bush, which presented a charming sight. For its sake alone the whole picture had been drawn.

Later in the day the two Sparrows who had been born there came by. “Where is the house?” they asked. “Where is the nest? Peep! All is burned and our strong brother too. That’s what he has now for keeping the nest to himself. The Roses got off very well; there they still stand with their red cheeks. They certainly do not mourn at their neighbours’ misfortunes. I don’t want to talk to them, and it looks miserable here—that’s my opinion.” And away they went.

On a beautiful sunny autumn day—one could almost have believed it was still the middle of summer—there hopped about in the dry clean-swept courtyard before the principal entrance of the Hall a number of pigeons, black, and white, and violet-coloured, all shining in the sunlight. The pigeon-mothers said to their young ones: “Stand in groups, stand in groups! for that looks much better.”

“What kind of creatures are those little grey ones that run about behind us?” asked an old pigeon, with red and green in her eyes. “Little grey ones! Little grey ones!” she cried.

“They are sparrows, and good creatures. We have always had the reputation of being pious, so we will allow them to pick up the corn with us; they don’t interrupt our talk, and they scrape so prettily when they bow.”

Indeed they were continually making three foot-scrapings with the left foot and also said “Peep!” By this means they recognised each other, for they were the Sparrows from the nest on the burned house.

“Provisions are uncommonly good here!” said the Sparrows. The pigeons strutted round one another, puffed out their chests mightily, and had their own private views and opinions.

“Do you see that pouter pigeon?” said one to the other. “Do you see how she swallows the peas? She eats too many, and the best ones too. Curoo! Curoo! Do you see how bald she is getting on her crest, the ugly, spiteful creature! Curoo! Curoo!” And the eyes of all sparkled with malice. “Stand in groups! Stand in groups! Little grey ones, little grey ones! Curoo, curoo, curoo!”

So their beaks ran on, and so they will go on for thousands of years. The Sparrows ate lustily; they listened attentively, and even stood in the ranks with the others, but it did not suit them at all. They were full, and so they left the pigeons, exchanging opinions about them, slipped in under the garden palings, and when they found the door leading into the house open, one of them, who was over-fed, and therefore felt brave, hopped on to the threshold. “Peep!” said he; “I may venture that.”

“Peep!” said the other; “so may I, and something more too!” And he hopped into the room. No one was there; the third Sparrow, seeing this, flew still farther into the room, exclaiming, “All or nothing! It is a curious man’s nest all the same; and what have they put up here? What is that?”

Close to the Sparrows the roses were blooming; they were reflected in the water, and the charred beams leaned against the overhanging chimney. “Do tell me what this is. How comes this in a room at the Hall?” And all three Sparrows wanted to fly over the roses and the chimney, but flew against a flat wall. It was all a picture, a great splendid picture, which the artist had painted from a sketch.

“Peep!” said the Sparrows, “it’s nothing. It only looks like something. Peep! that is ‘the beautiful!’ Do you understand it? I don’t.”

And they flew away, for some people came into the room.

Days and years went by. The pigeons had often cooed, not to say growled—the spiteful creatures; the Sparrows had been frozen in winter and had lived merrily in summer: they were all betrothed, or married, or whatever you like to call it. They had little ones, and of course each one thought his own the handsomest and cleverest; one flew this way, another that, and when they met they recognised each other by their “Peep!” and the three scrapes with the left foot. The eldest had remained an old maid and had no nest nor young ones. It was her pet idea to see a great city, so she flew to Copenhagen.

There was a large house painted with many colours standing close to the castle and the canal, upon which latter were to be seen many ships laden with apples and pottery. The windows of the house were broader at the bottom than at the top, and when the Sparrows looked through them, every room appeared to them like a tulip with the brightest colours and shades. But in the middle of the tulip stood white men, made of marble; a few were of plaster: but looked at with sparrows’ eyes, that comes to the same thing. Upon the roof stood a metal chariot drawn by metal horses and the goddess of Victory, also of metal, was driving. It was Thorwaldsen’s Museum.

“How it shines! how it shines!” said the maiden Sparrow. “I suppose that is ‘the beautiful.’ Peep! But this is larger than a peacock.” She still remembered from her childhood’s days that her mother had considered the peacock the greatest among the beautiful.

She flew down into the courtyard: there everything was extremely fine. Palms and branches were painted on the walls, and in the middle of the court stood a great blooming rose-tree spreading out its fresh boughs, covered with roses, over a grave. Thither flew the maiden Sparrow, for she saw several of her own kind there. A “peep” and three foot-scrapings—in this way she had often greeted throughout the year, and no one here had responded, for those who are once parted do not meet every day; and so this greeting had become a habit with her. But today two old Sparrows and a young one answered with a “peep” and the thrice repeated scrape with the left foot.

“Ah! Good-day! good-day!” They were two old ones from the nest and a little one of the family. “Do we meet here? It’s a grand place, but there’s not much to eat. This is ‘the beautiful.’ Peep!”

Many people came out of the side rooms where the beautiful marble statues stood and approached the grave where lay the great master who had created these works of art. All stood with enraptured faces round Thorwaldsen’s grave, and a few picked up the fallen rose-leaves and preserved them. They had come from afar: one from mighty England, others from Germany and France. The fairest of the ladies plucked one of the roses and hid it in her bosom. Then the Sparrows thought that the roses reigned here, and that the house had been built for their sake. That appeared to them to be really too much, but since all the people showed their love for the roses, they did not wish to be behindhand. “Peep!” they said, sweeping the ground with their tails, and blinking with one eye at the roses, they had not looked at them long before they recognized their old neighbours. And so they really were. The painter who had drawn the rose-bush near the ruined house, had afterwards obtained permission to dig it up, and had given it to the architect, for finer roses had never been seen. The architect had planted it upon Thorwaldsen’s grave, where it bloomed as an emblem of ‘the beautiful’ and yielded fragrant red rose-leaves to be carried as mementoes to distant lands.

“Have you obtained a situation here in the city?” asked the Sparrows. The Roses nodded; they recognised their grey neighbours and were pleased to see them again. “How glorious it is to live and to bloom, to see old friends again, and happy faces every day. It is as if every day were a festival.”

“Peep!” said the Sparrows. “Yes, they are really our old neighbours; we remember their origin near the pond. Peep! how they have got on. Yes, some succeed while they are asleep. Ah! there’s a faded leaf; I can see that quite plainly.”

And they pecked at it till it fell off. But the tree stood there fresher and greener than ever; the Roses bloomed in the sunshine on Thorwaldsen’s grave and were associated with his immortal name.

[ 1847 ]

The Happy Family

—

The biggest leaf here in the country is certainly the burdock leaf. Put one in front of your waist and it’s just like an apron, and if you lay it upon your head it is almost as good as an umbrella, for it is quite remarkably large. A burdock never grows alone—where there is one tree there are several more. It’s splendid to behold! and all this splendour is snails’ food—the great white snails, which the grand people in old times used to have made into fricassees; and when they had eaten them they would say,_“H’m, how good that is!” for they had the idea that it tasted delicious. These snails lived on burdock leaves, and that’s why burdocks were sown.

Now there was an old country estate, on which people ate snails no longer. The snails had died out, but the burdocks had not. These latter grew and grew in all the walks and on all the beds—-there was no stopping them: the place became a complete forest of burdocks. Here and there stood an apple or plum tree. Except for this, nobody would have thought a garden had been there. Everything was burdock, and among the burdocks lived the two last ancient snails.

They did not know themselves how old they were, but they could very well remember that there had been a great many more of them; that they had descended from a foreign family, and that the whole forest had been planted for them and theirs. They had never been away from home, but it was known to them that something existed in the world called the manor-house, and that there one was boiled, and one became black, and was laid upon a silver dish; but what was done afterward they did not know. Moreover, they could not imagine what that might be, being boiled and laid upon a silver dish; but it was stated to be fine, and particularly grand! Neither the beetle, nor the toad, nor the earthworm, whom they questioned about it, could give them any information, for none of their own kind had ever been boiled and laid on silver dishes.

The old white snails were the grandest in the world; they knew that! The forest was there for their sake, and the manor-house too, so that they might be boiled and laid on silver dishes.

They led a very retired and happy life, and as they themselves were childless, they had adopted a little common snail, which they brought up as their own child. But the little thing would not grow, for it was only a common snail, though the old people, and particularly the mother, declared one could easily see how he grew. And when the father could not see it, she requested him to feel the little snail’s shell, and he felt it, and acknowledged that she was right.

One day it rained very hard.

“Listen, how it’s drumming on the burdock leaves, rum-dum-dum! rum-dum-dum!” said the Father Snail.

“That’s what I call drops,” said the mother. “It’s coming straight down the stalks. You’ll see it will be wet here directly. I’m only glad that we have our good houses, and that the little one has his own. There has been more done for us than for any other creature; one can see very plainly that we are the grand folks of the world! We have houses from our birth, and the burdock forest has been planted for us: I should like to know how far it extends, and what lies beyond it”

“There’s nothing,” said the Father Snail, “that can be better than here at home! I have nothing at all to wish for.”

“Yes,” said the mother, “I should like to be taken to the manor-house and boiled and laid upon a silver dish; that has been done to all our ancestors, and you may be sure it’s quite a distinguished honour.”

“The manor-house has perhaps fallen in,” said the Father Snail, “or the forest of burdocks may have grown over it, so that the people can’t get out at all. You need not be in a hurry—but you always hurry so, and the little one is beginning just the same way. Has he not been creeping up that stalk these three days? My head quite aches when I look up at him.”

“You must not scold him,” said the Mother Snail. “He crawls very deliberately. We shall have much joy in him, and we old people have nothing else to live for. But have you ever thought where we shall get a wife for him? Don’t you think that farther in the wood there may be some more of our kind?”

“There are black snails there, I think,” said the old man, “black snails without houses! but they’re too vulgar. And they’re conceited, for all that. But we can give the commission to the ants: they run to and fro, as if they had business, they’re sure to know of a wife for our young gentleman.”

“I certainly know the most beautiful of brides,” said one of the Ants; “but I fear she would not do, for she is the Queen!”

“That does not matter,” said the two old Snails. “Has she a house?”

“She has a castle!” replied the Ant, “the most beautiful ant’s castle, with seven hundred passages.”

“Thank you,” said the Mother Snail; “our boy shall not go into an ant-hill. If you know of nothing better, we’ll give the commission to the white gnats; they fly far about in rain and sunshine, and they know the burdock wood, inside and outside.”

“We have a wife for him,” said the Gnats. “A hundred man-steps from here, a little snail with a house is sitting on a gooseberry-bush; she is quite alone, and old enough to marry. It’s only a hundred man-steps from here.”

“Yes, let her come to him,” said the old people. “He has a whole burdock forest, and she has only a bush.”

And so they brought the little maiden snail. Eight days passed before she arrived, but that was the rare circumstance about it, for by this one could see that she was of the right kind.

And then they had a wedding, Six glow-worms lighted as well as they could: with this exception it went very quietly, for the old snail people could not bear feasting and dissipation. But a capital speech was made by the Mother Snail. The father could not speak, he was so much moved. Then they gave the young couple the whole burdock forest for an inheritance, and said what they had always said, namely, that it was the best place in the world, and that the young people, if they lived honourably, and increased and multiplied, would someday be taken with their children to the manor-house, and boiled black, and laid upon a silver dish. And when the speech was finished, the old people crept into their houses and never came out again, for they slept.

The young snail pair now ruled in the forest, and had a numerous progeny. But as the young ones were never boiled and put into silver dishes, they concluded that the manor-house had fallen in, and that all the people in the world had died out. And as nobody contradicted them, they must have been right. And the rain fell down upon the burdock leaves to play the drum for them; and the sun shone to colour the burdock forest for them; and they were happy, very happy—the whole family was happy, uncommonly happy!

[ 1848 ]

In the Duck-Yard

—

A duck once arrived from Portugal. Some said she came from Spain, but that’s neither here nor there; it’s enough to know that she was called the Portuguese Duck, laid eggs, and was killed and cooked—that was her life. All those that crept out of her eggs were afterwards called Portuguese too, and that meant a great deal. Of the whole family there was now only one left in the duck-yard, a yard to which the chickens had access also, and where the cock was really cock of the walk.

“He annoys me with his loud crowing,” said the Portuguese Duck. “But he is very handsome, there’s no denying that, even though he isn’t a duckling. He ought to moderate his voice, but that’s an art which indicates a higher education, such as only the little singing birds in the lime trees in the next garden have received. How sweetly they sing! There is something so touching in their song—I call it Portugal. If I only had a little singing bird like that, I should be a good kind mother to it, for it’s in my blood, in my Portuguese blood.”

While she was still speaking, a little singing bird came head over heels from the roof into the yard. The cat was after it; but nevertheless the bird escaped with a broken wing—that’s why it fell into the duck—yard.

“That’s just like the cat, she’s a villain!” said the Portuguese Duck;“I know her from the time when I had children of my own. That such a creature should be allowed to live and wander about on the roofs! I don’t think such things happen in Portugal!”

She pitied the little Singing Bird, and the other ducks, who were not of Portuguese descent, also pitied him. “Poor little creature!” they said, as they came up one by one. “We certainly cannot sing,” they said, “but we have the rudiments of it or something of the sort inside us—we can feel that, even if we don’t talk about it.”

“But I will talk about it,” said the Portuguese Duck, “and I’ll do something for the little one; it’s only duty!”

So she got into the water-trough and beat the water so vigorously with her wings that the little Singing Bird was almost drowned by the bath he got; but the Duck meant well.

“That’s a good action,” she said; “let the others take example by it.”

“Peep!” said the little Bird; one of his wings was broken, and he found it difficult to shake himself; but he understood very well that the bath had been well-meant. “You are very kind-hearted, madam,” he said, though he had no desire for a second bath.

“I have never thought about my heart,” continued the Portuguese Duck, “but this much I know, that I love all my fellow creatures except the cat, and no one can expect me to love her, for she has eaten two of my little ones. But pray make yourself at home—it’s not difficult to do that. I am myself from foreign parts, as you may already have observed by my bearing and my feathers; my drake, however, is a native of this country, and not of my race: but I’m not proud. If anyone here in the yard can understand you, I may indeed say that I am that one.”

“She is quite full of Portulak!” [108]  said a common little duck, who was witty, and the other common ducks thought the word ‘Portulak’ excellent: it sounded like Portugal, and they nudged each other and said “Quack.” It was really too witty! And all the other ducks now made friends with the little Singing Bird.

“The Portuguese certainly has a greater command of language,” they said. “As for us, we don’t have such big words continually in our beaks, but our sympathy is just as great. Even if we do nothing for you, we will go about quietly with you, and that we think is the best.”

“You have a sweet voice,” said one of the oldest. “It must be a beautiful feeling to be able to give pleasure to so many creatures as you can do. It is true I do not understand your singing, and therefore I keep my beak shut; that is surely better than talking nonsense to you, as a great many others do.”

“Don’t bother him so,” said the Portuguese Duck, “he wants rest and nursing. Would you like me to give you another bath, my little Singing Bird?”

“Oh, no! pray let me remain dry!” he begged.

“The water cure is the only one that does me any good when I am not well,” answered the Portuguese. “Distraction is a good thing too. The fowls next door will soon come and pay a visit, and among them are two Cochin Chinas. They wear feather breeches, are well educated, and have been imported; therefore they stand higher in my esteem than the others.”

The fowls came and with them the Cock; today he was polite enough not to be rude. “You are a real singing bird!” he said, “and you get what there is to be got out of such a small voice as yours. But you should have more steam power, so that everyone may hear you are of the male sex.”

The two Cochin Chinas were quite charmed with the Singing Bird’s appearance; he looked very rumpled after the bath he had had, so that he seemed to them almost like a Cochin China chick. “He’s charming!” they exclaimed, and entered into conversation with him, speaking only in whispers, and in the Pa dialect, which is aristocratic Chinese.

“We are of your race,” they said; “the ducks, even the Portuguese one, are swimming birds, as you will no doubt have observed. You don’t know us yet; very few know us or take the trouble to do so—not even any of the fowls, although we are born to sit a step higher on the ladder than most of the rest. But that does not trouble us. We quietly go our way amongst the others, whose principles are certainly not ours, for we always look at things from their favourable side, and only speak of what is good, though it is difficult to find something where there is nothing. Besides us two and the cock, there is no one in the whole poultry-yard who is both talented and polite. That cannot even be said of the inhabitants of the duck-yard. We warn you, little Singing Bird! Don’t trust that one there with the short feathers in her tail; she’s cunning. The pied one there, with the crooked stripes on her wings is quarrelsome, and will always have the last word, although she’s generally in the wrong. The fat duck over there speaks ill of everyone; that is contrary to our nature—if we cannot speak well of a person, we hold our beaks. The Portuguese Duck is the only one who has a little education and with whom one can associate, but she’s passionate, and talks too much about Portugal.”

“What can those two Cochin Chinas always be whispering about?” whispered one duck to its mate, “they annoy me; we have never spoken to them.”

Just then the Drake came up. He thought the Singing Bird was a sparrow. “Well, I don’t know the difference,” he said, “and it’s all the same. He’s only a plaything, and if you have them—why, you have them.”

“Don’t attach any importance to what he says,” whispered the Portuguese Duck. “He’s very respectable in business matters, and with him business goes before everything else. But now I shall lie down for a rest. That is a duty we owe ourselves so that we may become nice and fat, if we are to be stuffed with apples and plums.”

So she lay down in the sun and blinked one eye; she lay very comfortably, felt very comfortable, and, moreover, slept very comfortably too.

The little Singing Bird busied himself with his broken wing, and at last he lay down too, pressing himself close to his protectress; the sun shone warm and bright, and he had found a very good place.

But the fowls from next door were wide awake and went about scratching up the earth; to tell the truth, they had paid the visit simply and solely for the sake of getting something to eat. The Cochin Chinas were the first to leave the duck-yard; the other fowls soon followed. The witty duckling said of the Portuguese that the old lady was fast getting into her second ducklinghood. The other ducks laughed at this till they cackled. “Ducklinghood!” they whispered; “She really is too funny!” Then they also repeated the former joke about Portulak—it was too amusing, they declared, and then they lay down.

When they had lain there awhile, something was suddenly thrown into the duck-yard for them to eat. It came down with such a twhack! that the whole company started up from their sleep and flapped their wings; the Portuguese awoke too, and rolling over on her other side, pressed the little Singing Bird very hard.

“Peep!” he said; “you trod very hard upon me, madam!”

“Well, why do you get in my way?” she cried. “You shouldn’t be so touchy. I have nerves too, but I have never yet said ‘Peep.’”

“Don’t be angry!” said the little bird. “The ‘peep’ dropped from my beak quite unawares.”

The Portuguese did not stop to listen to him, but pounced down upon the food and made a good meal. When this was finished, and she lay down again, the little singing-bird came up to her and wanted to be amiable. So it sang:

“I’ll fly so far,

Tra-la-la-la!

Singing so fine

Of that heart of thine!”

“Now I want to rest after my dinner,” said the Portuguese. “You must conform to the rules of the house. I want to sleep now.”

The little Singing Bird was quite abashed, for he had meant well. When madam awoke later on, he again stood before her with a grain of corn that he had found. He laid it at her feet, but as she had not slept well, she was, of course, in a very bad temper.

“Give that to a chick!” she said, “and don’t be always standing in my way!”

“Why are you angry with me?” answered the little bird. “What did I do?”

“Do?” repeated the Portuguese Duck. “Your mode of expression is not very polite; a fact to which I must call your attention.”

“It was all sunshine here yesterday,” said the little bird; “today there is thunder in the air.”

“You don’t know much about the weather,” retorted the Duck. “The day is not ended yet. Don’t stand there like a fool!”

“But you are looking at me just like the wicked eyes did when I fell down into the yard.”

“You impudent fellow!” said the Portuguese Duck, “do you compare me with the cat, that beast of prey? There is not a drop of bad blood in me; I have promised to take care of you, and I will teach you good manners!”

With that she bit off the Singing Bird’s head, and he lay there dead.

“What does that mean?” she said. “Couldn’t he bear even that? Well, then he was certainly not made for this world. I have been a mother to him, I know that, for I have a good heart.”

Then the Cock from next door put his head into the yard and crowed with steam-engine power.

“You’ll kill me with your crowing,” she cried. “It’s all your fault; he lost his head, and I am very near losing mine, too.”

“There’s not much lying where he fell,” observed the Cock.

“Speak of him with respect!” answered the Portuguese Duck. “He had good manners, a voice, and an excellent education. He was affectionate and tender, and that is as becoming to animals as to so-called human beings.”

All the ducks crowded round the little dead Singing Bird. Ducks have strong passions whether they feel envy or pity, and as there was nothing here to envy, pity made its appearance, even in the two Cochin Chinas. “We shall never get such a singing bird again; he was almost a Cochin China,” they whispered; and then they wept till they clucked, and all the fowls clucked too, but the ducks went about with the reddest eyes of all.

“We have hearts!” they said; “that no one can deny.”

“Hearts!” repeated the Portuguese; “yes, that we have, almost as much as in Portugal.”

“Now let’s think of getting something in our inside!” said the drake; “that’s of most importance. Even if one of our toys has come to bits, we’ve plenty left!”

[ 1861 ]

The Shadow

—

It is in the hot lands that the sun burns, sure enough! There the people become quite mahogany brown, aye, and in the hottest lands they are burnt to Negroes. But now it was only to the hot lands that a learned man had come from the cold; there he thought that he could run about just as when at home, but he soon found out his mistake.

He, and all sensible folks, were obliged to stay indoors; the window-shutters and doors were closed the whole day; it looked as if the whole house slept, or there was no one at home.

The narrow street, with the high houses, was built so that the sunshine must fall there from morning till evening—it was really not to be borne.

The learned man from the cold lands—he was a young man, and seemed to be a clever man—sat in a glowing oven; it took effect on him, he became quite meagre—even his shadow shrivelled and shrank, for the sun had also an effect on it. Not until evening, when the sun was down, did they begin to freshen up again.

In the warm lands every window has a balcony, and the people came out on all the balconies in the street—for one must have air, even if one is accustomed to be mahogany! [40] It was lively both up and down the street. Tailors, and shoemakers, and all the folks, moved out into the street; chairs and tables were brought forth; and candles burned—yes, above a thousand lights were burning; and some talked and others sang, and people walked and church bells rang, and asses went along with a dingle-dingle-dong! for they too had bells on. The street boys were screaming and hooting, and shouting and shooting, with firecrackers and detonating balls: and there came corpse bearers and hood wearers—for there were funerals with psalm and hymn; and then the din of carriages driving and company arriving—yes, it was, in truth, lively enough down in the street. Only in that single house, which stood opposite that in which the learned foreigner lived, it was quite still; and yet someone lived there, for there stood flowers in the balcony—they grew so well in the sun’s heat!—and that they could not do unless they were watered; and someone must water them—there must be somebody there. The door opposite was also opened late in the evening, but it was dark within, at least in the front room; further in there was heard the sound of music. The learned foreigner thought it quite marvellous, but now—it might be that he only imagined it, for he found everything marvellous out there in the warm lands, if there had only been no sun. The stranger’s landlord said that he didn’t know who had taken the house opposite, one saw no person about, and as to the music, it appeared to him to be extremely tiresome. “It is as if someone sat there and practised a piece that he could not master—always the same piece. ‘I shall master it!’ says he; but yet he cannot master it, however long he plays.”

One night the stranger awoke—he slept with the doors of the balcony open—the curtain before it was raised by the wind, and he thought that a strange lustre came from the opposite neighbour’s house; all the flowers shone like flames, in the most beautiful colours, and in the midst of the flowers stood a slender, graceful maiden—it was as if she also shone; the light really hurt his eyes. He now opened them quite wide—yes, he was quite awake; with one spring he was on the floor; he crept gently behind the curtain, but the maiden was gone; the flowers shone no longer, but there they stood, fresh and blooming as ever: the door was ajar, and, far within, the music sounded so soft and delightful, one could really melt away in sweet thoughts from it. Yet it was like a piece of enchantment. And who lived there? Where was the actual entrance? The whole of the ground-floor was a row of shops, and people could not always be running through there.

One evening, the stranger sat out on the balcony. The light burned in the room behind him; and thus it was quite natural that his shadow should fall on his opposite neighbour’s wall. Yes, there it sat, directly opposite, between the flowers on the balcony; and when the stranger moved, the shadow also moved: for that it always does.

“I think my shadow is the only living thing one sees over there,” said the Learned Man. “See! how nicely it sits between the flowers. The door stands half-open: now the shadow should be cunning, and go into the room, look about, and then come and tell me what it had seen. Come, now! be useful, and do me a service,” said he, in jest. “Have the kindness to step in. Now! aft thou going?” and then he nodded to the Shadow, and the Shadow nodded again. “Well, then, go! but don’t stay away.”

The stranger rose, and his Shadow on their opposite neighbour’s balcony rose also; the stranger turned round, and the Shadow also turned round. Yes! if anyone had paid particular attention to it, they would have seen, quite distinctly^ that the Shadow went in through the half-open balcony door of their opposite neighbour, just as the stranger went into his own room, and let the long curtain fall down after him.

Next morning, the Learned Man went out to drink coffee and read the newspapers.

“What is that?” said he, as he came out into the sunshine. “I have no shadow! So, then, it has actually gone last night, and not come again. That is really tiresome!”

This annoyed him: not so much because the shadow was gone, but because he knew there was a story about a man without a shadow. [41] It was known to everybody at home, in the cold lands; and if the Learned Man now came there and told his story, they would say that he was imitating it, and he did not wish to have that said of him. He would, therefore, not talk about it at all; and that was wisely decided.

In the evening, he went out again on the balcony. He had placed the light directly behind him, for he knew that the shadow always likes to have its master for a screen, but he could not entice it. He made himself little; he made himself great: but no shadow came again. He said, “Hem! hem!” but that was of no use either.

It was vexatious; but in the warm lands everything grows so quickly. After the lapse of eight days he observed, to his great joy, that a new shadow came in the sunshine—the roots must have remained. In the course of three weeks he had a very fair shadow, which, when he set out for his home in the northern lands, grew more and more in the journey, so that at last it was so long and so large that it was more than sufficient.

The Learned Man then came home, and he wrote books about what was true in the world, and about what was good, and what was beautiful; and there passed days and years—yes! many years passed away.

One evening, as he was sitting in his room, there was a gentle knocking at the door.

“Come in!” said he; but no one came in; so he opened the door, and there stood before him a man, so an extremely lean that it made him feel quite uncomfortable. As to the rest, the man was very finely dressed—he must be a man of distinction.

“Whom have I the honour of speaking to?” asked the Learned Man.

“Yes! I thought as much,” said the fine man. “I thought you would not know me. I have got so much body. I have even got flesh and clothes. You certainly never thought of seeing me so well off. Do you not know your old Shadow? You certainly thought I should never more return. Things have gone on well with me since I was last with you. I have, in all respects, become very well off. Shall I purchase my freedom from service? If so, I can do it;” and then he rattled a whole bunch of valuable seals that hung on his watch-chain, and he stuck his hand in the thick gold chain he wore around his neck. And how all his fingers glittered with diamond rings; and all were real gems!

“Nay, I cannot recover from my surprise!” said the Learned Man: “what is the meaning of all this?”

“It is nothing common,” said the Shadow: “but you yourself do not belong to the common order; and I, as you well know, have from a child followed in your footsteps. As soon as you found I was capable to go out alone in the world, I went my own way. I am in the most brilliant circumstances, but a sort of desire came over me to see you once more before you die—you will die, I suppose? I also wished to see this land again—for you know we always love our native land. I know you have got another Shadow again; have I anything to pay to it or you? If so, you will oblige me by saying what it is.”

“Nay, is it really thou?” said the Learned Man: “it is most remarkable. I never imagined that one’s old shadow could come again as a man.”

“Tell me what I have to pay,” said the Shadow; “for I don’t like to be in any sort of debt.”

“How can you talk so?” said the Learned Man; “what debt is there to talk about? Be as free as anyone else. I am extremely glad to hear of thy good fortune: sit down, old friend, and tell me a little how it has gone with thee, and what thou hast seen at our opposite neighbour’s there—in the warm lands.”

“Yes, I will tell you all about it,” said the Shadow, and sat down: “but then you must also promise me, that, wherever you may meet me, you will never say to anyone here in the town that I have been your shadow. I intend to get betrothed, for I could support more than one family.”

“Be quite at thy ease about that,” said the Learned Man; “I will tell no one who you really are. Here is my hand—I promise, and a word is sufficient between man and man.”

“Between man and shadow,” said the Shadow; for he was, of course, obliged to speak like that.

It was really quite astonishing how much of a human being he had become. He was dressed entirely in black, and of the very finest cloth; he had patent leather boots, and a hat that could be folded together, so that it was bare crown and brim; not to speak of what we already know he had—seals, gold neck-chain, and diamond rings. The Shadow was, in fact, extraordinarily well dressed, and this made a man of him.

“Now I shall tell you my adventures,” said the Shadow; and then he sat, placing his foot with the polished leather boot as firmly as possible on the arm of the Learned Man’s new shadow, which lay like a poodle-dog at his feet. Now this was perhaps from arrogance; or perhaps so that the new shadow might stick to him. But the shadow on the ground remained very still, in order that he might hear all that passed: he wished to know how he also could get free and become his own master.

“Do you know who lived in our opposite neighbour’s house?” said the Shadow; “it was the most charming of all beings, it was Poetry! I was there for three weeks, and that has as much effect as if one had lived three thousand years, and read all that was composed and written; that is what I say, and it is right. I have seen everything, and I know everything!”

“Poetry!” cried the Learned Man; “yes, yes, she often lives as a hermit in great cities! Poetry! yes, I have seen her—a single, short moment, but sleep came into my eyes! She stood on the balcony and shone as the aurora borealis shines. Go on, go on!—thou wert on the balcony, and went through the doorway, and then—”

“Then I was in the antechamber,” said the Shadow. “You always sat and looked over to the antechamber. There was no light; there was a sort of twilight, but the one door stood open directly opposite the other through a long row of rooms and salons, and there it was lighted up. I should have been completely killed if I had gone over to the maiden; but I was circumspect, I took time to think, and that’s what one must always do.”

“And what didst thou then see?” asked the Learned Man.

“I saw everything, and I shall tell all to you; but—it is no pride on my part—as a free man, and with the knowledge I have, not to speak of my position in life, my excellent circumstances—I wish you would speak to me a little more respectfully. I should very much prefer you to address me as you rather than thou!” [42]

“I beg your pardon,” said the Learned Man; “it is an old habit with me. You are perfectly right, and I shall remember it; but now you must tell me all that you saw!”

“Everything!” said the Shadow, “for I saw everything, and I know everything!”

“How did it look in the inner rooms?” asked the Learned Man. “Were they like the cool grove? Were they like a holy temple? Were the halls like the starry heavens seen from the mountaintops?”

“Everything was there!” said the Shadow. “I did not go quite in; I remained in the twilight of the outer room, but that was an excellent position. I saw everything, and I know everything! I have been in the antechamber at the Court of Poetry.”

“But what did you see? Did all the gods of the olden times pass through the large salons? Did the old heroes combat there? Did sweet children play there, and relate their dreams?”

“I tell you I was there, and you can conceive that I saw everything there was to be seen. If you had gone there, you would not have remained a human being, but I became one! At the same time I learned to understand my inner being and the relationship I had with Poetry. When I was still with you I never thought of such things; but you know that whenever the sun rose or set I was often wonderfully tall, and in the moonlight I was almost more noticeable than yourself. At that time I did not understand my nature; it was revealed to me in the antechamber! I became a man! I came out matured. But you were no longer in the warm lands. As a man, I was ashamed to go about as I did. I was in want of boots, of clothes, of the whole human varnish by which a man is known. I took my way—I can tell you, for you will not put it in any book—I took my way to the cake woman—I hid myself behind her; the woman didn’t know how much she concealed. I went out first in the evening; I ran about the streets in the moonlight; I stretched myself long up the walls—it tickles the back so delightfully! I ran up, and I ran down, peeped through the highest windows, into the grand halls, and into the attics. I saw what no one else saw, what no one was supposed to see. It is really a wicked world after all; I would not care to be a man if it were not the generally accepted idea that it is an honour to be one!

“I saw the most miserable things going on between husbands and wives, parents and children—sweet, incomparable children. I saw,” said the Shadow, “what no one knows, but which all would so much like to know: their neighbour’s evil deeds. Had I written a newspaper, how eagerly it would have been read! but I wrote direct to the persons themselves, and in every town I came I created terror. They were so afraid of me, and yet they were so excessively fond of me. Professors made me a professor; tailors gave me new clothes (I am well provided); coiners made money for me; and the women said I was so handsome! and so I became the man I am. And I now bid you farewell—here is my card—I live on the sunny side of the street, and am always at home in rainy weather!” And so away went the Shadow.

“That was most extraordinary!” said the Learned Man.

Years and days passed away, and the Shadow came again.

“How goes it?” said the Shadow.

“Alas!” said the Learned Man, “I write about the true, and the good, and the beautiful, but no one cares to hear such things! I am in despair, for I take it so much to heart!”

“But I don’t!” said the Shadow; “I grow strong and fat as everyone should try to be. You don’t understand the world, and that makes you ill—you must travel. I am going to make a tour this summer; will you go with me? I should like to have a travelling companion; will you come as my shadow? It would be a great pleasure to me, and I will pay your expenses.”

“Nay, that is going a little too far!” said the Learned Man.

“That is a matter of opinion,” said the Shadow. “At all events, a journey will do you good, and if you will be my shadow, then all your journey shall be paid.”

“Nay, the idea is too mad!” said the Learned Man.

“But so is the world,” said the shadow, “and it will remain so.”

With that he went away.

Everything went wrong with the Learned Man; sorrow and trouble followed him, and what he wrote about the true, the good, and the beautiful, was like casting pearls before swine. At length he fell ill.

“You really look like a shadow,” people said to him, and the Learned Man shuddered, for he had his own thoughts on the matter.

“You must go and drink the waters,” said the shadow, who one day paid him a visit. “There is no other help for you. I will take you with me for old acquaintance’ sake. I will pay your expenses, and you shall write a description of the journey to entertain me on the way. I want to go to a watering-place; my beard does not grow quite as it ought, which is as bad as being ill, for one must have a beard. Now you be reasonable and accept the offer; we shall travel as comrades!”

And so they travelled; the Shadow was now master, and the master was the Shadow. They drove, they rode, and they and walked together, side by side, before or behind, according to the position of the sun. The shadow always took care to take the place of honour; the learned man hardly noticed it, for he had a very kind heart and exceedingly mild and friendly manners.

One day the master said to the Shadow, “We have grown up together from our childhood, and now that we have become travelling companions, shall we not drink to our good fellowship, and say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to each other?”

“What you say,” said the Shadow, who was now really the master, “is very kind and straightforward; I will now be just as kind and straightforward. You, who are a learned man, know very well how strange nature is. There are some people who cannot bear the smell of brown paper—it makes them ill, while it makes others’ flesh creep to hear a pane of glass scratched with a nail; I myself have a similar feeling when I hear you address me as ‘thou.’ I feel as though I were thrust back into my old position with you—pressed to the earth. You see it is only a matter of feeling, not pride. I cannot let you say ‘thou’ to me, but I will willingly call you ‘thou,’ and so your wish will be half fulfilled.”

And now the Shadow called its former master “thou.” “That’s going rather too far,” thought the latter, “that I have to say ‘you’ to him, while he says ‘thou’ to me.” But he was obliged to put up with it.

So they came to a watering-place where there were many strangers, and amongst them was a princess whose malady consisted in being too sharp-sighted, which made everyone very uneasy.

She directly observed that the stranger who had just come was quite a different sort of person to all the others: “He has come here in order to get his beard to grow, they say; but I see the real cause: he cannot cast a shadow.”

Then she became very curious on the matter, and one day, while on the promenade, she entered into conversation with the strange gentleman. Being a princess, she was not obliged to stand upon much ceremony, so she said to him without hesitation, “Your complaint is, that you cannot cast a shadow.”

“Your royal highness must be well on the road to recovery,” said the shadow. “I know that your illness consists in seeing too sharply, but that is past, and you are cured. I have a very uncommon shadow. Don’t you see the person who always walks next to me? Other people have common shadows, but I don’t like what is common. People often give their servants better cloth for their liveries than they wear themselves, and so I had my shadow trimmed up into a man; as you see, I have even given him a shadow. It costs a great deal, but I like to have something uncommon.”

“What!” thought the Princess, “should I really be cured! These baths are the best that exist; the waters have quite marvellous powers nowadays. But I shall not leave the place, for it now begins to be amusing here. I am extremely fond of that stranger. Would that his beard should not grow! for in that case he will leave us.”

In the evening the Princess and the Shadow danced together in the great ballroom. She was light, but he was still lighter; she had never had such a partner in the dance. She told him from what land she came, and he knew that land; he had been there, but then she was not at home; he had looked in at the window above and below—he had learned one thing and another, and so he could answer the Princess, and make allusions that greatly astonished her. She thought he must be the cleverest man in the world, and she felt such respect for what he knew! And when she danced with him again she fell in love with him; and that the Shadow perceived very well, for she almost pierced him through with her eyes. They danced together once more, and she was near to declaring her love, but she was discreet, and thought of her country and her kingdom and of the many people over whom she was to reign.

“He is a wise man,” said she to herself, “it is well; and he dances delightfully—that is also good. But I wonder whether he has good sound knowledge. That is just as important; he must be examined.”

And she immediately put a difficult question to him which she herself could not have answered; and the Shadow pulled a long face

“You cannot answer that?” said the Princess.

“They belong to my childhood’s learning,” said the Shadow. “I really believe my shadow, standing by the door there, could answer that.”

“Your shadow!” said the Princess; “that would indeed be marvellous!”

“I will not say for a certainty that he can,” said the Shadow, “but I should almost think so. He has followed me now for so many years, and he has heard so much from me, that I should think so. But your royal highness will permit me to draw your attention to the fact that he is so proud of passing for a man that if he is to be put into a good humour—and that he must be to answer correctly—he should be treated just like a human being.”

“Oh! I like that!” said the Princess.

So she went to the Learned Man by the door, and she spoke with him about the sun and the moon, and about persons out of and in the world, and he answered with wisdom and prudence.

“What a man that must be, who has such a clever shadow!” she thought. “It would be a real blessing for my people and my kingdom if I chose him for my consort. I will do so!”

They were soon agreed, both the Princess and the Shadow; but no one was to know about it before she returned to her own kingdom.

“No one shall know—not even my shadow!” said the Shadow; and for that he had special reasons.

Now they were in the country where the Princess ruled when she was at home.

“Listen, my good friend!” said the Shadow to the Learned Man. “I have now become as happy and powerful as anyone can become; I will, therefore, do something special for thee! Thou shalt always live with me in the palace, drive with me in my royal carriage, and have ten thousand pounds a-year; but then thou must submit to be called ‘shadow’ by all and everyone; thou must not say that thou hast ever been a man; and once a year, when I sit on the balcony in the sunshine, thou must lie at my feet, as befits a shadow! I must tell thee: I am going to marry the Princess, and the wedding will take place this evening!”

“No, this is going too far!” said the Learned Man; “I will not have it; I will not do it! It means cheating the whole country and the Princess too! I will tell everything!—that I am the man and that you are the Shadow merely dressed up in men’s clothes.”

“There is no one who will believe it!” said the Shadow; “be reasonable, or I will call the guard!”

“I will go directly to the Princess!” said the Learned Man.

“But I will go first!” said the Shadow, “and thou wilt go to prison!” And it was so too, for the guards obeyed the one whom they knew the Princess was going to marry.

“You are trembling,” said the Princess when the Shadow came into her room. “Has anything happened? You must not be ill today, just as we are going to get married.”

“I have experienced the most terrible thing that can happen,” said the Shadow. “Just fancy—such a poor shadow brain cannot stand much—just fancy, my shadow has gone mad; he imagines that he has become a man, and that—only just fancy!—that I am his shadow.”

“How terrible!” said the Princess. “He is locked up, I suppose?”

“Of course; I fear he will never recover.”

“Poor shadow!” cried the Princess. “He is very unfortunate; it would be a real kindness to rid him of his life. And if I consider the matter rightly—how in our time the people are only too ready to take the part of the lower against the higher—it appears to me necessary to have him quietly put out of the way.”

“That’s really hard, for he was a faithful servant,” said the Shadow, and he pretended to sigh.

“You are a noble character!” said the Princess, and bowed before him.

In the evening the whole city was illuminated, and cannon were fired “Boom!”—and the soldiers presented arms. That was a wedding! The Princess and the Shadow came out upon the balcony to show themselves and receive another “Hurrah!”

The Learned Man heard nothing of all these festivities, for he had already been executed.

[ 1847 ]

The Snail and the Rose-Tree

—

Around the garden ran a hedge of hazels; beyond this hedge lay fields and meadows, wherein were cows and sheep; but in the midst of the garden stood a blooming Rose-tree; and under this Rose-tree lived a Snail, who had a good deal in his shell—namely, himself.

“Wait till my time comes!” he said: “I shall do something more than produce roses, bear nuts, or give milk, like the Rose-tree, the hazel-bush, and the cows!”

“I expect a great deal of you,” said the Rose-tree. “But may I ask when it will appear?”

“I take my time,” replied the Snail. “You’re always in such a hurry. You don’t rouse people’s interest by suspense.”

When the next year came, the Snail lay almost in the same spot, in the sunshine under the Rose-tree, which was again budding and bearing roses as fresh and beautiful as ever. The snail crept half out of his shell, stretched out his horns, and drew them in again.

“Everything is just as it was last year! No progress at all; the rose-tree sticks to its roses and gets no farther.”

The summer and the autumn passed; the rose-tree bore roses and buds till the snow fell and the weather became raw and wet; then it bent down its head, and the snail crept into the ground.

A new year began; and the roses came out, and the Snail came out also.

“You’re an old Rose-tree now!” said the Snail. “You must make haste and come to an end, for you have given the world all that was in you: whether it was of any use is a question that I have had no time to consider; but so much is clear and plain, that you have done nothing at all for your own development, or you would have produced something else. How can you answer for that? In a little time you will be nothing at all but a stick. Do you understand what I say?”

“You alarm me!” replied the Rose-tree. “I never thought of that at all.”

“No, you have not taken the trouble to consider anything. Have you ever given an account to yourself, why you bloomed, and how it is that your blooming comes about—why it is thus, and not otherwise?”

“No,” answered the Rose-tree. “I bloomed in gladness, because I could not do anything else. The sun shone and warmed me, and the air refreshed me. I drank the pure dew and the fresh rain, and I lived, I breathed. Out of the earth there arose a power within me; from above there came down a strength: I perceived a new ever-increasing happiness, and consequently I was obliged to bloom over and over again; that has been my life; I could not do otherwise.”

“You have led a pleasant life,” observed the Snail.

“Certainly. Everything I have was given to me,” said the Rose-tree. “But more still was given to you. You are one of those deep thoughtful characters, one of those highly gifted spirits, which will cause the world to marvel.”

“I’ve no intention of doing anything of the kind,” cried the Snail. “The world is nothing to me. What have I to do with the world? I have enough of myself and in myself.”

“But must we not all, here on earth, give to others the best we have, and offer what lies in our power? Certainly I have only given roses. But you—you who have been so richly gifted—what have you given to the world? what do you intend to give?”

“What have I given—what do I intend to give? I spit at it. It’s worth nothing. It’s no business of mine. Continue to give your roses, if you like: you can’t do any better. Let the hazel-bush bear nuts, and the cows and the ewes give milk: they have their public; but I have mine within myself—I retire within myself, and there I remain. The world is nothing to me.” And so saying the Snail retired into his house, and closed up the entrance after him.

“That is very sad!” said the Rose-tree. “I cannot creep into myself, even if I wished it; I must continue to produce roses. They drop their leaves, and are blown away by the wind. But I saw how a rose was laid in the matron’s hymn-book, and one of my roses had a place on the bosom of a fair young girl, and another was kissed by the lips of a child in the full joy of life. That did me good; it was a real blessing. That’s my remembrance—my life!”

And the Rose-tree went on blooming in innocence, while the Snail lay and idled away his time in his house—the world did not concern him.

And years rolled by.

The Snail had become dust in the dust, and the Rose-tree was earth in the earth; the rose of remembrance in the hymn-book was faded, but in the garden bloomed fresh rose-trees, and under the trees lay new snails; and these still crept into their houses, and spat at the world, for it did not concern them.

Suppose we begin the story again, and read it right through. It will never alter.

[ 1861 ]

The Buckwheat

—

When you pass by a field of Buckwheat after a thunderstorm you will often find it looking blackened and singed, as if a flame of fire had swept over it. Peasants say: “The lightning has caused this.” But why did the lightning blacken the Buckwheat? I will tell you what I heard from the sparrow, who was told by an old Willow Tree standing near a field of Buckwheat.

It was a large imposing old Willow Tree, although somewhat crippled by old age, and split in the middle; grass and a bramble-bush grew in the cleft; the tree was bending down its branches so that they nearly touched the ground, hanging down like long green hair. On all the neighbouring fields grew corn, not only rye and barley, but also oats—splendid oats indeed, which look, when they are ripe, like many little yellow canary-birds on a branch. The corn was lovely to look at, and the fuller the ears were the lower they were hanging down, as if in godly humility. Close by, right opposite to the old Willow Tree, was also a field of Buckwheat. The Buckwheat did not bend down like the other corn, but stood proudly and stiffly upright.

“I am certainly as well off as the corn,” it said, “I am in addition to this much better-looking; my flowers are as beautiful as the blossoms of the apple tree; it must be a pleasure to look at me and my companions. Do you know anything more magnificent than we are, old Willow Tree?”

The Willow Tree nodded its head, as if it wished to say: “Yes, certainly, I do.” The Buckwheat, full of pride, spread its leaves and said: “This stupid old tree! It is so old that grass is growing out of its trunk.”

Soon a heavy thunder-storm arose; all the flowers in the field folded their leaves or bowed their little heads down, while the storm passed over them; but the Buckwheat remained proudly standing upright.

“Bend your head, as we do,” said the flowers.

“Why should I?” asked the Buckwheat.

“Bend your head, as we do,” said the Corn. “The angel of the storm is approaching; his wings reach from the clouds down to the ground; he will cut you in two, ere you can cry for mercy.”

“But I refuse to bend my head,” said the Buckwheat.

“Close up your flowers and bend down your leaves,” cried the old Willow Tree. “Do not look up at the lightning when it tears the clouds; even mankind can’t do that, for while a flash of lightning lasts one can look into heaven, and that dazzles even mankind; what would then happen to us, the plants of the earth, which are so greatly inferior to men, if we dared do so?”

“Why greatly inferior?” said the Buckwheat. “If you cannot give a better reason, I will look up into heaven.” And in its boundless pride and presumption it did look up. Suddenly came a flash of lightning, that was so strong that it seemed for a moment as if the whole world was in flames.

When the storm had abated, the Flowers and the Corn stood refreshed by the rain in the pure, still air; but the Buckwheat was burned by the lightning, and had become a dead, useless weed.

The wind moved the branches of the old Willow Tree, so that large drops of water fell down from its green leaves, as if the tree was weeping; and the Sparrows asked it, “Why do you cry? Blessings are showered upon us all; look how the sun shines, and how the clouds sail on! Do you not smell the sweet fragrance of flowers and bushes? Why do you cry, old Willow Tree?”

Then the Willow Tree told them of the pride of the Buckwheat, of its presumption, and of the punishment which it had to suffer. I who have told you this story have heard it from the Sparrows; they related it to me one night when I had asked them for a tale.

[ 1842 ]

The Puppet-Show Man

—

On board the steamer was an elderly man with such a pleasant face, that, if it did not belie him, he must have been the happiest man on earth. And he declared he was, I heard it myself out of his own mouth. He was a Dane, the manager of a travelling theatre. He had all his company with him in a great big box, for he was a puppet showman His innate cheerfulness, he said, had been enlightened by a Polytechnic student, and the operation had made him completely happy.

I did not understand all this at first, but he afterwards explained the whole story to me, and here it is in his own words:

•  •  •

It was in the little town of Slagelse; I was giving a performance in the hall of the principal inn, and had a brilliant audience—an entirely juvenile one, with the exception of a couple of old matrons.

All at once a person dressed in black, looking like a student, enters the hall, takes a seat, laughs out loud at the right places and applauds just at the proper time. He was quite an uncommon spectator. I was very anxious to know what he was, and I learned that he was a student from the Polytechnic Institute at Copenhagen, who had been sent out to teach the people in the provinces. Punctually at eight o’clock my performance was over, for children have to go to bed early, and the convenience of one’s audience has to be consulted.

At nine o’clock the student began his lecture and experiments, and now I formed part of his audience. It was wonderful to hear and to see. The greater part of it was beyond my scope, but still it made me think that, if men can find out as much as that, they ought to be able to hold out longer on earth than they do now. They were little miracles that he performed, and yet all was done so easily and so naturally. In the days of Moses and the Prophets a Polytechnic student like that would have been one of the sages of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.

I did not sleep the whole night, and when I gave another performance on the following evening and the student was there again, I was overflowing with good spirits.

I have heard of an actor who when playing a lover’s part always thought of only one lady in the audience; he played to her and forgot the rest of the house. Well, the Polytechnic student was my “she,” my only spectator, to whom alone I played.

At the end of the performance all the puppets were called before the curtain, and I was invited by the Polytechnic student to go and take a glass of wine in his room; he spoke of my comedies and I of his science, and I think we were both equally delighted. Perhaps I ought not to say equally, for there was a good deal that he did that he could not always explain—for instance, the fact of a piece of iron becoming magnetic by falling through a spiral. How’s that, eh? The spirit enters into it; but where does the spirit come from? I think it’s just as it is with people: Providence makes them turn a somersault through the spiral of time, the spirit enters into them, and hey presto! you have a Napoleon, a Luther, or some similar individual.

“The whole world is a series of miracles,” said the student, “but we are so used to them that we call them every-day matters.” He went on explaining until it seemed as if the top of my head were coming off, and I honestly confessed that if I had not already been an old fellow, I would have entered the Polytechnic Institute at once and learned to examine the world a bit more closely—in spite of my being one of the happiest of men.

“One of the happiest!” exclaimed the student, and he seemed to relish my words. “Are you really happy?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am happy, and I am welcomed in every town that I enter with my company. It is true I have certainly one wish, and not infrequently it lies like a mountain of lead upon my good spirits: I should like to be the manager of a live troop, of a real company of actors.”

“I understand. You wish to have life blown into your puppets, so that they may become real actors and you their manager,” he said, “Do you think you would be perfectly happy then?”

He did not think so, and we discussed all the pros and cons, and at the end differed as much as ever. And we drank to each other’s health in excellent wine, but there was some magic in it, or I would certainly have been tipsy. But I was not; I remained clear-sighted, and the room was filled with sunshine, whilst sunshine also streamed from the eyes of the Polytechnic student. It made me think of the gods of the ancients, and of their eternal youth, when they still went about on earth and visited us mortals; I told him that too and he smiled—and then I could have sworn that he was a god in disguise, or at least belonging to the family. And he was too! My greatest wish was to be realised; the puppets were to come to life, and I was to be the manager of a living company. After he had promised this we drank to each other’s health, and emptied our glasses. Then he packed all my puppets in the box, strapped it on my back, and let me fall through a spiral. I can still hear myself turning somersaults, and there I lay on the ground—I know that quite well—and the whole company jumped out of the box. The spirit had entered into us all; all the puppets had become distinguished artists, for they said so themselves; and I was their manager.

Everything was ready for the first performance; the whole company wanted to speak to me. The dancing lady said the house would fall in if she did not stand on one leg, and being the mistress of the whole company she begged to be treated accordingly. The lady who acted the queen wanted to be treated like a queen off the stage too lest she should get out of practice. The man who had nothing to do but to hand over a letter considered himself as important as the first lover, declaring that the small parts were of as much consequence as the great ones in an artistic whole. The hero wanted parts consisting only of points likely to bring down the applause of the house. The prima donna would only act with a red light thrown on her, for she said that suited her, and blue did not. It was like being with flies in a bottle, and I was in the middle of the bottle—I was the manager! My breath left me and so did my senses; I was as miserable as a man can be. It was quite a new race of men amongst whom I had come, and I only wished I had them all in the box again, and that I had never become a manager. I told them straight out that they were only puppets after all; at this they killed me. I found myself lying on my bed in my room; but how I got there, and more especially how I got away from the Polytechnic student, he may know, but I don’t. The moon shone in upon the floor, where lay the box upset and all the puppets in a fine confusion great and small, the whole lot. But I was not idle; out of bed I jumped, and they were all popped into the box, some on their head and some on their feet; and shutting down the lid, I seated myself on the top. “Now you will stay there,” I said, “and I will take care not to wish you flesh and blood again.”

I felt quite light again—I was the happiest of men. The Polytechnic student had thoroughly enlightened me. I sat there on the box as happy as could be, and fell asleep. The next morning—it was really midday, for I slept wonderfully long that morning—I was still sitting there happy, and feeling conscious that my former and only wish had been a foolish one. I asked after my Polytechnic student, but he was gone, like the gods of the Greeks and Romans. From that time I have been the happiest of men. I am a lucky manager: my company does not argue, neither does my audience, for it is always satisfied. I can patch my pieces together as I like; I take what pleases me best from each comedy, and nobody troubles himself about it. Pieces that are no longer looked at upon the real stage, but to see which the people flocked like mad thirty years ago, and at which they wept till the tears ran down their cheeks, these I now take up. I place them before the little ones, and they weep just as papa and mamma used to do; only I shorten them a little, for children don’t care much about the love-nonsense—and if they have anything mournful, they like it to be over quickly.

[ 1851 ]

Aunty Toothache

—

Where did we get this story? Would you like to know? We got it from the tub in which the waste paper is kept.

Many a good and rare old book has found its way to the butterman’s and the grocer’s, not to be read, but to be used as packing paper for starch and coffee, or to wrap up salted herrings, butter, and cheese. Manuscripts and letters also find their way to the tub.

We often throw into the waste-paper tub what ought not to go there.

I know a grocer’s assistant, the son of a butterman; he has risen from serving in the cellar to serving in the front shop, and is a well-read person, his reading consisting of the matter, printed and written, found on the paper he used for packing. He has an interesting collection; and in this are to be found many important official documents from the waste-paper baskets of several busy and absent-minded officials, a few confidential letters from one lady friend to another—bits of scandal which were to go no further, and were not to be mentioned by anyone. He is a living salvage-institution for a considerable portion of our literature, and his collection covers a wide field; he has the run of his parents’ shop and that of his present master, and has there saved many a book, or leaves of a book, well worth reading more than once.

He has shown me his collection of printed and written matter from the waste-paper tub; the most valuable has come from the butterman’s. I noticed a couple of leaves from a large exercise book; the unusually clear and neat handwriting attracted my attention at once.

“That’s what the student wrote,” he said; “the student who lived opposite here and died about a month ago. One can see he must have suffered terribly from toothache. It is very interesting reading. This is only part of what he wrote; there was a whole book and more besides; my parents gave the student’s landlady half a pound of soft soap for it. This is all I have been able to save.”

I borrowed it, I read it, and now I give it to the world.

The title was:

AUNTY TOOTHACHE.

I

Aunty used to give me sweets when I was a little boy.

My teeth did not suffer; they were not injured; now I am older, and I am a student; still she goes on spoiling me with sweets, and says I am a poet.

I have something of the poet in me, hut not enough. Often when I go about the streets, it seems to me as if I am walking in a big library; the houses are the bookshelves; and every floor is a shelf with books. There stands a story of everyday life; next to it a good old comedy, and scientific works in all branches, and here are books of good reading and books of bad reading. Over all this wealth of literature I can dream and philosophize.

There is something of the poet in me, but not enough. No doubt many people have just as much of it in them as I, yet they do not carry a badge or a necktie with the word “Poet” on it. They and I have been endowed with a divine gift, a blessing great enough to satisfy oneself, but altogether too insignificant to be portioned out again to others. It comes like a ray of sunlight, and fills one’s soul and thoughts; it comes like a fragrant breeze, like a melody which one knows but without remembering whence it comes.

The other evening I sat in my room and felt inclined to read, but I had no book, no paper. Just then a leaf, fresh and green, fell from the lime tree, and the breeze carried it in through the window to me.

I examined the many veins in it; a little insect was crawling across them, as if it were making a thorough study of the leaf. This led me to think of all the wisdom that we men lay claim to; we also crawl about on a leaf, our knowledge being limited only to that; yet we are ready to deliver a lecture on the whole tree—the root, the trunk, and the crown; the great tree—God, the world, and immortality;—and of all this we know only the little leaf.

As I was sitting meditating thus, I received a visit from Aunty Milly.

I showed her the leaf and the insect, and told her of all the thoughts they had awakened in me, whereat her eyes sparkled.

“You are a poet!” she said; “perhaps the greatest we have. If I should live to see this, I would gladly lie down and die. Ever since Rasmussen the brewer’s funeral you have astonished me with your powerful imagination.”

This is what Aunty Milly said, and then she kissed me.

Who was Aunty Milly, and who was Rasmussen the brewer?

II

We children always called our mother’s aunt “Aunty”; we had no other name for her.

She gave us jam and sweets, although they were very injurious to our teeth; but the dear children were her weakness, as she used to say. It was a shame to deny them a few sweets, when they were so fond of them.

And that’s why we loved Aunty so much.

She was an old maid, and as far back as I can remember she was always old. She seemed always to be the same age.

In earlier years she had suffered a great deal from toothache, and was always talking about it; and so it happened that her friend, Mr. Rasmussen, the brewer, called her Aunty Toothache, just to show his wit.

He had left off brewing some years before, and was now living upon the interest of his money, and used to come and visit Aunty. He was older than she, and had no teeth at all—only some black stumps.

When a child he had eaten too much sugar, he told us children, and that’s how he came to look as he did.

Aunty could surely never have eaten sugar when she was young, for she had the most beautiful teeth.

She took great care of them, and she did not sleep in them at night—so Rasmussen the brewer said. The children knew that this was said in malice, but Aunty declared he did not mean anything by it.

One morning, after breakfast, she told us of a terrible dream she had had in the night, and that one of her teeth had fallen out.

“That means,” she said, “that I shall lose a true friend!”

“Was it a false tooth?” asked the brewer with a smile; “if so, it can only mean that you will lose a false friend!”

“You are a rude old man!” said Aunty, angrier than I have ever seen her before or since.

Afterward she told us that her old friend had only been teasing her; he was the noblest being on earth, and when he died he would become one of God’s angels in heaven.

I thought a good deal of this transformation, and wondered whether I should be able to recognize him in this new character.

When Aunty and he were young people, he had proposed to her. She had taken too long to think it over, and had settled down all by herself and become an old maid, but always remained his true friend.

And then Rasmussen died.

He was conveyed to his grave in the most expensive hearse, and was followed by a great number of people, many with orders and in uniform.

Aunty stood dressed in mourning by the window, together with all of us children, except our little brother whom the stork had brought a week ago.

The hearse and the procession had just passed, the street was empty, and Aunty wanted to go away from the window, but I did not want to; I was waiting for the angel, Rasmussen the brewer; for hadn’t he now become one of God’s be-winged children, and wouldn’t he appear now?

“Aunty,” I said, “don’t you think he will come now? Or, when the stork again brings us a little brother, won’t he then bring us the angel Rasmussen?”

Aunty was quite overwhelmed by my flight of imagination, and said: “That child will become a great poet!” And this she kept on repeating all the time I went to school, and even after I was confirmed and had become a student.

She was, and is, to me the most sympathetic of friends, both in my poetical and dental troubles, for I have attacks of both.

“Only write down your ideas,” she said, “and put them in the table drawer! That’s what Jean Paul did; he became a great poet, though I don’t admire him; he does not excite one. You must be exciting, and I know you will!”

During the night I lay awake, full of longings and anguish, full of desire and anxiety to become the great poet that Aunty saw and perceived in me; I went through all the agonies of a poet! But there is a still greater agony—toothache; it was grinding and crushing me, and I became a writhing worm, with a poultice of sweet herbs and mustard plaster round my face.

“I know all about it,” said aunty. There was a sorrowful smile on her lips, and her white teeth glistened.

But I must begin a new chapter in my own and my aunt’s history.

III

I had removed to new lodgings, where I had been living a month. I was telling Aunty about them.

I live with a quiet family; they do not trouble themselves about me, even if I ring three times. Otherwise it is a noisy house, full of sounds and disturbances caused by the weather, the wind, and the people. I live just over the gateway; every cart that drives out or in makes the pictures on the walls move to and fro. The gate bangs and shakes the whole house, as if there was an earthquake. If I am in bed, the shocks go right through all my limbs, but they say that is strengthening to the nerves. If it blows, and it is always blowing in our country, the long window-hooks outside swing to and fro, and strike against the wall. The bell in the neighbour’s yard rings with every gust of wind.

The people living in the house come home at all hours, from late in the evening till far into the night; the lodger just above me, who in the daytime gives lessons on the trombone, comes home last of all, and does not go to bed till he has taken a short midnight promenade with heavy steps and iron-heeled boots.

We do not have double windows. There is a broken pane in my room, over which the landlady has pasted some paper; but the wind blows through the crack for all that, and produces a sound something like a buzzing wasp. It is the kind of music which sends one to sleep. If at last I fall asleep, I am soon awakened by the crowing of the cocks. From the cellarman’s hen-coop the cocks and hens announce that morning is approaching. The small ponies, which have no stable, but are tied up in the store-room under the staircase, kick against the door and the boarding whenever they move their legs.

The day dawns; the porter, who lives with his family in the garret, comes thundering down the stairs; his clogs clatter along the passages, the gate bangs and the house shakes, and, when all this is over, the lodger above begins his gymnastic exercises; he lifts a heavy iron ball in his hand, but, as he is not able to hold it, it is constantly falling on the floor, while at the same time the young folks in the house, who go to school, come tearing along, screaming with all their might. I go to the window and open it to get some fresh air, which I consider most refreshing when I can get it, and when the young woman in the back building is not washing gloves in soap-suds, by which work she makes a living. Otherwise it’s a nice house, and I live with a quiet family!

This was the account I gave Aunty about my lodgings, only it was in a more lively style; the spoken word has a fresher sound than the written.

“You are a poet!” cried Aunty. “Only put down all you have said, and you will be as good as Dickens. Well, to me, of course you are much more interesting. You paint when you speak. You describe the house you live in as if one saw it before one’s eyes. It makes me shudder. Go on with your work. Put some living beings into it—some people, beautiful men and women, and—especially unhappy ones.”

I wrote down my description of the house as it now stands, with all its faults, and included only myself There was no plot in it. That comes later on.

IV

It was in the winter, late at night, after theatre hours; it was terrible weather; a snow-storm was raging, so that one could hardly get along.

Aunty had gone to the theatre, and I went to take her home; but it was difficult enough to get along by oneself, to say nothing of helping anyone else. All the carriages were engaged. Aunty lived in the outskirts of the town, while my lodgings were close to the theatre. If it had not been for this, we should have had to take refuge for a time in a sentry-box.

We trudged along in the deep snow with the snowflakes whirling around us. I had to lift her, support her, and push her along. Only twice did we fall, but we fell on soft ground.

We reached my gate, where we shook off some of the snow. On the stairs also we shook some off, but there was still enough almost to cover the floor of the anteroom.

We took off our outer wraps and galoshes, and everything else we could divest ourselves of. The landlady loaned Aunty dry stockings and a nightcap; she would be sure to want it, said the landlady, for, as she rightly added, it would be impossible for my aunt to get home that night; and so she asked her to make use of her parlour, where she would make a bed for her on the sofa, in front of the door leading into my room, which was always kept locked.

And Aunty agreed to the arrangement.

The fire burned in my stove, the tea urn came on the table, and the little room began to look cosy, if not quite so cosy as Aunty’s, where in the winter time there are thick portières before the door, thick curtains before the windows, and double carpets on the floor, with three layers of thick paper underneath. One sits there as if in a well-corked bottle, full of warm air; still, as I have said, my room also was pleasant and warm, while outside the wind was whistling.

Aunty talked and talked; the days of her youth came back; the brewer returned—all her old memories were revived.

She could remember when I got my first tooth, and how the family rejoiced.

My first tooth! The tooth of innocence, shining like a little drop of milk—the milk-tooth!

The first had come, then came more—a whole row, side by side, at the top and at the bottom, the prettiest of children’s teeth; but only the first ones, not the real ones, which have to last one’s whole lifetime

They also appeared, and the wisdom-teeth as well, the fuglemen in the row, born in pain and great tribulation.

They disappear again, every one of them; they disappear before the time of service is up—the very last one has gone, and it is not a day for rejoicing; it is a day for mourning.

So one begins to feel old, although one is young at heart.

Such reflections and such conversations are not pleasant. Yet we came to talk about all this; we went back to the days of my childhood, and talked and talked. It was twelve o’clock before Aunty went to rest in the room close by.

“Good night, my dear child,” she said. “I shall sleep as if I lay in my own four-poster.”

And she slept peacefully; but peace did not reign either within the house or without. The storm rattled the windows, struck the wall with the long, dangling iron hooks, and rang the neighbour’s bell in the backyard. The lodger upstairs had come home. He was still taking his nightly promenade up and down the room; he then kicked off his boots, and went to bed and to rest; but he snores, so that anyone with good ears can hear him through the ceiling.

I found no peace, no rest; nor did the weather take any rest; it was unusually lively. The wind howled and sang in its own way; my teeth also began to be lively and they hummed and sang in their way. A grand attack of toothache was coming on.

Draughty gusts came from the window. The moon shone through the window upon the door; the light came and went as the clouds rolled by in the stormy weather. There was an unceasing change of light and shadow, until at last the shadow on the floor began to take shape. I stared at the apparition, and felt an icy cold gust against my face.

On the floor sat a thin, long figure, just like what a child would draw with a pencil on its slate; something like a human being—a single thin line formed the body, another line or two made the arms, and the legs were only indicated by a single line for each, and the head by angular lines.

The figure soon became more distinct; it was draped with a very thin and fine kind of cloth, clearly showing that the figure was that of a woman.

I heard a buzzing sound. Was it she or the wind, which was buzzing like a hornet through the crack in the pane?

No, it was she, Mistress Toothache! Her terrible highness, Satania Infernalis! Heaven deliver and preserve us from her visits!

“How cosy it is here!” she buzzed; “these are nice quarters—marshy ground, boggy ground! Here the gnats have been buzzing with poison in their stings; I have a sting, and it must be sharpened on human teeth. Those over in the bed shine so brightly. They have defied sweet and sour things, heat and cold, nutshells and plum-stones; but I shall shake them to their roots, I shall stretch them on the rack, and feed their roots with draughty winds and chilly blasts!”

They were terrible words!—She is a terrible visitor!

“So you are a poet!” she said. “Well, I’ll coach you in all the meters of toothache! I’ll thrust iron and steel into your body! I’ll seize all the fibres of your nerves!”

I felt as if a red-hot awl passed through my cheek-bone; I writhed and twisted in my bed.

“A splendid row of teeth to play upon! just like an organ!” she said. “We shall have a grand concert on jews’-harps, with kettle-drums and trumpets, piccolo-flute, and trombone in the wisdom-tooth! Grand poet, grand music!”

And then she started the performance.

She looked terrible, although one did not see more of her than her hand, the shadowy, grey, ice-cold hand, with the long, thin, pointed fingers; each of them was an instrument of torture; the thumb and the forefinger were pincers and wrench, the middle finger ended in a pointed awl, the ring finger was an auger, and the little finger a squirt with gnat’s poison.

“I’ll teach you the right meter!” she said. “A great poet must have a great toothache, a little poet a little toothache!”

“Oh, consider me then a little poet!” I prayed. “Consider me nothing at all! And I am not a poet; I have only fits of poetry like fits of toothache. Leave me, oh leave me!”

“Will you acknowledge, then, that I am mightier than poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and all the music?” she said. “Mightier than all these notions that are painted on canvas or hewn in marble? I am older than any of them. I was born close to the Garden of Paradise, just outside, where the wind blew and the wet toadstools grew. It was I who made Eve put on clothes in the cold weather, and Adam also. There was manifestation of power in the first toothache, I can tell you!”

“I believe it all,” I said. “But leave me, oh leave me!”

“Yes, if you will give up being a poet, never put verse on paper, slate, or any kind of writing material, then I will let you off; but I shall come again, my poet!”

“I swear!” I said; “only let me never see or feel you any more!”

“See me you shall, but in a more substantial shape, in a shape more dear to you than I am at present. You shall see me as Aunty Milly, and I will say: ‘Write poetry, my dear boy! You are a great poet, perhaps the greatest we have!’ But if you believe me, and you begin to write poetry, then I will set music to your verses, and play them on your mouth-organ. You dear child! Remember me, when you see Aunty Milly!”

And then she vanished.

At parting I received something like the thrust of a red-hot awl through my cheek-bone, but it soon subsided. I felt as if I were gliding along the smooth water; I saw how the white water-lilies, with their large green leaves, bent and sank down under me; how they withered and perished, and how I sank with them; how I was set free and found peace and rest.

“To die, to melt away like snow!” resounded in the water; “to evaporate into air, to sail away like the clouds!”

Great shining names and inscriptions on waving banners of victory, the letters patent of immortality, written on the wing of an ephemera, shone down to me through the water.

The sleep was deep, a sleep without dreams. I did not hear the whistling wind, the banging gate, the neighbour’s noisy bell, or the gymnastics of the lodger.

What happiness!

Then came a sudden gust of wind, so that the locked door to Aunty’s room burst open. Aunty jumped up, got dressed, and came into my room.

I slept like one of God’s angels, she said, and had not the heart to wake me.

I awoke later on and opened my eyes, but did not remember that Aunty was in the house; but I soon remembered it—and also my toothache vision.

Dream and reality were blended.

“I suppose you did not write anything last night after we said goodnight?” she said. “I wish you had; you are my poet, and shall remain so!”

I thought that she smiled somewhat slyly. I did not know if it were the Aunty Milly who loved me, or the terrible one to whom I had made the promise of last night.

“Have you written any poetry, dear child?”

“No, no!” I shouted. “Are you really Aunty Milly?”

“Who else?” she said. It was really Aunty Milly.

She kissed me, got into a carriage, and drove home.

I jotted down what is written here. It is not in verse, and it shall never be printed.

•  •  •

Here ended the manuscript.

My young friend, the grocer’s assistant, could not find the missing sheets; they had gone out into the world like the papers round the salted herrings, the butter, and the soap; they had fulfilled their destiny!

The brewer is dead, Aunty is dead, the student is dead, he whose sparks of genius went into the tub. Nota bene—everything goes into the tub. This is the end of the story—the story of Aunty Toothache.

[ 1872 ]

The Flea and the Professor

—

There was once an aeronaut with whom things went badly; the balloon burst, tumbled the man out, and broke into bits. His boy he had sent down two minutes before with a parachute—that was the boy’s luck; he was unhurt and went about with knowledge enough to make him an aeronaut too, but he had no balloon and no means of acquiring one.

But live he must, and so he applied himself to the art of legerdemain and to talking in his stomach; in fact he became a ventriloquist, as they call it. He was young, good-looking, and when he got a moustache and had his best clothes on, he could be taken for a nobleman’s son. The ladies seemed to think well of him; one young lady even was so taken with his charms and his great dexterity that she went off with him to foreign parts. There he called himself Professor—he could scarcely do less.

His constant thought was how to get himself a balloon and go up into the air with his little wife, but as yet they had no means.

“They’ll come yet,” said he.

“If only they would,” said she.

“We are young folks,” said he, “and now I am Professor.”

She helped him faithfully, sat at the door and sold tickets to the exhibition, and it was a chilly sort of pleasure in winter time. She also helped him in the line of his art. He put his wife in a table-drawer, a large table-drawer; then she crawled into the back part of the drawer, and so could not be seen in the front part—quite an optical illusion to the audience. But one evening when he pulled the drawer out, she was also out of sight to him: she was not in the front drawer, not in the back one either, not in the house itself—nowhere to be seen or heard—that was her feat of legerdemain, her entertainment.

She never came back again; she was tired of it all, and he grew tired of it too. He lost his good-humour, could not laugh or make jokes;—and so the people stopped coming, his earnings became scanty, his clothes gave out; and finally he only owned a great flea, which his wife had left him, and so he thought highly of it. And he dressed the flea and taught it to perform, to present arms and to fire a cannon off—but it was a little cannon.

The Professor was proud of the flea, and the flea was proud of himself; he had learned something, and had human blood, and had been besides to the largest cities, had been seen by princes and princesses, had received their high praise, and it was printed in the newspapers and on placards. Plainly it was a very famous flea and could support a Professor and his entire family.

The flea was proud and famous, and yet when he and the Professor travelled they took fourth-class carriages on the railway; they went just as quickly as the first class. They privately pledged that they never would separate, and that they never would marry, the flea would remain a bachelor and the Professor a widower. That made it balance.

“Where one has the best luck,” said the Professor, “there one ought not to go twice.” He was a good judge of character, and that is also a science of itself. At last he had travelled over all countries except the wild ones, and so he wanted to go there. They eat Christian men there, to be sure, the Professor knew, but then he was not properly Christian and the flea was not properly a man, so he thought they might venture to travel there and have good success.

They travelled by steamship and by sailboat; the flea performed his tricks, and so they got a free passage on the way and arrived at the wild country. Here reigned a little Princess. She was only eight years old, but she reigned. She had taken away the power from her father and mother, for she had a will, and then she was extraordinarily beautiful—and rude.

Just as soon as the flea had presented arms and fired off the cannon, she was so enraptured with him that she said, “Him or nobody!” She became quite wild with love and she was already wild in other ways.

“Sweet, little, sensible child!” said her own father. “If one could only first make a man of him!”

“Leave that to me, old man,” said she, and that was not well said by a little Princess when talking with her father, but she was wild. She set the flea on her hand.

“Now you are a man, reigning with me, but you shall do what I want you to, or else I’ll kill you and eat the Professor.”

The Professor had a great hall to live in. The walls were made of sugar-cane, and he could have licked them, but he didn’t have a sweet-tooth. He had a hammock to sleep in. It was as if he were lying in a balloon, such as he had always wished for himself—that was his constant thought.

The flea lived with the Princess, sat upon her delicate hand or upon her fair neck. She had taken a hair from her head and made the Professor tie it to the flea’s leg, and so she kept him tied to the great red coral drop which she wore in the tip of her ear.

What a delightful time the Princess had, and the flea too, she thought, but the Professor was not very comfortable. He was a traveller; he liked to drive from town to town, and read in the newspapers about his perseverance and cleverness in teaching a flea to do what men do. But he lay in his hammock, lounged about, and had good feeding: fresh bird’s-eggs, elephant eyes and roast giraffe. People that eat men do not live entirely on cooked men—no, that is a great delicacy.

“Shoulder of children with a savoury sauce,” said the Princess’s mother, “is the most delicate.”

The Professor was tired of it all and would rather go away from the wild land, but he must have his flea with him, for it was his prodigy, and his bread and butter. How was he to get hold of him? That was no easy matter. He strained all his wits, and then he said,

“Now I have it.”

“Princess’s Father! grant me a favour. May I teach your subjects to present themselves before your Royal Highness? That is what is called a Ceremony in the high and mighty countries of the world.”

“Can I, too, learn to do that?” asked the Princess’s father.

“That is not quite proper,” replied the Professor; “but I shall teach your wild Fathership to fire a cannon off. It goes off with a bang. One sits high up aloft, and then off it goes or down he comes.”

“Let me crack it off!” said the Princess’s father. But in all the land there was no cannon except the one the flea had brought, and that was so very small.

“I will cast a bigger one!” said the Professor. “Only give me the means. I must have fine silk stuff, needle and thread, rope and cord, together with stomach drops for the balloon, they blow one up so easily and give one the heaves; they are what make the bang in the cannon’s inside.”

“By all means,” said the Princess’s father, and gave him what he called for. All the court and the entire population came together to see the great cannon cast. The Professor did not summon them before he had the balloon entirely ready to be filled and go up: The flea sat on the Princess’s hand and looked on. The balloon was filled, it bulged out and could scarcely be held down, so violent did it become.

“I must have it up in the air where it can be cooled off,” said the Professor, and took his seat in the car which hung below. “But I cannot manage and steer it alone. I must have a skilful companion along to help me. There is no one here that can do that except the flea.”

“I am not very willing to let him,” said the Princess, but still she reached out and handed the flea to the Professor, who placed him on his hand.

“Let go the cords and ropes,” he shouted. “Now the balloon’s going off.” They thought he said “the cannon.” And the balloon went higher and higher, up above the clouds, far away from the wild land.

The little Princess, all the family, and all the people sat and waited—they are waiting still; and if you do not believe it, just take a journey to the wild land; every child there talks about the Professor and the flea, and believes that they are coming back as soon as the cannon is cooled off.

But they will not come back. They are at home with us, they are in their native country. They travel on the railway, first class, not fourth; they have a great success, a great balloon. Nobody asks how they got their balloon or where it came from: they are rich folks now, quite respectable folks, indeed—the flea and the Professor!

[ 1873 ]

The Storm Shifts the Shields

—

In the old days, when Grandfather was quite a little boy, and ran about in little red breeches and a red coat, and a feather in his cap—for that’s the costume the little boys wore in his time when they were dressed in their best—many things were very different from what they are now. There was often a good deal of show in the streets—show that we don’t see nowadays, because it has been abolished as too old-fashioned. Still, it is very interesting to hear Grandfather tell about it.

It must really have been a gorgeous sight to behold, in those days, when the shoemakers brought over the shield, when they moved into their new guild-hall. The silken flag waved to and fro; on the shield itself a double eagle was displayed, and a big boot; the youngest lads carried the “welcome-cup,” and the chest of the workmen’s guild, and their shirt-sleeves were adorned with red and white ribbons; the elder ones carried drawn swords, each with a lemon stuck on its point. There was a full band of music, and the most splendid of all the instruments was the “Bird,” as Grandfather called the big stick with the crescent on the top, and all manner of dingle-dangles hanging to it—a perfect Turkish clatter of music. The stick was lifted high in the air, and swung up and down till it jingled again, and quite dazzled one’s eyes when the sun shone on all its glory of gold and silver and brass.

In front of the procession ran the Harlequin, dressed in clothes made of all kinds of coloured patches artfully sewn together, with a black face, and bells on his head like a sledge horse. He beat the people with his bat, which made a great clattering without hurting them, and the people would crowd together and fall back, only to advance again the next moment. Little boys and girls fell over their own toes into the gutter, old women dispensed digs with their elbows, and looked sour, and took snuff. One laughed, another chatted; the people thronged the windows and doorsteps, and even all the roofs. The sun shone; and although they had a little rain too, that was good for the farmer; and when they got wetted thoroughly, they only thought what a blessing it was for the land.

Ah, what things Grandpapa could tell! As a little boy he had seen all these fine doings in their greatest pomp. The oldest of the journeyman made a speech from the platform where the sign-board was hung up, and the speech was in verse, as if it had been made by a poet, as, indeed it had; for three people had concocted it together, and they had first drunk a good bowl of punch, so that the speech might turn out really well.

And the people gave a cheer for the speech, but they shouted much louder for the Harlequin, when he appeared in front of the platform, and mimicked the speaker. The fool played the fool most admirably, and drank mead out of dram-glasses, which he flung among the people, who caught them in the air. Grandfather was the possessor of one of these glasses, which a working mason had caught and given him. It was fun, indeed! And the shield hung, with flowers and wreaths, on the new guild-hall.

“One never forgets a feast like that, however old one may grow,” said Grandfather. Nor did he forget it, though he saw many other grand spectacles in his time, and could tell about them too. It was pleasant to hear him tell about the shield that was brought from the old to the new guild-hall, but it was grandest of all when he told of the shifting of the shields in the great city.

Grandfather had been there with his parents while he was a little boy; and that was the first time he saw the metropolis of the country. There were so many people in the streets, that he thought that a shield was being carried in a procession. There were many shields to be seen; a hundred rooms might have been filled with pictures, if they had been hung up inside instead of outside. At the tailor’s were pictures of all kinds of clothing, to show that he could stitch up people from the coarsest to the finest; at the tobacco manufacturer’s were pictures of the most charming little boys smoking cigars, just as they do in real life; there were signs with painted butter, and herring, clerical collars, and coffins, and inscriptions and announcements into the bargain. A person could walk up and down for a whole day through the streets, and tire himself out with looking at the pictures; and then he would know all about what people lived in the houses, for they had hung out their shields or signs; and, as Grandfather said, it was a very instructive thing, in a great town, to know at once who the inhabitants were.

And this is what happened with these shields, when Grandfather came to the town. He told it to me himself, and he hadn’t “a rogue on his back,” as mother used to tell me he had when he wanted to make me believe something outrageous, for now he looked quite trustworthy.

The first night after he arrived, there was the most terrible gale ever recorded in the newspapers—a gale such as none of the inhabitants had ever before experienced. The air was dark with flying tiles; old woodwork crashed and fell; and a wheelbarrow ran up the street to save its life. There was a groaning in the air, and a howling and a shrieking, and altogether it was a terrible storm. The water in the canal rose over the banks, for it did not know where to run. The Storm swept over the town, carrying plenty of chimneys with him, and more than one church tower had to bow, and has never got over it from that time.

There was a sentry-box before the house of the honest old captain of the firemen, who always arrived with the last engine. The storm would not leave this little sentry-box alone, but must needs tear it from its fastenings, and roll it down the street; and, wonderfully enough, it stopped before the door of the dirty journeyman plasterer, who had saved three lives at the last fire, but the sentry-box did not mean anything by this.

The barber’s shield, a great brazen dish, was carried away, and hurled straight into the window recess of the councillor of justice; and the whole neighbourhood said this looked almost like malice, inasmuch as they, and nearly all the friends of the councillor’s wife, used to call that lady “the Razor” for she was so sharp that she knew more about other people’s business than they knew about it themselves.

A shield with a dried salt fish painted on it flew exactly in front of the door of a house where dwelt a man who wrote a newspaper. That was a very poor joke perpetrated by the Storm, which seemed to have forgotten that a man who writes in a paper is not the kind of person to understand any liberty taken with him; for he is a king in his own newspaper, and likewise in his own opinion.

The Weathercock flew to the opposite house, where he perched, looking the picture of malice—so the neighbours said.

The cooper’s barrel stuck itself up under the head of “Ladies’ Costumes.”

The eating-house keeper’s bill of fare, which had hung at his door in a heavy frame, was posted by the Storm over the entrance to the theatre, where nobody ever went. It was a ridiculous list—“Horseradish Soup, and Stuffed Cabbage.” And now people came in plenty.

The fox’s skin, the honourable sign of the furrier, was found fastened to the bell-pull of a young man who always went to the early church service, and looked like a furled umbrella. He said he was striving after truth, and was considered by his aunt “a model and an example.”

The inscription “Institution for Superior Education” was found near the billiard club, which place of resort was further adorned with the words, “Children brought up by hand.” Now, this was not at all witty; but, you see, the Storm had done it, and no one has any control over that.

It was a terrible night, and in the morning—only think!—nearly all the shields had changed places. In some places the inscriptions were so malicious, that Grandfather would not speak of them at all; but I saw that he was chuckling secretly, so there may have been some inaccuracy in his description, after all.

The people of the town—and still more the strangers—were continually making mistakes in the people they wanted to see; nor was this to be avoided, when they went according to the shields that were hung up. Thus, for instance, some who wanted to go to a very grave assembly of elderly men, where important affairs were to be discussed, found themselves in a noisy boys’ school, where all the company were leaping over the chairs and tables.

There were also people who made a mistake between the church and the theatre, and that was terrible indeed!

Such a Storm has never blown in our time; for that only happened in Grandpapa’s time, when he was quite a little boy. Perhaps we shall never experience a Storm of that kind, but our grandchildren may—and we can only hope and pray that all may stay indoors while the Storm is moving the Shields.

[ 1865 ]

Everything
in Its Proper Place

—

It is over a hundred years ago! Behind the wood, near the great lake, stood an old mansion, and round it was a deep moat, in which reeds and bulrushes grew. Close by the bridge, at the entrance gate, stood an old willow tree, which bent over the reeds.

From the narrow way came the sound of horns and the tramping of horses’ feet; and therefore the little goose-girl hastened to drive her geese away from the bridge, before the hunting party came galloping up. They came, however, so fast that in order to avoid being ridden over, she had to jump up quickly onto one of the high cornerstones of the bridge. She was scarcely more than a child and very delicately built; she had two lovely bright eyes and a gentle, sweet expression. But such things the baron did not notice; as he galloped past her he reversed his hunting crop, and in rough play gave her such a push in the chest with it that she fell backward into the ditch.

“Everything in its proper place!” he cried. “Into the ditch with you!” Then he burst out laughing, for he called that fun; the others joined in; the whole party shouted and cried, and the hounds barked.

The poor goose-girl luckily caught hold of a branch of the willow tree as she fell, by the help of which she held herself out of the water, and as soon as the baron with his company and the hounds had disappeared through the gate, the goose-girl tried to scramble up, but the branch broke off at the top, and she would have fallen backward among the rushes had not a strong hand from above seized her. It was the hand of a pedlar, who had seen what had happened from a short distance, and had now hurried up to help her.

“Everything in its proper place!” he said, imitating the noble baron, and he pulled her up to the dry ground. He wished to put the branch back in the place it had been broken off, but “everything in its proper place” cannot always be managed; so he stuck the branch into the soft soil.

“Grow if you can, and provide a good flute for them up yonder at the mansion to make that master pay the piper!” he said. It would have given him great pleasure to play the Rogues’ March for the noble baron and his companions. Then he walked up and entered the mansion—but not the banqueting-hall, he was too humble for that. No, he went to the servants’ hall, and the men-servants and the maids looked over his stock of goods and bargained with him.

From above, where the company were at table, came sounds of screaming and shouting which they called singing—and indeed, they were not in a state to produce better. Loud laughter, mingled with the howling of dogs, sounded through the open windows. All were feasting and carousing. Wine and strong ale foamed in the jugs and glasses; the dogs ate and drank with their masters, and some of them, after having their snouts wiped with their long ears, were even kissed.

They ordered the pedlar to come upstairs with his wares, but only to make fun of him. The wine had got into their heads, and the wit had gone out. They poured beer into a stocking so that he could drink with them—but quickly, of course! That’s what they called fun, and it made them laugh. Then meadows, peasants, and farmyards were staked on a single card and lost.

“Everything in its proper place!” the pedlar said when he had at last got safely out of Sodom and Gomorrah, as he called it. “The open highway—that is my right place. Up there I did not feel at ease.” And the little goose-girl nodded to him from the gate.

And days passed and weeks passed, and it could be seen that the broken willow branch which the pedlar had stuck into the ground near the ditch remained fresh and green—indeed it even had put forth fresh shoots. The little goose-girl saw that the branch had taken root, and she was very pleased; the tree, so she said, was her tree. Yes, the tree made good progress, but everything else at the mansion was going rapidly backward, through feasting and gambling, for these are two wheels upon which nobody runs safely. Less than six years later, the baron, with bag and stick, passed out of his gate a beggared man, while the estate had been bought by a rich tradesman. He was the very man they had made fun of and poured ale into a stocking for; but honesty and industry are like favourable winds to a ship, and they had brought the pedlar to be master of the baronial estate. From that time forward no card-playing was permitted there.

“That’s a bad pastime!” he said. “When the devil saw the Bible for the first time he wanted to produce something in opposition to it, and so he invented card-playing.”

The new master took a wife, and who was she? It was the little goose-girl, who had always remained good and faithful, and who looked as beautiful in her new clothes as if she had been of high birth. And how did all this come about? That would be too long a tale to tell in our busy time, but it really happened, and the most important part is yet to come.

It was pleasant and cheerful to live in the old mansion now; the mistress looked after the household, and the master managed the estate. Their home overflowed with blessings, for where honesty leads the way, prosperity is sure to follow. The old mansion was repaired and painted, the ditches were cleaned and fruit trees planted, the floors were scrubbed as white as a pastry-board, and all was clean and pleasant. In the long winter evenings, the mistress and her maids sat at the spinning-wheel in the large hall. Every Sunday the Justice of the Peace—for a justice the pedlar had become, although only in his old age—read aloud from the Bible. The children—for children came—all received the best education, but they were not all equally clever, as is the case in all families.

In the meantime the willow branch outside had grown into a fine tree, and stood there, free, and was never clipped, “That is our genealogical tree,” said the old people, and that tree must be held in honour and respect. So they told their children, even those who had not very good heads.

A hundred years had now gone by. It was in our own time; the lake had been transformed into marsh land, and the old mansion had almost disappeared. A narrow pool of water and some ruined walls by it, that was all that was left of the deep moat; and here still stood a magnificent old tree with overhanging branches—that was the genealogical tree. Here it stood, and showed how beautiful a willow can look if one does not interfere with it. The trunk, it is true, was cleft in the middle from the root to the crown; storms had twisted it a little, but it still stood, and out of every crevice and cleft, in which wind and weather had carried mould, blades of grass and flowers sprang forth. Especially near the top, where the great branches forked, there was quite a hanging garden, in which throve wild raspberries and ferns, and even a little mistletoe had taken root and grew gracefully in the old willow branches, which were reflected in the dark water beneath when the wind blew the chickweed into the corner of the pond. A footpath led across the fields close by the old tree.

High up, on the woody hillside, stood the new mansion. It had a splendid view, and was large and magnificent; its windowpanes were so clear that one might have thought there were none there at all. The broad steps that led to the door looked like a bower of roses and broad-leaved plants. The lawn was as green as if each blade of grass was cleaned separately morning and evening. In the hall hung costly pictures. Here stood chairs and sofas covered with silk and velvet, which could be easily rolled about on castors; there were tables with polished marble tops, and books bound in morocco leather with gilt edges. Indeed, distinguished people lived here; it was the dwelling of the baron and his family.

Everything was in keeping with its surroundings. “Everything in its proper place” was the motto still, and therefore all the paintings which had once been the honour and glory of the old mansion were now hung up in the passage which led to the servants’ rooms. It was all old lumber, especially two portraits—one representing a man in a scarlet coat with a wig, and the other a lady with powdered and curled hair holding a rose in her hand, each of them being surrounded by a large wreath of willow branches. Both portraits had many holes in them, because the baron’s sons used the two old people as targets for their bows and arrows. They represented the councillor and his wife, from whom the whole family descended.

“But they did not properly belong to our family,” said one of the boys; “he was a pedlar and she kept the geese. They were not like papa and mama.”

So the portraits were old lumber, and “everything in its right place!” they said, and so the great-grandfather and great-grandmother had to go to the servants’ passage.

The son of the clergyman was tutor in the great house. One day he was out with the young barons and their elder sister, who had lately been confirmed, and they walked by the footpath past the old willow tree, and as they went along she picked a bunch of field-flowers. “Everything in its proper place,” and indeed the bunch looked very beautiful. At the same time she listened to all that was said, and she very much liked to hear the pastor’s son speak about the works of Nature and about the great men and women in history. She had a healthy mind, noble in thought and deed, and with a heart full of love for everything that God had created.

They stopped at the old willow tree, as the youngest of the baron’s sons wished very much to have a flute from it, such as had been cut for him from other willow trees, and the pastor’s son broke off a branch.

“Oh, don’t do that!” said the young baroness; but it was already done. “That is our famous old tree. I love it very much. They often laugh at me at home about it, but that does not matter. There is a story attached to this tree.”

And now she told him all that we already know about the tree—the old mansion, the pedlar and the goose-girl, who had met there for the first time, and had become the ancestors of the noble family to which the young baroness belonged.

“They would not be ennobled, the good old people,” she said. “Their motto was ‘everything in its proper place,’ and it would not be right, they thought, to be given a title on account of their wealth. My grandfather, the first baron, was their son. They say he was a very learned man, a great favourite with the princes and princesses, and was invited to all Court festivities. The others at home love him best; but, I do not know why, there seems to be something about the old couple that draws my heart to them! How homely, how patriarchal, it must have been in the old mansion, where the mistress sat at the spinning-wheel with her maids, while her husband read aloud from the Bible!”

“They must have been excellent people, sensible people,” said the pastor’s son. And they went on to talk about noblemen and commoners, and from the manner in which the clergyman’s son spoke about the meaning of nobility it seemed almost as if he were not himself a commoner.

“It is good fortune to be of a family that has distinguished itself, and to possess, as it were, in one’s blood a spur to lead in all that is good. It is a splendid thing to have a noble name that is a card of admission into the highest circles. Nobility is a gold coin that bears the stamp of its own value. It is the fallacy of the the present day, into which many poets have fallen, to say that all persons of noble birth are bad and stupid, and that the lower we descend in society the oftener we find great and shining characters. I do not share this opinion, for it is a mistake—it is altogether wrong. In all classes can be found men and women possessing kindly and beautiful traits.

“My mother told me of such, and I could tell you of many more. One day she was visiting a nobleman’s house in town; my grandmother, I believe, had been the lady’s nurse when she was a child. My mother and the great old nobleman were alone in the room, when he noticed an old woman on crutches come limping into the courtyard; she came every Sunday to get a penny.

“‘There is the poor old woman,’ said the nobleman; ‘it is such difficulty to her to walk.’

“And before my mother understood, he was out of the door and down the stairs, in order to save her the toilsome walk for the gift she had come to fetch. Of course this is only a little incident, but, like the widow’s mite, it comes from the heart, from the depth of human nature.

“These are subjects of which poets should write and sing, for they soften and unite mankind into one brotherhood. But when a man, simply because he is of noble birth and has a pedigree, like an Arab horse, stands on his hind legs and neighs in the streets, and says with a sneer when a commoner has been in a room, ‘It smells like the street in here,’ there nobility is decaying; it has become a hollow mask of the kind that Thespis created. People are glad to see such persons turned into objects of satire.”

Such was the speech of the parson’s son; it was a little long, but meanwhile the flute was being cut.

There was a great party at the mansion, many guests from the neighbourhood and from the capital, ladies dressed with taste—and without it. The big hall was quite crowded with people. The clergymen stood humbly together in a corner, and looked as if they were preparing for a funeral, but it was a festival—only the amusement had not yet begun.

A great concert was to take place, and that is why the baron’s young son had brought his willow flute with him; but he could not make it sound, nor could his papa, and therefore the flute was pronounced a failure.

There were music and songs of the kind which delight mostly the performers; otherwise quite charming!

“But you are a performer, too, surely,” said a witty gentleman, addressing the tutor. “You are of course a flute player as well as a flute maker. You are a universal genius, I hear, and genius is quite the rage nowadays—nothing like genius. Come now; I am sure you will be so good as to enchant us by playing on this little instrument.” He handed it over, announcing in a loud voice that the tutor was going to favour the company with a solo on the flute.

They wished to tease him—that was evident—and so the tutor refused to play, although he could do so very well, but they pressed and urged him so hard that at last he took up the flute and placed it to his lips.

That was a marvellous flute! Its sound was as shrill as the whistle of a steam engine—in fact, much stronger, for it was heard in the courtyard, in the garden, and in the wood, many miles round in the country; and with the note a storm arose and roared: “Everything in its proper place!” And off flew papa, as if carried by the wind, out of the hall straight into the shepherd’s cottage, and the shepherd flew—not into the banqueting hall, thither he could not come—but into the servants’ hall, among the smart footmen strutting about in silk stockings; and these haughty servants looked horror-struck that such a person dared to sit at table with them.

But in the banqueting-hall the young baroness flew to the place of honour at the end of the table, where she was worthy to sit, and the parson’s son had the seat next to her; the two sat there as if they were a bridal pair. An old count, belonging to one of the oldest families of the country, remained untouched in his place of honour; the flute was just, as it is one’s duty to be. The sharp-tongued cavalier who had caused the flute to be played, and who was the child of his parents, flew headlong into the fowl-house, but not he alone.

The flute was heard a mile away, and strange events took place. A rich banker’s family, who were driving in a coach and four, were blown out of it, and could not even find room on the footboard at the back. Two rich farmers, who had in our day grown too big for their own cornfields, were flung into the ditch—it was a dangerous flute! Luckily it burst at the first note, and that was a good thing, for then it was put back into its owner’s pocket—“everything in its proper place!”

The day after, nobody spoke a word about what had taken place; and thence came the saying, “to pocket the flute!” Besides, everything was again in its usual place, except that the two old pictures of the pedlar and the goose-girl were hanging in the banqueting-hall, where they had been blown; and, as a real expert said that they were painted by a master’s hand, they were allowed to remain there and were restored. They did not know before that they were worth anything, for how should they know?

Now they hung in a place of honour. “Everything in its proper place,” and to that it comes! Eternity is long, much longer than this story.

[ 1853 ]

The Wind’s Tale

CONCERNING WALDEMAR DAAE
AND HIS DAUGHTERS.

—

When the wind passes over the grass, the grass ripples like a lake; when it passes over the corn, the corn curls into waves like the sea; this is the wind’s dance. But the Wind can do more than this; only listen to his loud chant amid the trees of the wood, to his shrill wail amid the crannies, crevices, and sounding holes of old walls; watch how he chases the white fleecy clouds like a flock of sheep across the sky; mark how he howls through the open portal, as though he were the warder blowing his horn. Then again, how wondrously he whistles through the chimney; the fire in the hearth beneath flames up and blazes, and it is right pleasant and comfortable to sit in the chamber warmed by its bright glow and listen to stories. Let the Wind be the story-teller; he knows more wonderful tales and histories than all of us put together. Now he begins; “Whew, whew, whew! on, on, on!” That is the refrain of his song.

“Close to the Great Belt stands an old mansion with thick red walls,” says the wind. “I know every stone of it, I knew them before when they formed part of Marsk Stig’s Castle on the Ness; it had to come down. The stones were used again, and made a new wall of a new castle in another place, Borreby Hall as it now stands.

“I have watched the high-born men and women of all the various families who have lived there, and now I am going to tell you about Waldemar Daae [43] and his daughters!

“He held his head very high, for he came of a royal stock! He knew more than the mere chasing of a stag, or the emptying of a flagon; he knew how to manage his affairs, he said himself.

“His lady wife walked proudly across the brightly polished floors, in her gold brocaded kirtle; the tapestries in the rooms were gorgeous, and the furniture of costly carved woods. She had brought much gold and silver plate into the house with her, and the cellars were full of German ale, when there was anything there at all. Fiery black horses neighed in the stables; Borreby Hall was a very rich place when wealth came there.

“Then there were the children, three dainty maidens, Ida, Johanna and Anna Dorothea. I remember their names well.

“They were rich and aristocratic people, and they were born and bred in wealth! Whew! whew! fare away!” roared the Wind; then he went on with his story.

“I did not see here, as in other old noble castles, the high-born lady sitting among her maidens in the great hall turning the spinning-wheel. No, she played upon the ringing lute, and sang to its tones. Her songs were not always the old Danish ditties, however, but songs in foreign tongues. All was life and hospitality, noble guests came from far and wide; there were sounds of music and the clanging of flagons, so loud that I could not drown them!” said the Wind. “Here were arrogance and ostentation enough and to spare; plenty of lords, but the Lord had no place there.

“Then came the evening of May-day!” said the Wind. “I came from the west; I had been watching ships being wrecked and broken up on the west coast of Jutland. I tore over the heaths and the green wooded coasts, across the island of Fünen and over the Great Belt puffing and blowing. I settled down to rest on the coast of Zealand close to Borreby Hall where the splendid forest of oaks still stood. The young bachelors of the neighbourhood came out and collected faggots and branches, the longest and driest they could find. These they took to the town, piled them up in a heap, and set fire to them; then the men and maidens danced and sang round the bonfire. I lay still,” said the Wind, “but I softly moved a branch, the one laid by the handsomest young man, and his billet blazed up highest of all. He was the chosen one, he had the name of honour, he became ‘Buck of the Street!’ and he chose from among the girls his little May-lamb. All was life and merriment, greater far than within rich Borreby Hall.

“The great lady came driving towards the Hall, in her gilded chariot drawn by six horses. She had her three dainty daughters with her, they were indeed three lovely flowers. A rose, a lily, and a pale hyacinth. The mother herself was a gorgeous tulip, she took no notice whatever of the crowd, who all stopped in their game to drop their curtseys and make their bows; one might have thought that, like a tulip, she was rather frail in the stalk and feared to bend her back. The rose, the lily, and the pale hyacinth, yes, I saw them all three. Whose May-lambs were they one day to become? thought I; their mates would be proud knights—perhaps even princes!

“Whew! whew! fare away! Yes, the chariot bore them away, and the peasants whirled on in their dance. They played at ‘Riding the Summer into the village,’ to Borreby village, Tareby village, and many others.

“But that night when I rose,” said the Wind, “the noble lady laid herself down to rise no more; that came to her which comes to everyone—there was nothing new about it. Waldemar Daae stood grave and silent for a time; ‘the proudest tree may bend, but it does not break,’ said something within him. The daughters wept, and everyone else at the Castle was wiping their eyes; but Lady Daae had fared away, and I fared away too! Whew! whew!” said the Wind.

•  •  •

“I came back again; I often came back across the island of Fünen and the waters of the Belt and took up my place on Borreby shore close to the great forest of oaks. The ospreys and the wood-pigeons used to build in it, the blue raven and even the black stork! [44] It was early in the year, some of the nests were full of eggs, while in others the young ones were just hatched. What a flying and screaming was there! Then came the sound of the axe, blow upon blow; the forest was to be felled. Waldemar Daae was about to build a costly ship, a three-decked man-of-war, which it was expected the King would buy. So the wood fell, the ancient landmark of the seaman, the home of the birds. The shrike was frightened away; its nest was torn down; the osprey and all the other birds lost their nests too, and they flew about distractedly, shrieking in their terror and anger. The crows and the jackdaws screamed in mockery, ‘Caw, caw! Out of the nest, Caw, caw!’

“Waldemar Daae and his three daughters stood in the middle of the wood among the workmen. They all laughed at the wild cries of the birds except Anna Dorothea, who was touched by their distress, and when they were about to fell a tree which was half-dead, and on whose naked branches a black stork had built its nest, out of which the young ones were sticking their heads, she begged them with tears in her eyes to spare it. So the tree with the black stork’s nest was allowed to stand. It was only a little thing.

“The chopping and the sawing went on—the three-decker was built. The master-builder was a man of humble origin, but of noble loyalty; great power lay in his eyes and on his forehead, and Waldemar Daae liked to listen to him, and little Ida liked to listen too, the eldest fifteen-year-old daughter. But whilst he built the ship for her father, he built a castle in the air for himself, in which he and little Ida sat side by side as man and wife. This might also have happened if his castle had been built of solid stone, with moat and ramparts, wood and gardens. But with all his wisdom, the shipbuilder was only a poor bird, and what business has a sparrow in a peacock’s nest? Whew! whew! I rushed away, and he rushed away, for he dared not stay, and little Ida got over it, as get over it she must.

•  •  •

“The fiery black horses stood neighing in the stables; they were worth looking at, and they were looked at to some purpose too. An admiral was sent from the King to look at the new man-of-war, with a view to purchasing it. The admiral was loud in his admiration of the horses. I heard all he said,” added the Wind. “I went through the open door with the gentlemen and scattered the straw like gold before their feet. Waldemar Daae wanted gold; the admiral wanted the black horses, and so he praised them as he did; but his hints were not taken, therefore the ship remained unsold. There it stood by the shore covered up with boards, like a Noah’s Ark which never reached the water. Whew! whew! get along! get along! It was a miserable business.

In the winter, when the fields were covered with snow, and the Belt was full of ice-floes which I drove up on to the coast,” said the Wind, “the ravens and crows came in flocks, each one blacker than the next, and perched upon the desolate, dead ship by the shore. They screamed themselves hoarse about the forest which had disappeared, and the many precious birds’ nests which had been devastated, leaving old and young homeless; and all for the sake of this old piece of lumber, the proud ship which was never to touch the water! I whirled the snow about till it lay in great heaps round the ship. I let it hear my voice, and all that a storm has to say. I know that I did my best to give it an idea of the sea. Whew! whew!”

“The winter passed by; winter and summer passed away! They come and go just as I do. The snowflakes, the apple blossom, and the leaves fall, each in their turn. Whew! whew! they pass away, as men pass too!

“The daughters were still young. Little Ida, the rose, as lovely to look at as when the shipbuilder turned his gaze upon her. I often took hold of her long brown hair when she stood lost in thought by the apple tree in the garden. She never noticed that I showered apple blossom over her loosened hair; she only gazed at the red sunset against the golden background of the sky, and the dark trees and bushes of the garden. Her sister Johanna was like a tall, stately lily; she held herself as stiffly erect as her mother, and seemed to have the same dread of bending her stem. She liked to walk in the long gallery where the family portraits hung. The ladies were painted in velvet and silk, with tiny pearl embroidered caps on their braided tresses. Their husbands were all clad in steel, or in costly cloaks lined with squirrel skins and stiff blue ruffs; their swords hung loosely by their sides. Where would Johanna’s portrait one day hang on these walls? What would her noble husband look like? These were her thoughts, and she even spoke them aloud; I heard her as I swept through the long corridor into the gallery, where I veered round again.

“Anna Dorothea, the pale hyacinth, was only a child of fourteen, quiet and thoughtful. Her large blue eyes, as clear as water, were very solemn, but childhood’s smile still played upon her lips; I could not blow it away, nor did I wish to do so. I used to meet her in the garden, the ravine, and in the manor fields. She was always picking flowers and herbs, those she knew her father could use for healing drinks and potions.

“Waldemar Daae was proud and conceited, but he was also learned, and he knew a great deal about many things. One could see that, and many whispers went about as to his learning. The fire blazed in his stove even in summer, and his chamber door was locked. This went on for days and nights, but he did not talk much about it. One must deal silently with the forces of nature. He would soon discover the best of everything, the red, red gold!

“This was why his chimney flamed and smoked and sparkled. Yes, I was there, too,” said the Wind.

“Away with you, away! I sang in the back of the chimney. Smoke, smoke, embers and ashes, that is all it will come to! You will burn yourself up in it. Whew! whew! away with it! But Waldemar Daae could not let it go.

“The fiery steeds in the stable, where were they? The old gold and silver plate in cupboard and chest, where was that? The cattle, the land, the castle itself? Yes, they could all be melted down in the crucible, but yet no gold would come.

“Barn and larder got emptier and emptier. Fewer servants; more mice. One pane of glass got broken and another followed it. There was no need for me to go in by the doors,” said the Wind. “A smoking chimney means a cooking meal, but the only chimney which smoked here, swallowed up all the meals, all for the sake of the red gold.

“I blew through the castle gate like a watchman blowing his horn, but there was no watchman,” said the Wind. “I twisted round the weathercock on the tower till it creaked as if a warder up there was snoring, only there was no warder. Rats and mice were the only inhabitants. Poverty laid the table; poverty lurked in wardrobe and larder. The doors fell off their hinges, cracks and crannies appeared everywhere, I went in and out through them as I pleased,” said the Wind, “so I know all about it.”

“The hair and the beard of Waldemar Daae grew grey, in the sorrow of his sleepless nights, amid smoke and ashes. His skin grew grimy and yellow, and his eyes were still greedy for gold, the long-expected gold.

“I whistled through the broken panes and fissures, I blew into the daughters’ chests where their clothes lay faded and threadbare; they had to last forever. A song like this had never been sung over the cradles of these children. A lordly life became a woeful life! I was the only one to sing in the castle now,” said the Wind. “I snowed them in, for they said it gave warmth. They had no firewood, for the forest was cut down where they should have got it. There was a biting frost. Even I had to keep rushing through the crannies and passages to keep myself lively. They stayed in bed to keep themselves warm, those noble ladies. Their father crept about under a fur rug. Nothing to bite, and nothing to burn; a lordly life indeed! Whew! whew! let it go! But this was what Waldemar Daae could not do.

“‘After winter comes the spring,’ said he; ‘a good time will come after a time of need; but they make us wait their pleasure, wait! The castle is mortgaged, we are in extremities—and yet the gold will come—at Easter!’

“I heard him murmur to the spider’s web—‘You clever little weaver! You teach me to persevere! If your web is broken, you begin at the beginning again and complete it! Broken again—and cheerfully you begin it over again. That is what one must do and one will be rewarded!’

“It was Easter morning, the bells were ringing, and the sun was at play in the heavens. Waldemar Daae had watched through the night with his blood at fever pitch; boiling and cooling; mixing and distilling. I heard him sigh like a despairing soul, I heard him pray, and I felt that he held his breath. The lamp had gone out, but he never noticed it; I blew up the embers and they shone upon his ashen face which took a tinge of colour from their light, his eyes startled in their sockets, they grew larger and larger as if they would leap out.

“Look at the alchemist’s glass! something twinkles in it, it is glowing, pure and heavy. He lifted it with a trembling hand and shouted with a trembling voice: ‘Gold! gold!’ He reeled, and I could easily have blown him over,” said the Wind, “but I only blew upon the embers, and followed him to the room where his daughters sat shivering. His coat was powdered with ash, as well as his beard and his matted hair. He drew himself up to his full height and held up his precious treasure, in the fragile glass: ‘Found! won! gold!’ he cried, stretching up his hand with the glass which glittered in the sunbeams: his hand shook, and the alchemist’s glass fell to the ground shivered into a thousand atoms. The last bubble of his welfare was shattered too. Whew! whew! fare away! and away I rushed from the goldmaker’s home.

•  •  •

“Late in the year when the days were short and dark up here, and the fog envelops the red berries and bare branches with its cold moisture, I came along in a lively mood, clearing the sky and snapping off the dead boughs. This is no great labour, it is true, yet it has to be done. Borreby Hall, the home of Waldemar Daae was having a clean sweep of a different sort. The family enemy Ove Ramel from Basnaes appeared, holding the mortgage of the Hall and all its contents. I drummed upon the cracked windowpanes, beat against the decaying doors, and whistled through all the cracks and crannies, whew! I did my best to prevent Herr Ove taking a fancy to stay there. Ida and Anna Dorothea faced it bravely although they shed some tears; Johanna stood pale and erect and bit her finger till it bled! much that would help her! Ove Ramel offered to let them stay on at the Castle for Waldemar Daae’s lifetime, but he got no thanks for his offer; I was listening. I saw the ruined gentleman stiffen his neck and hold his head higher than ever. I beat against the walls and the old linden trees with such force that the thickest branch broke, although it was not a bit rotten. It fell across the gate like a broom, as if someone was about to sweep; and a sweeping there was indeed to be. I quite expected it. It was a grievous day and a hard time for them, but their wills were as stubborn as their necks were stiff. They had not a possession in the world but the clothes on their backs; yes, one thing—an alchemist’s glass which had been bought and filled with the fragments scraped up from the floor. The treasure which promised much and fulfilled nothing. Waldemar Daae hid it in his bosom, took his staff in his hand, and with his three daughters the once wealthy gentleman walked out of Borreby Hall for the last time. I blew a cold blast upon his burning cheeks, I fluttered his grey beard and his long white hair; I sang such a tune as only I could sing. Whew! whew! away with them! away with them! This was the end of all their grandeur.

“Ida and Anna Dorothea walked one on each side of him: Johanna turned round in the gateway, but what was the good of that? nothing could make their luck turn. She looked at the red stones of what had once been Marsk Stig’s Castle, was she thinking of his daughters?

The elder took the younger by the hand,

And out they roamed to a far off land.

Was she thinking of that song? Here there were three and their father was with them. They walked along the road where once they used to ride in their chariot. They trod it now as vagrants, on their way to a plastered cottage on Smidstrup Heath, which was rented at ten marks yearly. This was their new country seat with its empty walls and its empty vessels. The crows and the magpies wheeled screaming over their heads with their mocking ‘Caw, caw! Out of the nest, Caw, caw!’ just as they screamed in Borreby Forest when the trees were felled.

“Herr Daae and his daughters must have noticed it. I blew into their ears to try and deaden the cries which after all were not worth listening to.

“So they took up their abode in the plastered cottage on Smidstrup Heath, and I bore off over marshes and meadows, through naked hedges and bare woods, to the open seas and other lands. Whew! whew! away, away! and that for many years.”

•  •  •

And how did it fare with Waldemar Daae and his daughters? The Wind will tell us if we listen.

“The last of them I saw, yes, for the last time, was Anna Dorothea, the pale hyacinth. She was old and bent now; it was half a century later. She lived the longest, she had gone through everything.

“Across the heath, near the town of Viborg, stood the Dean’s new, handsome mansion, built of red stone, with toothed gables. The smoke curled thickly out of the chimneys. The gentle lady and her fair daughters sat in the bay window looking into the garden at the drooping thorns and out to the brown heath beyond. What were they looking at there? They were looking at a stork’s nest on a tumbledown cottage; the roof was covered, as far as there was any roof to cover, with moss and house-leek; but the stork’s nest made the best covering. It was the only part to which anything was done, for the stork kept it in repair.

“This house was only fit to be looked at, not to be touched. I had to mind what I was about,” said the Wind. “The cottage was allowed to stand for the sake of the stork’s nest, in itself it was only a scarecrow on the heath, but the Dean did not want to frighten away the stork, so the hovel was allowed to stand. The poor soul inside was allowed to live in it; she had the Egyptian bird to thank for that; or was it repayment for having once pleaded for the nest of his wild black brother in Borreby Forest? Then, poor thing, she was a child, a delicate, pale hyacinth in a noble flower-garden. Poor Anna Dorothea; she remembered it all! Ah, human beings can sigh as well as the Wind when it soughs through the rushes and reeds.

“‘Oh dear! Oh dear! No bells rang over the grave of Waldemar Daae. No schoolboys sang when the former lord of Borreby Castle was laid in his grave. Well, everything must have an end, even misery! Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant, and this was her father’s sorest trial. His daughter’s husband a miserable serf, who might at any moment be ordered the punishment of the wooden horse by his lord. It is well that the sod covers him now, and you, too, Ida! Ah, yes! ah, yes! Poor me, poor me! I still linger on. In Thy mercy release me, oh Christ!’

“This was the prayer of Anna Dorothea, as she lay in the miserable hovel which was only left standing for the sake of the stork.

“I did what I could for the boldest of the sisters,” said the Wind. “She cut her coat according to her cloth: she dressed as a lad and went to a skipper and got a berth on his ship. Her words were few and her looks sullen, but she was willing at her work. But with all her will she could not climb the rigging; so I blew her overboard before anyone discovered that she was a woman, and I fancy that was not a bad deed of mine!” said the Wind.

“On such an Easter morning as that on which Waldemar Daae thought he had found the red gold, I heard from beneath the stork’s nest a psalm echoing through the miserable walls. It was Anna Dorothea’s last song. There was no window; only a hole in the wall. The sun rose in splendour and poured in upon her; her eyes were glazed and her heart broken! This would have been so this morning whether the sun had shone upon her or not. The stork kept a roof over her head till her death! I sang at her grave,” said the Wind, “and I sang at her father’s grave. I know where it is, and hers too, which is more than anyone else knows.

“The old order changeth, giving place to the new. The old highroad now only leads to cultivated fields, while peaceful graves are covered by the busy traffic on the new road. Soon comes Steam with its row of wagons behind it, rushing over the graves, forgotten, like the names upon them. Whew! whew! Let us be gone! This is the story of Waldemar Daae and his daughters. Tell it better yourselves, if you can,” said the Wind, as he veered round. Then he was gone. [45]

[ 1859 ]

The Bishop of Börglum
and His Warriors

—

Our scene is laid in Northern Jutland, in the so-called “wild moor.” We hear what is called the “Wester-wow-wow”—the peculiar roar of the North Sea as it breaks against the western coast of Jutland. It rolls and thunders with a sound that penetrates for miles into the land; and we are quite near the roaring. Before us rises a great mound of sand—a mountain we have long seen, and towards which we are wending our way, driving slowly along through the deep sand. On this mountain of sand is a lofty old building—the Börglum Monastery. In one of its wings (the larger one) there is still a church. We arrive now in the late evening hour; but the weather is clear in the bright June night around us, and the eye can range far, far over field and moor to the Bay of Aalborg, over heath and meadow, and far across the deep blue sea.

Now we are on the hill, and roll past between barns and other farm buildings; and at the left of the gate we turn aside to the Old Castle Farm, where the lime trees stand in rows along the walls; sheltered from the wind and weather, they grow so luxuriantly that their twigs and leaves almost conceal the windows.

We mount the winding stone staircase, and march through the long passages under the heavy roof-beams. The wind moans very strangely here, both within and without. It is hardly known how, but the people say—yes, people say a great many things when they are frightened or want to frighten others—they say that the old dead choir-men glide silently past us into the church, where mass is sung. They can be heard in the rushing of the storm, and their singing brings up strange thoughts in the hearer—thoughts of the old times into which we are carried back.

•  •  •

There is a wreck upon the coast; the Bishop’s men are busy down on the shore; the sea has spared some, but they spare none, and the water will wash away all trace of the crimson blood. The stranded goods—and there are many—all belong to the Bishop. The sea casts up tubs and barrels filled with costly wine for the convent cellar, and in the convent is already good store of beer and mead. There is plenty in the kitchen—dead game and poultry, hams and sausages; and fat fish swim in the ponds without.

The Bishop of Börglum is a mighty lord. He has great possessions, but still he longs for more—everything must bow before the mighty Olaf Glob. His rich cousin at Thyland is dead, and the widow is to have the rich inheritance. But how comes it that one relation is always harder towards another than even strangers would be? The widow’s husband had possessed all Thyland, with the exception of the church property. Her son was not at home. In his boyhood he had already started on a journey, for his desire was to see foreign lands and strange people. For years there had been no news of him. Perhaps he had been long laid in the grave, and would never come back to his home, to rule where his mother then ruled.

“What has a woman to do with rule?” said the Bishop.

He summoned the widow before a law court; but what did he gain thereby? The widow had never been disobedient to the law, she had right and justice on her side.

Bishop Olaf of Börglum, what dost thou purpose? What writest thou on yonder smooth parchment, sealing it with thy seal, and entrusting it to the horsemen and servants, who ride away, far away, to the city of the Pope?

It is the time of falling leaves and of stranded ships, and soon icy winter will come.

Twice had icy winter returned before the Bishop welcomed the horsemen and servants back to their home. They came from Rome with a papal decree—a ban, or bull, against the widow who had dared to offend the pious bishop. “Cursed be she and all that belongs to her. Let her be expelled from the congregation and the Church. Let no man stretch forth a helping hand to her, and let friends and relations avoid her as a plague and a pestilence!”

“What will not bend must break,” said the Bishop of Börglum

And all forsake the widow; but she holds fast to her God. He is her helper and defender.

One servant only—one maid—remained faithful to her; and with the old servant, the widow herself followed the plough; and the crop grew, although the land had been cursed by the Pope and by the Bishop. Seven years she spent thus in poverty, lobar, and desolation.

“Thou child of perdition, I will yet carry out my purpose!” cried the Bishop of Börglum. “Now will I lay the hand of the Pope upon thee, to summon thee before the tribunal that shall condemn thee!”

Then the widow yoked the last two remaining oxen to a wagon, and mounted up on the wagon, with her old servant, and travelled away across the heath out of the Danish land. As a stranger she came into a foreign country, where a strange tongue was spoken and where new customs prevailed. Farther and farther she journeyed, to where green hills rise into mountains, and the vines clothe their sides. Strange merchants drive by her, and they look anxiously after their wagons laden with merchandise. They fear an attack from the armed followers of the robber-knights. The two poor women, in their humble vehicle drawn by two black oxen, travel fearlessly through the dangerous sunken road and through the darksome forest. And now they were in Franconia. And there met them a stalwart knight, with a train of twelve armed followers. He paused, gazed at the strange vehicle, and questioned the women as to the goal of their journey and the place whence they came. Then one of them mentioned Thyland in Denmark, and spoke of her sorrows, of her woes, which were soon to cease, for so Divine Providence had willed it. For the stranger knight is the widow’s son! He seized her hand, he embraced her, and the mother wept. For years she had not been able to weep, but had only bitten her lips till the blood started.

It is the time of falling leaves and of stranded ships, and soon will icy winter come.

The sea rolled wine-tubs to the shore for the Bishop’s cellar. In the kitchen the deer roasted on the spit before the fire. At Börglum it was warm and cheerful in the heated rooms, while cold winter raged without, when a piece of news was brought to the Bishop. “Jens Glob, of Thyland, has come back, and his mother with him.” Jens Glob laid a complaint against the Bishop, and summoned him before the temporal and the spiritual court.

“That will avail him little,” said the Bishop. “Best leave off thy efforts, knight Jens.”

•  •  •

Again it is the time of falling leaves and stranded ships. Icy winter comes again, and the “white bees” are swarming, and sting the traveller’s face till they melt.

“Keen weather today!” say the people, as they step in.

Jens Glob, who keeps at home, close to the fire, stands lost in thought, singes his dress, burns a hole in it unawares.

“Thou Börglum Bishop,” he exclaims, “I shall subdue thee after all! Under the shield of the Pope, the law cannot reach thee; but Jens Glob shall reach thee!”

Then he writes a letter to his brother-in-law, Olaf Hase, in Sallingland, and prays that knight to meet him on Christmas eve, at mass, in the church at Widberg. The Bishop himself is to read the mass, and must therefore journey from Börglum to Thyland; and this is known to Jens Glob.

Moorland and meadow are covered with ice and snow. The marsh will bear horse and rider. The Bishop with his priests and armed men ride the shortest way, through the waving reeds, where the wind moans sadly.

Blow thy brazen trumpet, thou fur-clad minstrel! it sounds merrily in the clear air. So they ride on over heath and moorland—over what is the garden of Fata Morgana [46] in the hot summer, though now icy, like all the country—towards the church of Widberg.

The wind is blowing his trumpet too—blowing it harder and harder. He blows up a storm—a terrible storm—that rises more and more. Towards the church they ride, as fast as they may through the storm. The church stands firm, but the storm careers on over field and moorland, over land and sea.

Börglum’s Bishop reaches the church; but Olaf Hase will scarcely do so, however hard he may ride. He journeys on the farther side of the bay with his warriors, whom Jens Glob has summoned to aid him in calling the Bishop to his account.

The church is the judgment hall; the altar is the council table. The lights burn clear in the heavy brass candelabra. The storm reads out the accusation and the sentence, roaming in the air over moor and heath, and over the rolling waters. No ferry-boat can sail over the bay in such weather as this.

Olaf Hase makes halt at Ottesworde. There he dismisses his warriors, presents them with their horses and harness, and gives them leave to ride home and greet his wife. He intends to risk his life alone in the roaring waters; but they are to bear witness for him that it is not his fault if Jens Glob stands without reinforcement in the church at Widberg. The faithful warriors will not leave him, but follow him out into the deep waters. Ten of them are carried away; but Olaf Hase and two of the youngest men reach the farther side. They have still four miles to ride.

It is past midnight. It is Christmas. The wind has abated. The church is lighted up; the gleaming radiance shines through the window-frames, and pours out over meadow and heath. The mass has long been finished, silence reigns in the church, and the wax is heard dropping from the candles to the stone pavement. And now Olaf Hase arrives.

In the forecourt Jens Glob greets him kindly, and says,

“I have just made an agreement with the Bishop.”

“Sayest thou so?” replied Olaf Hase. “Then neither thou nor the Bishop shall quit this church alive.”

And the sword leaps from the scabbard, and Olaf Hase deals a blow that makes the panel of the church door, which Jens Glob hastily closes between them, fly in fragments.

“Hold, brother! First hear what the agreement was that I made. I have slain the Bishop and his warriors and priests. They will have no word more to say in the matter, nor will I speak again of all the wrong that my mother has endured.”

The long wicks of the altar lights glimmer red; but there is a redder gleam upon the pavement, where the Bishop lies with cloven skull, and his dead warriors around him, in the quiet of the holy Christmas night.

And four days afterwards the bells toll for a funeral in the convent of Börglum. The murdered bishop and the slain warriors and priests are displayed under a black canopy, surrounded by candelabra decked with crape. There lies the dead man, in the black cloak wrought with silver; the crozier in the powerless hand that was once so mighty. The incense rises in clouds, and the monks chant the funeral hymn. It sounds like a wail—it sounds like a sentence of wrath and condemnation, that must be heard far over the land, carried by the wind—sung by the wind—the wail that sometimes is silent, but never dies; for ever again it rises in song, singing even into our own time this legend of the Bishop of Börglum and his hard nephew. It is heard in the dark night by the frightened husbandman, driving by in the heavy sandy road past the convent of Börglum. It is heard by the sleepless listener in the thickly-walled rooms at Börglum. And not only to the ear of superstition is the sighing and the tread of hurrying feet audible in the long echoing passages leading to the convent door that has long been locked. The door still seems to open, and the lights seem to flame in the brazen candlesticks; the fragrance of incense arises; the church gleams in its ancient splendour; and the monks sing and say the mass over the slain bishop, who lies there in the black silver-embroidered mantle, with the crozier in his powerless hand; and on his pale proud forehead gleams the red wound like fire, and there burn the worldly mind and the wicked thoughts.

Sink down into his grave—into oblivion—ye terrible shapes of the times of old!

•  •  •

Hark to the raging of the angry wind, sounding above the rolling sea! A storm approaches without, calling aloud for human lives. The sea has not put on a new mind with the new time. This night it is a horrible pit to devour up lives, and tomorrow, perhaps, it may be a glassy mirror—even as in the old time that we have buried. Sleep sweetly, if thou canst sleep!

•  •  •

Now it is morning.

The new time flings sunshine into the room. The wind still keeps up mightily. A wreck is announced—as in the old time.

During the night, down yonder by Lokken, the little fishing village with the red-tiled roofs—we can see it up here from the window—a ship has come ashore. It has struck, and is fast embedded in the sand; but the rocket apparatus has thrown a rope on board, and formed a bridge from the wreck to the mainland; and all on board are saved, and reach the land, and are wrapped in warm blankets; and today they are invited to the farm at the convent of Börglum. In comfortable rooms they encounter hospitality and friendly faces. They are addressed in the language of their country, and the piano sounds for them with melodies of their native land; and before these have died away, the chord has been struck, the wire of thought that reaches to the land of the sufferers announces that they are rescued. Then their anxieties are dispelled; and they join in the dance at the feast given in the great hall at Börglum. Waltzes and Styrian dances are given, and Danish popular songs, and melodies of foreign lands in these modern times.

Blessed be thou, new time! Speak thou of summer and of purer gales! Send thy sunbeams gleaming into our hearts and thoughts! On thy glowing canvas let them be painted—the dark legends of the rough hard times that are past!

[ 1861 ]

Danish Popular Legends

—

Denmark is rich in old legends of historical persons, churches, and manors, of hills, of fields, and bottomless moors; sayings from the days of the great plague, from the times of war and peace. The sayings live in books, and on the tongues of the people; they fly far about like a flock of birds, but still are as different from one another as the thrush is from the owl, as the wood-pigeon from the gull. Listen to me, and I will tell you some of them.

It happened one evening in days of yore, when the enemy were pillaging the Danish country, that a battle had been fought and won by the Danes, and many killed and wounded lay on the field of battle. One of these, an enemy, had lost both his legs by a shot. A Danish soldier, standing nearby, had just taken out a bottle filled with beer, and was about to put it to his mouth, when the badly wounded man asked him for a drink. As he stooped to hand him the bottle, the enemy discharged his pistol at him, but missed his shot. The soldier drew his bottle back again, drank half of it, and gave the remaining half to his enemy, only saying, “You rascal, now you will only get half of it.”

The king afterward hearing of this, granted the soldier and his descendants an armorial bearing of nobility, on which was painted a half-filled bottle, in memory of his deed.

•  •  •

There is a beautiful tradition worth telling about the church-bell of Farum. The parsonage stood close by the church. It was a dark night late in the fall, and the minister was sitting up at a late hour preparing his sabbath sermon, when he heard a slight, strange sound from the large church bell. No wind was blowing, and the sound was inexplicable to him; he got up, took the keys, and went into the church. As he entered the church the sound stopped suddenly, but he heard a faint sigh from above. “Who is there, disturbing the peace of the church?” he asked, in a loud voice. Footsteps were heard from the tower, and he saw in the passage-way a little boy advancing toward him.

“Don’t be angry!” said the child. “I slipped in here when the Vesper Service was rung; my mother is very sick!” and now the little boy could not say more for the tears that choked him. The minister patted him on the cheek, and encouraged him to be frank, and to tell him all about it.

“They say that my mother—my sweet, good mother—is going to die; but I knew that when one is sick unto death he may recover again and live, if in the middle of the night one dares enter the church, and scrape off a little rust from the large church-bell; that is a safeguard against death. Therefore I came here and hid myself until I heard the clock strike twelve. I was so afraid! I thought of all the dead ones, and of their coming into the church. I dared not look out; I said the Lord’s Prayer, and scraped the rust off the bell.”

“Come, my good child,” said the minister; “our Lord will forsake neither thy mother nor thee.” So they went together to the poor cottage, where the sick woman was lying. She slept quietly and soundly. Our Lord granted her life, and his blessings shone over her and her son.

•  •  •

There is a legend about a poor young fellow, Paul Vendelbo, who became a great and honoured man. He was born in Jutland, and had striven and studied so well that he got through the examination as student, but felt a still greater desire to become a soldier and stroll about in foreign countries. One day he walked with two young comrades, who were well off, along the ramparts of Copenhagen, and talked to them of his desire. He stopped suddenly, and looked up at the window of the Professor’s house, where a young girl was seated, whose beauty had astonished him and the two others. Perceiving how he blushed, they said in joke, “Go in to her, Paul; and if you can get a voluntary kiss from her at the window, so that we can see it, we will give you money for travelling, that you may go abroad and see if fortune is more favourable for you there than at home.”

Paul Vendelbo entered into the house, and knocked at the parlour door.

“My father is not at home,” said the young girl.

“Do not be angry with me!” he answered, and the blood rushed up into his cheeks, “it is not your father I want!” And now he told her frankly and heartily his wish to try the world and acquire an honourable name; he told her of his two friends who were standing in the street, and had promised him money for travelling on the condition that she should voluntarily give him a kiss at the open window; and he looked at her with such an open, honest, and frank face, that her anger disappeared.

“It is not right for you to speak such words to a chaste maid,” said she; “but you look so honest, I will not hinder your fortune!” And she led him to the window, and gave him a kiss. His friends kept their promise, and furnished him with money. He went into the service of the Czar, fought in the battle of Pultawa, and acquired name and honour. Afterward, when Denmark needed him, he returned home, and became a mighty man of the army and of the king’s council. One day he entered the Professor’s plain room, and it was not just the Professor he wished to see this time either: it was again his daughter, Ingeborg Vinding, who gave him the kiss—the inauguration of his fortune. A fortnight after, Paul Vendelbo Loevendern (Lion-eagle) celebrated his wedding.

•  •  •

The enemy made once a great attack on the Danish island of Fünen. One village only was spared; but this was also soon to be sacked and burned. Two poor people lived in a low-roofed house, in the outskirts of the town. It was a dark winter evening; the enemy was expected; and in their anxiety they took the Book of Psalms, and opened it to see if he psalm which they first met with could render them any aid or comfort. They opened the book, and turned to the psalm, “A mighty fortress is our God.” Full of confidence, they sang it; and, strengthened in faith, they went to bed and slept well—kept by the Lord’s guardianship. When they awoke in the morning it was quite dark in the room, and the daylight could not penetrate; they went to the door, but could not open it. Then they mounted the loft, got the trapdoor open, and saw that it was broad daylight; but a heavy drift of snow had in the night fallen upon the whole house and hidden it from the enemies, who in the night-time had pillaged and burned the town. Then they clasped their hands in thankfulness, and repeated the psalm, “A mighty fortress is our God!” The Lord had guarded them, and raised an entrenchment of snow around them.

•  •  •

From North Seeland there comes a gloomy incident that stirs the thoughts. The church of Roervig is situated far out toward the sand hills by the stormy Kattegat. One evening a large ship dropped anchor out there, and was presumed to be a Russian man-of-war. In the night a knocking was heard at the gate of the parsonage, and several armed and masked persons ordered the minister to put on his ecclesiastical gown and accompany them out to the church. They promised him good pay, but offered threats if he declined to go. He went with them. The church was lighted, unknown people were gathered, and all was in deep silence. Before the altar the bride and bridegroom were waiting, dressed in magnificent clothes, as if they were of high rank, but the bride was pale as a corpse. When the marriage ceremony was finished, a shot was heard, and the bride lay dead before the altar. They took the body, and all went away with it. The next morning the ship had weighed anchor. To this day nobody has been able to give any explanation of the event.

The minister who took part in it wrote down the whole event in his Bible, which is handed down in his family. The old church is still standing between the sand hills at the tossing Kattegat, and the story lives in writing and in memory.

•  •  •

I must tell you one more church legend. There lived in Denmark, on the island of Falster, a rich lady of rank, who had no children, and her family was about to die out. So she took a part of her riches and built a magnificent church. When it was finished, and the altar-candles lighted, she stepped up to the altar-table and prayed on her knees that God would grant her, for her pious gift, a life upon the earth as long as her church was standing. Years went by. Her relations died, her old friends and acquaintances, and all the former servants of the manor were laid in the graves; but she, who made such an evil wish, did not die. Generation upon generation became strange to her, she did not approach anybody, and nobody approached her. She wasted away in a long dotage, and sat abandoned and alone; her senses were blunted, she was like a sleeping person, but not dead. Every Christmas Eve the life in her flashed up for a moment, and she got her voice again. Then she would order her people to put her in an oak coffin, and place it in the open burying-place of the church. The minister was then to wait on her in order to receive her commands. They laid her in the coffin, and brought it to the church. The minister came, as desired, and raised the cover for the old, wearied lady, who was lying there without rest.

“Is my church still standing?” she would ask with quivering voice; and upon the minister’s answer, “It stands still!” she would sigh profoundly and sorrowfully, and fall back again. The minister let the cover down, and came again the next Christmas night, and the next again, and still again the following. Now there is no stone of the church left upon another, no traces of the buried dead ones. A large white-thorn grows here on the field, with beautiful flowers every spring, as if it were the sign of the resurrection of life. It is said that it grows on the very spot where the coffin with the noble lady stood, where her dust became dust of earth.

•  •  •

There is an old popular saying that our Lord, when he expelled the fallen angels, let some of them drop down upon the hills, where they live still, and are called “Bjergfolk” (mountain goblins), or “Trolde” (imps). They are always afraid, and flee away when it thunders, which is for them a voice from heaven. Others fell down in the alder moors, they are called “Elver-folk” (alder folks), and among them the women are very handsome to look at, but not to be trusted; their backs are hollow, like a dough-trough. Others fell down in old farms and houses; they became dwarfs and “Nisser” (elves).

Sometimes they are wont to have doings with men, and a great many very strange stories art related about them.

Up in Jutland lived in a large hill such a mountain goblin, together with a great many other imps. One of his daughters was married to the smith of the village. The smith was a bad man, and beat his wife. At last she got tired of it, and one day as he was again about to beat her, she took a horseshoe and broke it over him. She possessed such immense strength, that she easily could have broken him in pieces too. He thought about it, and did not beat her any more. Yet it was rumoured abroad, and her respect among the country-people was lost, and she was known as a “Trolde baru” (an imp child). No one in the parish would have anything to do with her. The mountain goblin got a hint of this; and one Sunday, when the smith and his wife, together with other parishioners, were standing in the churchyard, waiting for the minister, she looked out over the bay, where a fog was rising.

“Now comes father,” she said, “and he is angry!’ He came, and angry he was.

“Will you throw them to me, or will you rather do the catching?” he asked, and looked with greedy eyes upon the church-people.

“The catching!’ she said; for she knew well that he would not be so gentle when they fell into his hands. And so the mountain goblin seized one after another, and flung them over the roof of the church, while the daughter, standing on the other side, caught them gently. From that time she got along very well with the parishioners; they were all afraid of the mountain goblin, and many of that kind were scattered about the country. The best they could do was to avoid quarrelling with him, and rather turn his acquaintance to their profit. They knew well that the imps had big kettles filled with gold money, and it was certainly worth while to get a handful of it; but for that they had to be cunning and ingenious, like the peasant of whom I am going to tell you, and also of his boy, who was still more cunning.

The peasant had a hill on his field, which he would not leave uncultivated; he ploughed it, but the mountain goblin, who lived in the hill, came out and asked, “How dare you plough upon my roof?”

“I did not know that it was yours!” said the peasant; “but is not advantageous for any of us to let such a piece of land lie uncultivated. Let me plough and sow; and then you reap the first year what is growing over the earth, and I what grows in the earth. Next year we will change.” They agreed; and the peasant sowed the first year carrots, and the second corn. The mountain goblin got the top part of the carrots, and the roots of the corn. In this way they lived in harmony together.

But now it happened that there was to be a christening in the house of the peasant. The peasant was much embarrassed, as he could not well omit inviting the mountain goblin, with whom he lived in good accord; but if the imp accepted his invitation, the peasant would fall into bad repute with the minister and the other folk of the parish. Cunning as the peasant ordinarily was, this time he could not find out how to act. He spoke about it to his pig-boy, who was the more cunning of the two.

“I will help you!” said the boy; and taking a large bag, he went out to the hill of the mountain goblin; he knocked, and was let in. Then he said that he came to invite him to the christening. The mountain goblin accepted the invitation, and promised to come

“I must give a christening-present, I suppose; mustn’t I?”

“They usually do,” said the boy, and opened the bag. The imp poured money into it

“Is that sufficient?” The boy lifted the bag.

“Most people give as much!’ Then all the money in the large money kettle was poured into the bag.

“Nobody gives more—most less.”

“Let me know, now,” said the mountain goblin, “the great guests you are expecting.”

“Three priests and one bishop,” said the boy.

“That is fine; but such gentlemen look only for eating and drinking—they don’t care about me. Who else comes?”—“Mother Mary is expected!”—“Hm, hm! but I think there will always be a little place for me behind the stove! Well, and then?”

“Well, then comes ‘our Lord.’”—“Hm, hm, hm! that was mighty! but such highly distinguished guests usually come late and go away early. I shall therefore, while they are in, slink away a little. What sort of music shall you have?”

“Drum-music!” said the boy; “our Father has ordered a heavy thundering, after which we shall dance! drum-music it shall be.”

“O, is it not dreadful!” cried the mountain goblin. “Thank your master for the invitation, but I would rather stay at home. Did he not know, then, that thundering and drum are to me, and to my whole race, a horror? Once, in my younger days, going out to take a walk, the thunder began to drum, and I got one of the drumsticks over my thigh-bone so that it cracked. I will not have more of that kind of music! Give my thanks and my greetings.”

And the boy took the bag on his back, and brought his master the great riches, and the imp’s friendly greetings.

[ 1870 ]

Godfather’s Picture-Book

—

Godfather could tell stories, ever so many and ever so long; he could cut out paper figures and draw pictures, and when it came near Christmas, he would bring out a copy-book, with clean white pages; on this he pasted pictures, taken out of books and newspapers; if he did not have enough for the story he wished to tell, he drew them himself. When I was little, I got several such picture-books, but the loveliest of them all was the one from “the memorable year when gas replaced the old oil-lamps in Copenhagen,” and that was set down on the first page.

“Great care must be taken of this book,” said Father and Mother; “it must only be brought out on grand occasions.”

Yet Godfather had written on the cover:

Though the book be torn, it is hardly a crime;

Other young friends have done worse in their time.

It was best of all when Godfather himself showed the book, read the verses and the other inscriptions, and told so many things besides; then the story became a real story.

On the first page there was a picture cut out of The Flying Post newspaper, in which one saw Copenhagen with its Round Tower, and Our Lady’s Church; to the left of this was pasted an old lantern, on which was written “Train-oil,” to the right was a chandelier—on it was written “Gas.”

“See, that is the placard,” said Godfather; “that is the prologue to the story you are going to hear. It could also be given as a whole play, if you could get it acted: ‘Train-oil and Gas, or, the Life and Doings of Copenhagen.’ That is a very good title! At the foot of the page there is still another little picture; it is not so easy to understand, so I shall explain it. That is the hel-horse. [47] He ought not to have come in till the end of the book; but he has run on ahead, just to say that beginning, middle, and end are all good-for-nothing; he could have done the thing better himself—if he could only have done it at all. The hel-horse, I must tell you, sticks all day long to the newspaper; the columns are his crutches, he cannot get along without them; but in the evening he slips out, and posts himself at the poet’s door, neighing to the man inside that he must die directly; but the man won’t die, if he has any real life in him. The hel-horse is nearly always a poor creature, who has nothing to say for himself, and nothing to do for a living: he picks up broken victuals by tramping about and neighing. He’ll wrinkle his nose, I’ll warrant you, at Godfather’s picture-book; but for all that, it may be worth the paper that it’s written on.

“Now, that is the first page of the book; that is the placard.

•  •  •

“It was just the last evening on which the old oil-lamps were lighted; the town had got gas, and it shone so brightly that the old lamps seemed to be quite lost in it.

“I was out in the streets myself, that evening,” said Godfather; “people walked up and down to compare the old lighting with the new. Crowds of people were there, and twice as many legs as heads. The watchmen looked on gloomily, not knowing how soon they might be turned off, like the oil-lamps. The old lamps themselves were thinking of times gone by—they dared not think of times to come. They had so many memories of quiet evenings and dark nights. I leaned back against a lamp-post,” said Godfather; “there was a sputtering in the oily wick: I could hear what the lamp was saying, and now you shall hear it too.”

“We have done our best!” said the lamp. “We have been sufficient for our time, and lighted up its joys and sorrows. We have outlived many a wonder. We have been, so to speak, the night-eyes of Copenhagen. New flames may displace us now, and undertake our office; but how many years they will shine, and what they will light up—that remains to be seen! They shine a little stronger than we old ones, we confess; but that’s an easy matter when one is moulded like a chandelier, and has such good connections; they keep pouring into one another. They have pipes on all sides, and can renew their forces from inside the town and outside the town. But as for us oil-lamps, each one shines with what he has in himself, without the help of his family connections. Copenhagen has been lighted by us and our forefathers, time out of mind. But now that our last evening is come, and we are thrust, so to speak, into the ranks behind you, ye shining comrades, far be it from, us to sulk and fret: let us rather be cheery and good-humoured. We are the old sentinels, who are relieved by new-fashioned guards in a smarter uniform than ours. We will tell what our race, all the way down from the tip-topmost old grandmother lantern, has lived to see: the whole of Copenhagen’s history. May you and yours, down to the last gas chandelier, have tales as wonderful as our own to tell, whenever you get your discharge. For your discharge you will get some day—be sure of that! Man will find out a stronger light than gas. I have heard a student say that there is a scheme afloat for setting fire to sea-water.” There was a sputtering in the wick, as the lamp spoke these words, just as if there was water in it already.

Godfather listened and pondered, and thought this a famous idea of the old lantern’s, to pass the night of transition from oil to gas in tales and sketches of Copenhagen’s history. “A good idea must not be let slip,” said Godfather; “I caught it up, went home, and got this picture-book ready for you: it goes further back still than the lanterns could go.

Here is the book, here the history:

Life and Doings of Copenhagen

It begins with pitch-darkness, a page as black as coal; that is the night of ages.

•  •  •

“Now we’ll turn over,” said Godfather.

Do you see the picture? Only the wild sea, and the blustering north-east wind; he is driving heavy icebergs onward; there is no one to sail on them—nothing but great blocks of granite, which have rolled onto the ice, as it lay under the mountains of Norway. The north-eastern wind has blown the ice adrift; he means to show the German mountains what boulders may be found up in the north. The ice-fleet has already entered the Sound, and is nearing the coast of Zealand, where Copenhagen lies now—but then there was no Copenhagen. Sandbanks were stretching under the water, and against one of them struck the icebergs, with their cargo of granite. The ice-fleet stuck fast; the north-east wind could not blow them afloat again, and so he grew mad as mad could be, and bellowed curses against the sandbank, “that thieves’ ground,” as he called it; and he swore that if it ever raised itself above the sea it should be a place for thieves and robbers, for the gallows and the wheel

But when he was thus cursing and scolding, the sun broke forth; and swaying and sporting on the sunbeams came bright and gentle spirits, children of light; they danced over the chilling icebergs, and melted them: and the great stone boulders sank down to the sandy bottom.

“Sun-vermin!” roared the north-east wind; “is that good-fellowship and kinship? That will I remember, and that will I revenge. So now for my curse!”

“And now for our blessing!” sang the children of light. “The sandbank shall rise, and we will protect it. Truth and Goodness and Beauty shall dwell there!”

“Flams and flummery!” growled the north-east wind.

“Well, of all this the lamps knew nothing,” said Godfather; “but I know it; and it is of great importance for the life and doings of Copenhagen.

“Now we’ll turn over,” said Godfather.

•  •  •

Ages have gone by; the sandbank has risen upwards; a sea-bird has settled on the largest stone that has come jutting out above the water. You may see it all in the picture. Age after age has gone by. The sea has cast dead fish upon the strand; the tough lime-grass has sprung forth, has withered, rotted, and enriched the ground. Grasses and herbs have grown of many kinds; the bank has become a green holm. The Vikings have landed there. They have met in the holmgang [48] in the death-struggle: they have found a safe anchorage in the holm alongside of Zealand.

The first oil-lamp has been kindled. I fancy that it was meant for broiling fish; and of fish there was no lack here. The herrings passed through the Sound in vast shoals; it was hard to push a boat across them. There was a flash like summer-lightning on the waters; a splendour in the deep, like the glow of northern lights. The Sound had stores of wealth in its fish, and there fore houses were built on the coast of Zealand: the walls were of oak timber, and the roofs of bark: there were trees enough for the builders. Ships made for the haven; the oil-lantern hung swaying from its rope; the north-east wind puffed and hooted: “Hooh! out, out!” But if a lantern shone upon the island, it was a thieves’ lantern: smugglers and thieves plied their trade on Thieves’ Island.

“All a-going! all a-blowing!

Weeds of wickedness and woe!

As I promised long ago!”

Thus shouted the north-east wind; and “soon,” he muttered, “there cometh a tree, the fruits whereof I may rattle as I please!”

“And here stands the tree,” said Godfather; “do you see the gallows upon Thieves’ Island?”

Robbers and murderers are hanging there in irons, just as they used to hang. The wind blew till the long skeletons clattered; but the moon shone down upon them serenely, even as it shines now upon a village dance. The sun, too, shone down serenely, and crumbled away the dangling skeletons; and the children of light sang from the sunbeams, “We know it! We know it! Yet wait a little while, and this shall be a place of beauty; a place of goodness and of splendour.”

“Cackle! Cackle! Chicken prattle!” cried the north-east wind.

“Now we’ll turn over,” said Godfather.

•  •  •

The bells were pealing in the town of Roeskilde. There lived Bishop Absalon: he could read his Bible or swing his sword; he had power and a will of his own. Absalon resolved to protect the busy fishermen of yonder harbour, where the town had grown into a market-place. He sprinkled the unhallowed ground with holy water: Thieves’ Island got a mark of honour. Masons and carpenters set to work there; and a building grew at the Bishop’s command. The sunbeams kissed the red walls as they arose. There stood Axel’s house.

Buttress’d wall, lordly hall,

Balconies and galleries,

And towers and turrets tall!

North-east wind puffed and grinned,

Fluster’d here, and bluster’d there—

The castle stood it all.”

And alongside of it lay the town of “Haven,” the merchants’ harbour: [49]

Mermaid’s bower ’mid gleaming lakes,

Built in groves of green.

Foreign traders came for the sake of the great fish-market. They built shops and houses with windowpanes of stretched bladder—for glass was too dear. Then warehouses arose, with gable-ends furnished with cranes and pulleys. Look inside the shops: those old bachelors, sitting there, mustn’t marry; they have their pepper and ginger to mind; no such wares as wives for the old pepper-boys.

The north-east wind sweeps through streets and lanes, sets the dust flying and whisks off a thatch or two. Pigs and cattle stray along the street-ditch.

“I’ll box and buffet them!” quoth the north-east wind: “I’ll whoop round the roofs, and round Axel’s house! There’s no missing that! We all know Spike Castle on Thieves’ Island.”

And Godfather showed a picture of it which he had drawn himself. On the wall stood stake after stake, and on every stake was a pirate’s head showing its teeth.

“That really did happen,” said Godfather; “the story is well worth hearing and heeding.”

Bishop Absalon was in his bath one day, when he heard through the thin wall that a freebooting ship was near the harbour. He sprang out of the bath and onto his own vessel: his horn blew, and his men gathered. The pirates turned tail and rowed hard; but the arrows flew after them and nailed their hands fast: there was no time to pull the arrows out. Bishop Absalon captured every living man, cut off all their heads, and set them up on the outer wall of the castle. The north-east wind blew with swollen cheeks, with bad weather in his jaw, as the sailors say.

“Here I’ll lie down and stretch myself out,” said the wind; “and have a look at this pretty set-out.”

He rested for hours, then he blew for days. Years went by.

The watchman climbed up on the castle watch-tower: he looked east and west, north and south.

“There you have it on the picture,” said Godfather, showing it; “you may see the man, but what he saw I must tell you.”

From the walls of Spike Castle lies open water right out to Kjöge Bay, and broad is the channel over to Zealand. The two large villages in front of Serritslev Common and Solbjerg Common are fast growing into one city with gabled timber houses. There are whole streets for shoemakers and skinners, for grocers and ale-house keepers. There is a market-place; there is a guildhall; and close to the sea, on a spot that once was an island, stands the splendid church of St. Nicholaus. It has a tower and spire, immensely high: how well it is reflected on the clear water! Not far from it stands Our Lady’s Church, where masses are read and sung, the incense fumes, and the candles burn. The Merchants’ haven is now the Bishop’s town: the Bishop of Roeskilde rules and reigns there.

Bishop Erlandsen is seated at Axel’s House. They are roasting and baking; they are serving ale and claret; they are sounding the fiddle and the kettle-drum. Lamps and lustres are burning; the castle shines as if it were the whole kingdom’s lantern. The north-east wind blows round walls and towers, but they stand firm. The north-east wind blows round the city’s western fortification, ’tis but an old wooden barricade, yet it holds fast. There, outside the wall, stands Denmark’s King, Christopher the First. The rebels have beaten him at Skelskör: he seeks shelter in the Bishop’s town.

The wind whistles and says, as the Bishop says, “Keep out! Keep out! The door is locked for thee!”

It is a time of trouble; these are dismal days; every man will have his own way. The Holstein banner waves from the castle tower. There is want and woe; it is the night of anguish. Strife is in the land, and the Black Death; pitch-dark night—but then came Waldemar. The Bishop’s town is now the King’s town; it has gabled houses and narrow streets; it has watchmen, and a town-hall; it has a fixed gallows by the west-port. None but townsmen may be hanged on it: one must be a citizen to be able to dangle there, to come up so high as to see Kjöge and the hens of Kjöge.

“That is a lovely gallows,” says the north-east wind; “the beautiful grows!” and so it whistled and blew.

From Germany blew trouble and want.

The Hansa merchants came; they came from warehouse and counter, the rich traders from Rostock, Lübeck, and Bremen; they wanted to snatch up more than the golden goose from Waldemar’s Tower; they had more power in the town of the Danish King than the Danish King himself; they came with armed ships, and no one was prepared. King Eric had no mind either to fight with his German kinsfolk; they were so many and so strong. So King Eric and all his courtiers hurried out at the west-port to the town of Sorö, to the quiet lake and the green woods, to the song of love and the goblet’s clang.

But one remained behind in Copenhagen, a kingly heart, a kingly mind. Do you see the picture here, the young woman, so fine and tender, with sea-blue eyes and flaxen hair? it is Denmark’s Queen, Philippa, the English Princess. She stayed in the distracted city, where in the narrow lanes and streets with the steep stairs, sheds, and lath-and-plaster shops, townspeople swarmed and knew not what to do. She has the heart and courage of a man. She summons burghers and peasants, inspires and encourages them. They rig the ships and garrison the blockhouses; they bang away with the carbines; there is fire and smoke, there is lightness of heart; our Lord will not give up Denmark! and the sun shines into all hearts, it beams out of all eyes in the gladness of victory. Blessed be Phihppa! and blessed she is in the hut and in the house, and in the castle of the King, where she looks after the wounded and the sick.

“I have cut a wreath and put it round the picture here,” said Godfather. “Blessed be Queen Philippa!”

•  •  •

“Now we spring years forward!” said Godfather, “and Copenhagen springs with us.”

King Christian the First has been in Rome, has been blessed by the Pope, and greeted with honour and homage on the long journey. He is building here a hall of red brick; learning shall grow there, and display itself in Latin. The poor man’s children from the plough or workshop can come there too, can live upon alms, can attain to the long black gown and sing before the citizens’ doors.

Close to the hall of learning, where all is in Latin, lies a little house; in it Danish rules, both in language and in customs. There is ale-porridge for breakfast, and dinner is at ten o’clock in the forenoon. The sun shines in through the small panes on cupboards and bookcases; in the latter lie written treasures. Master Mikkel’s “Rosary” and “Godly Comedies,” Henrik Harpestreng’s “Leech-book,” and Denmark’s “Rhyming Chronicle”’ by Brother Niels of Sorö. “Every man of breeding ought to know these,” says the master of the house, and he is the man to make them known. He is Denmark’s first printer, the Dutchman, Gotfred van Ghemen. He practises the blessed black art of book-printing.

And books come into the King’s castle, and into the houses of the burghers. Proverbs and songs get eternal life. Things which men dare not say in sorrow and pleasure are sung by the Bird of Popular Song, darkly and yet clearly; it flies so free, it flies so wide, through the common sitting-room, through the knightly castle; it sits like a falcon on the hand of the noble lady and twitters; it steals in like a little mouse, and squeaks in the dungeon to the enslaved peasant.

“It is all mere words!“ says the sharp north-east wind.

“It is spring-time!” say the sunbeams. “See how the green buds are peeping!”

•  •  •

“Now we’ll go on with our picture book,” said Godfather.

How Copenhagen glitters! There are sports and tournaments: there are long trains of splendour; look at the noble knights in armour, at the stately dames in silks and sables. King Hans is giving his daughter Elizabeth to the Elector of Brandenburg. How young she is, how gay she seems! she treads on velvet: there is a future in her thoughts, a life of household happiness. Close beside her stands her brother, Prince Christian, with earnest eyes, and hot burning blood. He is dear to the townsfolk: he knows their wrongs: he has the poor man’s future in his thoughts.

But the future rests with God alone!

•  •  •

“Now for another page in our picture-book,” said Godfather. “Sharp blows the wind, singing of the sharp sword, of the heavy times of sorrow and of strife.”

It is in the middle of April: the day is icy-cold. Why is the crowd thronging between the castle and the old custom-house, where the king’s ship lies, with sails set and flags flying? The windows and the roofs are full of faces. There is grief and pity, doubt and dread. They gaze at the castle, where once there were torch-dances in the gilded halls, now so silent and empty. They gaze at the window-balcony, where King Christian so often sat, looking over the court-bridge, and along the narrow court-bridge-street, down to his Dovelet; the Dutch girl whom he brought from Bergen. The shutters are closed fast. They turn their eyes to the castle-gate; it is opening; the draw-bridge is falling. Yonder comes King Christian with his own true wife, Elizabeth: she will not forsake her lord, now when he is so hard beset.

There was fire in his blood and fire in his brains. He would fain break with the olden times, burst the peasant’s yoke, raise the burgher, and clip the wings of “the greedy hawks;” but the hawks were too many for him. He must now leave kingdom and country behind him, and win friends and kinsfolk for himself in foreign lands. His wife and a faithful band of men go with him: every eye is wet in the hour of parting.

There is a discord of voices in the song of Time, some for and some against him: a threefold choir. Hear what the nobles say: their words are written and printed.

“Woe to thee, Christian the Bad! the blood shed on Stokholm’s market-place cries aloud and curses thee!”

And the monks echo the malediction: “Be thou cast off by God and by us! Thou hast called hither the Lutheran doctrine: thou hast given it church and pulpit: thou hast loosened the devil’s tongue: woe to thee, Christian the Bad!”

But peasant and burgher sigh in deep undertones: “Christian, thou beloved of the people! No more shall the peasant be sold like cattle, no more be bartered away for a hound. That law of thine shall bear witness for thee!”

But the words of the poor are like chaff before the wind.

Now the king’s ship sails away from the castle; and the townsfolk gather on the ramparts, and look after it to the last.

•  •  •

Weary times! hard times! Put not thy trust in kith: no, nor yet in kin.

Thy father’s brother Frederick, Lord of the castle of Kiel, would like to be King of Denmark.

King Frederick lies before Copenhagen. Do you see this picture, “the faithful Copenhagen?” Round about it are coal-black clouds, with picture on picture; only look at each of them. They are full of death-knells, such as still resound in the sad old lays and legends, tolling for the agonies of many bitter years.

And how fared King Christian, that wandering bird? The birds have sung thereof; and they fly wide over land and sea. The stork came early in the spring, from the south over the German lands, and you shall hear what he had seen.

“I saw the fugitive King Christian drive upon a heather-grown moor. I saw him meet a wretched car, with one horse to draw it. A woman sat in it, King Christian’s sister, the Margravine of Brandenburg; true to the Lutheran creed, she had been turned away by her husband. On the bleak moor met the outcast children of kings. Hard times! Weary times! Trust neither kith nor kin!”

The swallows came from Sonderborg Castle with a doleful song: “King Christian is betrayed. They have cast him into the dungeon vault, deep as a well. His steps are wearing footprints on the rocky floor, his fingers leave their marks upon the stones.”

Oh, words are weak the woe to speak

Yon furrowed stone can tell.”

The fish-eagle comes from the rolling sea: it is open and free: a ship speeds over it, and the skipper is the bold Sören Nordby. Fortune is with him; but fortune shifts like wind and weather.

In Jutland and Fyn scream the crows and ravens, “Come, gather together! fine work for beak and claw. Horse-carrion or man-carrion. Pick and choose: pick and choose!” ’Tis a fighting time again; the count’s feud. The peasant has grasped his club, the townsman his knife, and they have shouted, “Death to the wolves! and let none of their cubs escape!” There are clouds of smoke; they roll from burning towns.

King Christian is held prisoner in Sönderborg Castle. He will never get loose; never see Copenhagen and its bitter need. On North-Common stands Christian the Third, where his father stood before. Within the city is despair; famine is there, and the spotted plague.

Propped against yonder church-wall sits a gaunt and ragged woman; see, she is a corpse: two living children lie on her lap, and suck blood from the dead breast.

Courage has fallen: resistance falls. Oh, thou faithful Copenhagen!

•  •  •

Hark! rub-a-dub! tantara! Drums and trumpets are coming.

And here come noble lords, their figures glowing with silks and velvets and waving plumes, and their steeds caparisoned with cloth of gold. They are riding to the Old-market. Is it for carousing or tourneying, as in olden days? Burghers, too, and peasants are flocking thither, all in their best array. What is to be seen? Have they been piling a bonfire of popish idols? Or stands the hangman there as he stood by Slaghoek’s death-fire? Not so—the king, the lord of the land, is Lutheran; and now his creed will be avowed, and adopted as a child of the state.

High and mighty ladies and noble maidens with high collars and pearls in their caps, sit behind the open windows, and see all the show. On an outspread carpet, under a canopy, sit the councillors of state in antique dress, near the King’s throne. The King is silent. Now his will is proclaimed in the Danish tongue, the will of the state council. Burghers and peasants receive words of stern rebuke for the opposition they have shown to the high nobility. The burgher is humbled; the peasant becomes a thrall. Now words of condemnation are uttered against the bishops of the land. Their power is past. All the property of the church and cloisters is transferred to the King and the nobles.

Haughtiness and hate are there, pomp and misery.

The time of change has heavy clouds, but also sunshine; it shone now in the hall of learning, in the student’s home, and names shine out from it right on to our time. Hans Tausen, the son of a poor smith in Fyn:

It was the little lad from Birkendè who came.

His name flew over Denmark, so widely spread his fame;

A Danish Martin Luther, who drew the Gospel sword,

And gained a victory for truth and for the Word.

There also shines the name of Petrus Palladius; so it is in Latin, but in Danish it is Peter Plade, the Bishop of Roskilde, also the son of a poor smith in Jutland. Among the names of noblemen shines that of Hans Friis, the Chancellor of the kingdom. He seated the students at his table, and looked after their wants, and those of the schoolboys too. And one name before all others is greeted with hurrahs and song:

While but a single student here

At learning’s desk is seated.

So long shall good King Christian’s name

With loud Hurrahs be greeted.

Sunbeams came amongst the heavy clouds in that time of change.

•  •  •

“Now we turn the page.”

What whistles and sings in “The Great Belt” under the coast of Samsö? From the sea rises a mermaid, with sea-green hair; she tells the future to the peasant. A prince shall be born, who will become a king, great and powerful.

In the fields, under the blossoming white-thorn, he was born. His name now blooms in song and story, in the knightly halls and castles round about. The exchange sprang up with tower and spire; Rosenborg lifted itself and looked far out over the ramparts: the students themselves got a house of their own, and close beside it stood and still points to Heaven the Round Tower, which looks toward the island of Hven where Uranienborg once stood. Its golden domes glittered in the moonlight, and mermaids sang of the master there whom kings and sages visited, the sage of noble blood, Tycho Brahe. He raised the name of Denmark so high, that along with the stars of heaven it was known in all the cultured lands of the world. And Denmark spurned him away from her.

He sang for comfort in his grief:

“Is not Heaven everywhere?

What more then do I require!”

His song lives in the hearts of the people, like the mermaid’s song about Christian the Fourth.

•  •  •

“Now comes a page which you must look at in earnest,” said Godfather; “there is picture after picture, as there is verse after verse in the old ballads. It is a song, so joyful in its beginning, so sorrowful in its ending.”

A king’s child dances in the castle of the King; how charming she is to see! She sits on the lap of Christian the Fourth, his beloved daughter Eleonora. She grows in womanly virtues and graces. The foremost man amongst the nobles, Corfitz Ulfeldt, is her bridegroom. She is still a child, and still gets whippings from her stern governess; she complains to her sweetheart, and with good right too. How clever she is, and cultured and learned; she knows Latin and Greek, sings Italian to her lute, and is able to talk about the Pope and Luther.

King Christian lies in the chapel-vault in Roskilde Cathedral, and Eleonora’s brother is King. There is pomp and show in the palace in Copenhagen, there is beauty and wit; foremost is the Queen herself, Sophia Amalia of Lyneborg. Who can guide her horse so well as she? Who dances with such dignity as she? Who talks with such knowledge and cleverness as Denmark’s Queen? “Eleonora Christina Ulfeldt!”—these words were spoken by the French Ambassador—“in beauty and cleverness she surpasses all.”

From the polished dancing-floor of the palace grew the burdock of envy; it hung fast, it worked itself in and twisted around itself, the scorn of contempt. “The baseborn creature! her carriage shall stop at the castle-bridge: where the Queen drives, the lady must walk.” There is a perfect storm of gossip, slander, and lies.

And Ulfeldt takes his wife by the hand in the quietness of the night. He has the keys of the town gates; he opens one of them, horses wait outside. They ride along the shore, and then sail away to Sweden.

Now we turn the page, even as fortune turns itself for these two.

It is autumn; the day is short, the night is long; it is grey and damp, the wind so cold, and rising in strength. It whistles in the leaves of the trees on the rampart, the leaves fly into Peter Oxe’s courtyard, which stands empty and forsaken by its owners. The wind sweeps out over Christianshaven, round Kai Lykke’s mansion, now a common jail. He himself has been hunted from honour and home; his escutcheon is broken, his effigy hanged on the highest gallows. Thus is he punished for his wanton thoughtless words about the honoured Queen of the land. Shrilly pipes the wind, and rushes over the open place where the mansion of the Lord High Steward has stood; only one stone of it is now left—“that I drove as a boulder down here on the floating ice,” whoops the wind. “The stone stranded where Thieves’ Island has since grown, under my curse, and so it came into the mansion of Lord Ulfeldt, where the lady sang to the sounding lute, read Greek and Latin, and bore herself proudly: now only the stone stands up here with its inscription:

‘TO THE ETERNAL SHAME AND DISGRACE OF THE TRAITOR CORFITZ ULFELDT.’

“But where is she now, the stately lady? Hoo-ee! hoo-ee!” pipes the wind with ear-splitting voice.

In the Blue Tower, behind the palace, where the sea-water beats against the slimy walls, there she has already sat for many years. There is more smoke than warmth in the chamber; the little window is high up under the ceiling. Christian the Fourth’s petted child, the daintiest of maids and matrons, in what discomfort and misery she sits. Memory hangs curtains and tapestries on the smoke-blackened walls of her prison. She remembers the lovely time of her childhood, her father’s soft and beaming features; she remembers her splendid wedding; the days of her pride, her hours of hardship in Holland, in England, and in Bornholm.

Naught seems too hard for wedded love to bear.

And faithfulness is not a cause for shame.

But he was with her then; now she is alone, alone forever. She knows not his grave, no one knows it.

Her faithfulness to him was all her crime.

She sat there for years, long and many, whilst life went on outside. It never stands still, but we will do that for a moment here, and think of her, and the words of the song:

I keep my promise to my husband still

In want and great necessity.

•  •  •

“Do you see the picture here?” said Godfather. “It is winter-time; the frost makes a bridge between Lolland and Fyn, a bridge for Carl Gustav, who is pushing on irresistibly. There is plundering and burning, fear and want, in the whole land.”

The Swedes are lying before Copenhagen. It is biting cold and a blinding snow; but true to their king, and true to themselves, men and women stand ready for the fight. Every tradesman, shopman, student, and schoolmaster is up on the ramparts to defend and guard. There is no fear of the red-hot balls. King Frederick swore he would die in his nest. He rides up there and the queen with him. Courage, discipline, and patriotic zeal are there. Only let the Swede put on his white shroud, and crawl forward in the white snow, and try to storm! Beams and stones are rolled down on him; yea, the women come with brewing cauldrons and pour boiling pitch and tar over the storming enemy.

This night king and commoner are one united power. And there is rescue and there is victory. The bells ring; songs of thanksgiving resound. Commoners, here you won your knightly spurs!

•  •  •

What follows now? See the picture here. Bishop Svane’s wife comes in a closed carriage. Only the high and mighty nobility may do that. The proud young gentlemen break the carriage down; the bishop’s wife must walk to the bishop’s house.

Is that the whole story?—Something much bigger shall be broken next—the power of pride.

Burgomaster Hans Nansen and Bishop Svane grasp hands for the work, in the name of the Lord, They talk with wisdom and honesty; it is heard in the church and in the burgher’s house,

One hand-grip of fellowship, and the haven is blocked, the gates are locked, the alarm bell rings.

The power is given to the king alone, he who remained in his nest in the hour of danger; he governs, he rules over great and small. It is the time of absolute monarchy.

•  •  •

Now we turn the page and the time with it.

“Halloo, halloo, halloo!” The plough is laid aside, the heather gets leave to grow—but the hunting is good. “Halloo, halloo!” Listen to the ringing horn, and the baying hounds! See the huntsmen, see the king himself. King Christian V: he is young and gay. There is merriment in palace and in town. In the halls are wax candles, in the courtyards are torches, and the streets of the town have got lamps. Everything shines so new! The new nobility, called in from Germany, barons and counts, get favours and gifts. Nothing passes current now except titles and rank, and the German language.

Then sounds a voice that is thoroughly Danish; it is the weaver’s son who is now a bishop; it is the voice of Kingo; he sings his lovely hymns.

There is another burgher’s son, a vintner’s son; his thoughts shine forth in law and justice; his law-book became gold-ground for the king’s name; it will stand for times to come. That burgher’s son, the mightiest man in the land, gets a coat of arms and enemies with it, and so the sword of the executioner is raised over the head of Griffenfeldt. Then grace is granted, with imprisonment for life. They send him to a rocky islet off the coast of Trondhjem, Munkholm—Denmark’s St. Helena,

But the dance goes merrily in the palace hall; splendour and pomp are there; there is lively music, and courtiers and ladies dance there.

•  •  •

Now comes the time of Frederick IV!

See the proud ships with the flag of victory! See the rolling sea! it can tell of great exploits, of the glories of Denmark. We remember the names, the victorious Sehested and Gyldenlöwe! We remember Hvitfeldt, who, to save the Danish fleet, blew up his ship, and flew to Heaven with the Danish flag. We think of the time, and the struggle of those days, and the hero who sprang from the Norwegian mountains to the defence of Denmark, Peter Tordenskjold. From the glorious surging sea, his name thunders from coast to coast.

There flashed a lightning through the powder-dust,

A thunder rumbled through the whispering age;

A tailor-lad sprang from the tailor’s board,

From Norway’s coast sailed out a little sloop,

And over Northern seas there flew again

The Viking spirit, youthful, girt with steel.

Then there came a fresh breeze from Greenland’s coast, a fragrance as from the land of Bethlehem; it bore tidings of the Gospel light kindled by Hans Egede and his wife.

The half-page here has therefore a gold ground; the other half, which betokens sorrow, is ashen-grey with black specks, as if from fire sparks, as if from disease and pestilence.

In Copenhagen the plague is raging. The streets are empty; the doors are barred, and round about are crosses marked with chalk; inside is the plague, but where the cross is black, all are dead.

In the night the bodies are carried away, without the tolling-bell; they take the half-dead from the streets with them; the army wagons rumble, they are filled with corpses. But from the ale-houses sound the horrid songs of the drunkard and wild shrieks. In drink they seek to forget their bitter distress; they would forget, and end—end! Everything comes to an end. Here the page ends with the second time of distress and trial for Copenhagen,

•  •  •

King Frederick IV is still alive; his hair has grown grey in the course of the years. From the window of the palace he looks out upon the stormy weather; it is late in the year.

In a little house by the Westgate a boy plays with his ball; it flies up into the garret. The little one takes a tallow-candle and goes up to search for it; he sets fire to the little house, and so to the whole street. It flares in the air, so that the clouds shine. The flames increase! There is food for the fire; there is hay and straw, bacon and tar, there are piles of firewood for the winter-time, and everything burns. There is weeping and shrieking and great confusion. In the tumult rides the old king, encouraging and commanding. There is blowing up with powder, and pulling down of houses. Now there is fire also in the north quarter, and the churches are burning, St. Peter’s and Our Lady’s. Listen to the bells playing their last tune: “Turn away thy wrath, Lord God of Mercy!”

Only the Round Tower and the castle are left standing; round about them are smoking ruins. King Frederick is good to the people; he comforts and feeds them; he is with them; he is the friend of the homeless. Blessed be Frederick IV!

•  •  •

See this page now!

See the gilded carriage with footmen round it, with armed riders before and behind it, coming from the castle, where an iron chain is stretched to prevent the people from coming too near. Every plebeian man must go over the square with bare head; because of this not many are seen there, they avoid the place. There comes one now with downcast eyes, with hat in hand, and he is just the man of that time, whom we name with pride:

His words like a cleansing storm-wind rang

For sunshine in days yet to come;

And smuggled-in fashions like grasshoppers sprang

In haste to escape and get home.

It is wit and humour in person; it is Ludwig Holberg. The Danish theatre, the scene of his greatness, has been closed, as if it were the dwelling-place of infamy. All merriment is coffined; dance, song, and music are forbidden and banished. The dark side of religion is now in power.

•  •  •

“The Danish prince!” as his mother called him; now comes his time with sunshiny weather, with the song of birds, with gladness and gaiety, and true Danish ways. King Frederick V is king. And the chain is taken away from the square beside the castle; the Danish theatre is opened again; there is laughter and pleasure and good humour. And the peasants hold their summer festival It is a time of gaiety after the time of fasting and oppression. The beautiful thrives, blossoming and bearing fruit in sound, in colour, and in creative art. Hearken to Gretry’s music! Watch the acting of Londemann! And Denmark’s queen loves what is Danish. Louisa of England, beautiful and gentle; God in his Heaven, bless you! The sunbeams sing in lively chorus about the queens in the Danish land—Pliilippa, Elizabeth, Louisa!

•  •  •

The earthly parts have long been buried, but the souls live, and the names live. Again, England sends a royal bride, Matilde, so young, and so soon forsaken! Poets will sing of thee in times to come, of thy youthful heart and time of trial. And song has power, an indescribable power through times and peoples. See the burning of the castle. King Christian’s castle! They try to save the best they can find. See, the dockyard men are dragging away a basket with silver plate and precious things. It is a great treasure; but suddenly they see through the open door, where the flames are bright, a bronze bust of King Christian IV. Then they cast away the treasure they are carrying; his image is much more to them! that must be saved, however heavy it may be to carry. They know him from Ewald’s song, from Hartmann’s lovely melody.

There is power in the words and the song, and it shall sound even twice as strong for the poor Queen Matilde.

•  •  •

Now we shall turn farther on in our picture-book.

On Ulfeldt’s Place stood the stone of shame; where is there one on the earth like it? By the Westgate a column was raised; how many are there like it on the earth?

The sunbeams kissed the boulder-stone, the foundation of “Freedom’s Column.” All the church-bells rang, the flags waved, the people hurraed for the Crown-prince Frederick. In the hearts and on the lips of old and young were the names of Bernstorff, Reventlow, Colbjörnson. With beaming eyes and thankful hearts they read the inscription of the column:

The king has decreed: Serfdom shall cease. The Tenant laws shall be set in order, and put in force, that the free yeoman may become brave and enlightened, diligent and contented, a worthy citizen, a happy man!

What a sunny day! What a “summer in town!”

The spirits of light sang: “The Good is growing, the Beautiful is growing. Freedom’s column shall stand in sunshine, blessed by God, by king and people.”

We have a highway old and wide

And to the ends of earth it goes.

The open sea—open for friend and foe—and now the foe was there. It sailed up, the mighty English fleet; a great power against a little one. The shock was cruel, but there were brave hearts to bear it; and

Each stood firm with dauntless breath.

Stood and fought and met his death.

they made the foe admire them, and inspired the singers of Denmark. We still keep that day with waving flags. Denmark’s glorious second of April, the battle day at the Roadstead.

•  •  •

Years passed away. A fleet was seen in the Sound. Was it bound for Russia or Denmark? No one knew, not even those on board.

Our people tell a legend of that morning in the Sound. When the sealed orders were broken open, and read, and found to be orders to take the Danish fleet, then, they say, a young captain stood up before his chief, a worthy son of Britain, noble in word and deed. “I have sworn,” he cried, “to fight to the death for England’s flag in fair and open war, but not in piracy.”

And thereupon he sprang overboard.

And straight the fleet to Copenhagen came.

Far from the spot where battle was to be

He lay, the captain—no one knows his name,

A corpse, enshrouded by the deep dark sea;

Northward he drove; and Swedish fishermen,

Sweeping the midnight water with their nets,

Drew him ashore among their fish: and then—

They cast dice for the dead man’s epaulettes.”

The enemy stood before Copenhagen; it shone in flames, and we lost our fleet, but not our courage and our faith in God: he casteth down, but raiseth up again. Our wounds were healed like those of the chosen in Valhalla. Copenhagen’s history is rich with consolation.

’Tis a saying in our land,

Bravely still let Denmark stand,

God will lend a helping hand,

And the sun will shine tomorrow!

And soon, indeed, the sun shone upon the rebuilt city, upon rich corn fields, upon business and enterprise; a blessed summer day of peace, wherein poetry raised her Fata Morgana of many colours, at the coming of Oehlenschläger.

And in science a great find was made; far better than the “gold-horn” of olden days. A bridge of gold was found.

“A bridge for Thought itself;

From land to land, in lightning’s form, to speed.”

Hans Christian Oersted [50] wrote his name upon it. And see! close up to the church by the castle, there rose a building, to which even the poorest man and woman gladly gave their penny.

You remember the first part of the picture-book? and the old stone- blocks, that toppled down from the crags of Norway, and were floated here on the ice: now they are hoisted up out of the sandy depths at Thorwaldsen’s [51] bidding, and brought to light again in all their marble beauty.

Remember what I have shown and told you. The sand-bank in the sea arose, became a breakwater for the haven, bore Axel’s house, bore the bishop’s mansion, and the king’s castle; and now it bears the temple of art. The words of the wind’s curse have blown away; but what the children of sunlight sang in their gladness about the coming times—that has been fulfilled.

Many and many a storm has rolled off: yet another may come on; it will roll off again. Truth, and Goodness, and Beauty win the day. And so ends the picture-book; but not so Copenhagen’s history. Who knows what you yourself may live to see?

It has often looked black and blown a gale; but the sunshine is not blown away—that remains. And stronger than the very strongest sunshine is God. Our Lord rules over more than Copenhagen.

•  •  •

Thus spoke Godfather, and gave me the book. His eyes shone: he felt so sure of what he said. And I took the book joyfully, proudly, and carefully, just as I took my little sister, the first time I carried her.

And Godfather said, “You are quite welcome to show your picture-book to one friend or another, and you may say it was I who made up the work, with scissors, paste, and pencil. But it is a matter of life and death that they should know where I got the first idea of it. You know it, so tell it to them! The idea is due to the old oil-lamps that on the last evening of their burning showed to the gas-lights of the city, like a Fata Morgana, all that had been seen there—from the first kindling of a lamp in the harbour, down to that very evening when Copenhagen was lighted up both with oil and gas.

“You may show the book to whom you please; that is to say, to any people with kind eyes and gentle hearts; but if a hel-horse should look in, then close Godfather’s Picture-Book.”

[ 1868 ]

From a Window in Vartou

—

Looking toward the green rampart that encircles Copenhagen, stands a large red house with numerous windows, which are garnished with balsams and green trees; the rooms within are bare and poverty-stricken, and poor old folk inhabit them. The place is called Vartou.

Look! an old maid is leaning out from one window, plucks off the withered leaves from her balsams, and looks out upon the green rampart, where merry children are rolling and tumbling; what can she be thinking of? A whole life-drama moves before her mind’s eye.

The poor children, how happily they play! what red cheeks, what bright eyes! They don’t notice that they have neither shoes nor stockings. There they dance, on the very same green mound where, as tradition tells, many years back, because the earth always sank in, an innocent child was enticed with flowers and playthings into its open grave, which was walled up while the little one played and feasted. [52] Then the rampart grew firm and soon wore a garment of fair green turf. But the children have never heard the legend, else they would hear the poor betrayed little one still crying from beneath the earth, and the dew on the grass would seem to them like burning tears. Nor have they heard the history of that king of Denmark who, when the enemy lay encamped round the city, rode past this spot, and swore he would die in his nest; or how women and men came together and poured boiling water upon the white-clad foemen as they crawled up the outer side of the rampart, amid the snow.

The little ones play merrily; neither they, nor the old maid watching them, think on these things.

Play, thou pretty maiden, play! the years pass quickly; soon comes the blessed, solemn time, when the candidates for confirmation walk together, hand in hand, and thou among them clad in a white frock that has cost thy mother much time and work, to make it out of her own dress of long ago. Thou shalt have a red shawl too; it is far too big for thee, but at least everyone can see how big it is! Thou thinkest now upon thy dress, now upon the goodness of the kind Father in heaven who has called thee to be His child. And pleasant it is to have a whole holiday, and a walk on the green rampart after service-time.

And the years pass on; many dark days come, but youth is hopeful, and you have won a new friend—you know not how. You meet, you ramble together on the rampart in early spring, on the high days and holidays, while the church-bells ring out the solemn festivals.

There are no violets in blossom yet, but just outside Rosenborg you find a tree decked with the first green buds of spring; there you pause. Every year that tree throws out fresh green shoots. Alas! It is not so with the human heart, and heavier and darker clouds pass over the mind of man than ever the northern skies have known. Poor child; thy bridal chamber is a coffin, and thou shalt be an old maid. From Vartou shalt thou look out through the balsam blossoms, watch the children at play; and see thy history repeated.

This is the life drama that unfolds its course before the eyes of the old maid who looks out on the ramparts, while the sun shines, and the merry red-cheeked children without shoes and stockings sing and sport, like the free birds of the air.

[ 1847 ]

The Dream of Little Tuk

—

Well, yes, there was little Tuk. That was not his name, but when he could not yet speak clearly he called himself Tuk, which he meant for Charlie; and that does very well, but one must know it. He had to look after his little sister Gustava, who was much younger than himself, and at the same time he had to learn his lessons; these two things, however, would not go very well together. The poor boy sat there with his little sister on his knee, singing to her all the songs he knew, and glancing now and then into his geography book which lay open before him. The next morning he had to know all the towns of Zealand by heart, and all that anyone can be expected to know about them.

Then his mother came home, for she had been out, and took little Gustava in her arms. Tuk went as quickly as possible to the window, and read so zealously that he had almost read his eyes out; it became darker and darker, but his mother had no money to buy candles.

“There goes the old washerwoman from over the way,” said his mother, looking out of the window. “The poor woman can hardly drag herself along, and has to carry a pail full of water from the well; be a good boy, Tuk, my child, run over and help the old woman. Will you?”

And Tuk ran quickly over and helped her; but when he came back to the room it had become quite dark, and as there could be no question about light, he was to go to bed; his bed was an old settle. He was lying upon it thinking of his geography lesson of Zealand, and of all the master had said. Of course he ought still to be learning, but that was impossible. He therefore put the geography book under his pillow, because he had heard that this helps one a great deal when one wants to learn a lesson; the only thing is, one can’t depend upon it. There he was lying and thinking and thinking, and then it seemed to him suddenly as if someone kissed him on the eyes and mouth. He slept, and yet he did not sleep; he felt as if the old washerwoman looked at him with her kind eyes and said: “It would be a great pity if you did not know your lesson tomorrow! You have helped me; therefore I will now help you, as God always helps everyone.” And suddenly the book under Tuk’s pillow began to move. “Cluck, cluck!” It was a hen which came crawling out, and she was from Kjöge. [53]  “I am a Kjöge-hen,” she said, and then she told him how many inhabitants the town had, and of the battle that had taken place there, although this latter was not worth mentioning.

Then he heard a rattling noise and a plump—something fell down. It was a wooden bird, the parrot that was used at the shooting competition in Prästöe. [54]  It said that there were as many inhabitants in that town as it had nails in its body; it was very proud too. “Thorwaldsen has been living quite close to me. Plump! here I am, quite comfortable!”

But now little Tuk was no longer lying in bed, but sat on horseback, and went off at a gallop. A magnificently dressed knight, with a shining plume on his helmet, held Tuk before him on the saddle, and so they rode through the wood to the old town of Wordingborg, [55] and that was a large lively town; on the king’s castle were high towers, and light streamed from all the windows. Inside there was singing and dancing, for King Waldemar danced with the gaily-dressed Court ladies. Now it became morning, and as the sun rose, the whole city and the king’s castle, tower after tower, sank down; and at last one single tower stood on the hill where the castle had been standing. The town was very small and poor, and the boys came out of school with their books under their arms, and said: “Two thousand inhabitants;” but that was not true, for there were not so many in the town.

And little Tuk was again in bed, and did not know if he was dreaming or not, but somebody stood close by his side. “Little Tuk, little Tuk,” a voice said. It was a sailor who spoke, but he was as small as if he were a midshipman, although he was not one. “I have to greet you from Corsör; that’s a rising town, and is very lively; it has steamboats and mail-coaches—formerly they said that it was ugly, but that is no longer true.”

“I am situated upon the sea,” said Corsör; [56]  I have highroads and pleasure-grounds, and I am the birthplace of a poet who was witty and entertaining, qualities that not all poets possess. Once I wished to equip a ship that was to go all round the world; but it did not do it, although it might have done it. In addition, I smell sweetly, for close by my gates grow the most splendid rose trees.”

Little Tuk looked, but all was red and green before his eyes; when the confusion of colours had passed by, he all at once saw a wooded slope near a bay, and high above it stood a beautiful old church with two high pointed spires. Springs of water flowed out of the slope in numerous jets, so that there was continual splashing. Close by sat an old king with a golden crown on his long hair. He was King Hroar, near the springs, close by the city of Roeskilde, [57] as one now calls it. And over the slope went all the kings and queens of Denmark, hand in hand, with their golden crowns on their heads, up to the old church, and the organ was playing, and the springs rippled. Little Tuk saw and heard everything. “Don’t forget the towns,” said King Hroar.

All at once everything was gone again, but whither? It seemed to Tuk as if someone turned over the leaves of a book. And there stood an old peasant woman before him, who came from Sorö, [58] where the grass grows in the market-place. A grey linen apron was hanging over her head and back, and was very wet; it must have been raining. “Yes, it has,” she said, and she could tell many amusing passages from Holberg’s comedies and of Waldemar and Absolom. But all at once she shrank together and nodded her head as if she wanted to jump. “Croak,” she said; “it is wet, it is wet; Sorö is as quiet as a grave!” Suddenly she became a frog. “Croak!” And then she turned an old woman again. “One must dress oneself according to the weather,” she said. “It is wet! It is wet! My town is like a bottle—one has to go in at the neck, and come out at the neck again! Formerly, I had most splendid fishes, and now I have fresh rosy-cheeked boys at the bottom of the bottle, who learn wisdom, Hebrew, Greek. Croak!” That sounded as if the frogs croaked, or as if someone walked over the marshes with large boots—always the same sound, so monotonous and tiresome, that little Tuk fell asleep, and that could not do him any harm. But even in this sleep came a dream, or something of that kind. His little sister Gustava, with her blue eyes and golden curly hair, had suddenly become a tall slender girl, and could fly without having any wings; and then they flew right across Zealand, with its green woods and blue lakes.

“Do you hear the cock crow, little Tuk? ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo.’ The cocks fly up from Kjöge! You shall have a large farmyard one day! You will never suffer want or hunger! And you will take the cake, as people say: you will become a rich and happy man. Your house will rise like the tower of King Waldemar, and will be richly adorned with marble statues like those at Prästöe. Understand me well: your name shall travel with glory all over the world, like the ship that was to sail off from Corsör, and at Roeskilde—”

“—don’t forget the towns!” said King Hroar—

“—there you will speak well and cleverly, little Tuk; and when they place you at last in your grave, you will sleep peacefully.”

“As if I lay in Sorö,” said little Tuk, and then he woke up.

It was broad daylight, and he could no longer remember his dream, but that was not necessary, for one must not know what is to come in future. He quickly jumped out of bed and read his book, and there, all at once, he knew his whole lesson.

The old washerwoman just then peeped in at the door, nodded kindly to him, and said: “Many thanks, you good child, for your assistance! May God realise your beautiful dream!”

Little Tuk did not remember what he had dreamed, but God knew it.

[ 1847 ]

A String Of Pearls

—

As yet the railroad in Denmark extends only as far as from Copenhagen to Corsör; it is a chain of pearls. Europe has abundance of pearls far larger and more costly, such as Paris, London, Vienna, Naples. And yet many a man will point out as his favourite, choicest pearl, no such famous city as one of these, but, on the contrary, some little unnoticeable town, which is yet to him the home of homes, the dwelling-place of those dearest to him. Nay, often would he select, not a town at all, but only a single little house, half hidden among green hedges, a mere point hardly seen as the train rattles past.

How many pearls can we count on the line from Copenhagen to Corsör? We will consider six, which the majority must take note of; six to which old memories give a peculiar beauty and lustre.

Close by the hill where stands Frederick the Sixth’s palace, the home of Oehlenschläger’s [59] childhood, and sheltered by a background of woods, glistens one of these pearls; it used to be called “The Cottage of Philemon and Baucis.” For here two lovable old people, Rahbek and his wife Gamma, [60] were wont to dwell; here, under this hospitable roof, were assembled all the most intellectual men of the last generation, the choicest spirits in Copenhagen; it was the holiday home of the intellectual. Nay, do not exclaim, “Alas, what a change!” for now it is the nursery of the intellect, a conservatory for sick plants, for the buds that have not strength to unfold the beauty of colour and form, the capacity for blossoming and fruit-bearing latent within them. The idiots’ home, encompassed and guarded by love, is in truth a holy spot, a conservatory for the sick plants that shall someday be transplanted hence to blossom in the paradise of God. Here, where once the strongest and keenest intellects were met to exchange thought and idea, here are now assembled the weakest; but still the soul’s flame mounts heavenward from “The Cottage of Philemon and Baucis.”

Old Roeskilde now lies before us, the home of ancient kings; the slender spires of the church rise above the low-built town and mirror themselves in Issefiord. Here we will seek out a grave—not that of the great Queen Margaret; no, within yonder white-walled churchyard it lies; an ordinary stone covers the spot where reposes the master of the organ; we remember, “There dwelt a king in Leire,” etc. [61]  Roeskilde, the burial-place of kings! the pearl for us here is only yon insignificant grave-stone, whereon is chiselled a lyre, and the name Weyse.

Now we come to Sigersted, near Ringsted town; the bed of the river is low; yellow corn now waves over the spot where Hagbarth’s boat lay at anchor, not far from Signé’s maiden bower. Who knows not the legend of Hagbarth, who was hanged on an oak tree, while Signelil’s bower stood in flames? who remembers not that legend of strong love? [62]

“Beautiful Sorö, encircled by woods!” The quiet old cloister town just peeps out through its moss-grown trees; the youths in the academy can glance across the lake toward the world’s highway, and hear the whistle and whiz of the train as it flies through the wood. Sorö, thou pearl indeed, thou keepest Holberg’s [63] dust! Like a great white swan beside the deep woodland lake stands thy palace of learning, and near it, like the bright star-flower of the groves, gleams a tiny house, whence pious hymns re-echo throughout the land, where words are spoken to which even the peasant listens with delight. As the bird’s song to the green wood, so is Ingemann [64] to Sorö.

On! to the town of Slagelse! Vanished is Antoorskov cloister, vanished the rich halls of the palace, yet one relic of old times still lingers here—the wooden cross on the hill yonder; it has been repaired again, for it marks the spot where, according to the legend, St. Anders, [65] the priest of Slagelse, waked up, after having been carried from Palestine thither in the space of a single night.

Corsör! there wast thou born, Jens Baggesen, thou master of words and wit! The ruined old ramparts of the dismantled fortress are now the last visible relics of thy childhood’s home; their shadows, lengthening at sunset, point out the spot where stood thy parents’ house. Thou sweet singer! we will weave thee a garland of wild flowers, fling it into the lake, and the current will bear it to the coast of Kieler Fiord, where rest thine ashes; the tide shall bring thee a greeting from the rising generation—a greeting from thy birthplace, even Corsör, where I let fall the string of pearls.

•  •  •

“Quite right! it is a string of pearls that stretches from Copenhagen to Corsör,” said my grandmother, after hearing all this read aloud. “It is a row of pearls for me now, and it was the same forty years ago,” she added. “We had no steam-engines then, we spent days over a journey that can now be achieved in as many hours. It was in 1815; I was then one-and-twenty—a charming age! Well, in those days, it was a great matter to journey to Copenhagen—the town of all towns, as we held it. My parents had not been there for twenty years; well, at last they were going, and I with them. We had talked about it for years beforehand, and now it had actually come to pass; it seemed as though a new life were beginning for me, and so in truth it was, after a fashion.

“There was such sewing and packing; and when at last we got off, such a crowd of good friends came out to bid us farewell. It was in the forenoon that we drove out of Odense in my parents’ old-fashioned carriage, our acquaintances nodding to us from the windows all down the street, till we passed through St. George’s Gate. The weather was beautiful, the birds sang, everything was a pleasure; we forgot that it was a long and wearisome road to Nyborg. Toward evening we reached it; the post did not arrive before the night, and the little sailing vessel had to wait for it. We got on board; there lay before us, as far as we could see, the wide, smooth waters. We lay down in our clothes, and went to sleep. When I waked up in the morning, and came on deck, nothing at all could be seen, mist covered the whole. I heard the cocks crowing, and knew by that that it must be sunrise; the bells were ringing, I knew not whence; then the mist faded away, and we found we were still close to Nyborg. A bit of a gale sprang up later in the day, but right against us; we cruised and cruised about, and at last were lucky enough to get to Corsör by a little past eleven at night, having spent two-and-twenty hours over a distance of sixteen miles.

“I was right glad to get on land; but it was dark, the lamps burned miserably, and all seemed so strange to me, who had never been in any town but Odense.

“‘Look! Baggesen [66] was born here,’ said my father; ‘and in this house Birckner [67] lived!’ And at hearing this, somehow the dark old town with its narrow little streets at once seemed to grow larger and brighter. And we were so glad to have solid earth under our feet. Sleep was out of the question for me, that night.

“Next morning we had to start early; we had before us a miserable road, with terribly great hillocks and holes as far as Slagelse, and afterward there was little improvement, and we wanted to get on to The Crab in good time, and thus be able the same day to pay a visit to the miller’s Emilius at Sorö. The miller’s Emilius—so we called him then—he, you know, was your grandfather, my late husband the dean—he was then a student at Sorö, and had just passed his second examination.

“By the afternoon we got to The Crab, which was then the very best inn on the whole journey, and such a pretty place!—well, you must allow that it still is. And Madame Plambek was a brisk hostess, and everything in the house was so clean and fresh. On the wall hung, framed and under a glass, Baggesen’s letter to her; I liked to see that. And we went to Sorö, and there we found Emilius; and you may fancy how glad we were to see him, and he to see us. He was so attentive and pleasant; he went with us to see the church, to Absalon’s grave, and Holberg’s; he looked with us at the old monkish inscriptions, and sailed with us across the lake. It was a most delicious evening! I remember thinking that to become a poet, one need only come to Sorö, and muse among these lovely, peaceful scenes. Then by moonlight we took the ‘Philosopher’s Walk,’ as it is called, the lonely path along the lake-side, joining the highroad near The Crab. Emilius stayed and supped with us, and my mother declared he was grown so sensible and looked so well. It was just upon Whitsuntide, and in a few days he was to join his family at Copenhagen. Ah! those hours at Sorö and in The Crab Inn, I reckon them among the choicest pearls of life!

“Next morning we started very early, for it was a long journey to Roeskilde, and there we had to see the cathedral, and father wanted to visit an old school-fellow in the evening. We slept at Roeskilde that night, and by noon next day reached Copenhagen. So we had spent three days over a journey that can now be taken in three hours—Corsör to Copenhagen. The pearls on the way have not grown more costly—that could hardly be—but the chain is a new one. I stayed for three weeks at Copenhagen, and Emilius was with us for eighteen days; and when we journeyed back to Fünen, he accompanied us as far as Corsör, and there, before we parted, we were betrothed; so it is no wonder that I should call the way from Copenhagen to Corsör a string of pearls.

“Afterward, when Emilius received his cure at Assens, we were married. We often talked over our journey to Copenhagen, and proposed taking it again, but then your mother made her appearance, and after her came her sisters and brothers, and there was so much to do among them all! And then Emilius was made a dean—that was a great pleasure to me! Everything was a pleasure; but, somehow, we never got to Copenhagen. And now I am too old to travel by rail, but for all that I am right glad of the railway! it is a real blessing, for it brings you young ones quickly to me! Now, Odense is hardly further from Copenhagen than in my youth it was from Nyborg; you can fly to Italy in the time that it took as to journey to Copenhagen—that is something worth doing! No matter that I sit, sit here always; let others travel, so long as they travel sometimes to me. And you need not laugh at me, you young folks, for sitting so still, day after day, for I have really a great journey before me; I shall soon have to travel at a pace far swifter than the railway’s. For when our Lord wills it, I shall go to join your grandfather; and you, too, when you have completed your work on this dear earth, will join us also; and then, if we talk over the days of our mortal life, believe me, children, I expect to say then as now, ‘From Copenhagen to Corsör, it is a perfect chain of pearls!’”

[ 1857 ]

Great-Grandfather

—

Great-grandfather was so lovable, wise, and good! We all looked up to Great-grandfather. He used be called, as far back as I can remember, “Father’s-father,” and also “Mother’s-father;” but when brother Frederick’s little son came into the family, he was promoted, and got the title of “Great-grandfather.” He could not expect to get any higher!

He was very fond of us all, but he did not seem fond of our times. “Old times were good times,” he used to say; “quiet and steady-going they were; in these days there is such a hurrying and turning upside-down of everything. The young people lay down the law, and speak of the kings, even, as if they were their equals. Any good-for-nothing fellow can dip a rag in rotten water, and wring it out over the head of an honourable man!”

Great-grandfather would get quite angry and red in the face, when he talked of these things; but very soon he would smile his kind, genial smile, and say, “Well, well! I may be mistaken; I belong to the old times, and can’t quite get a foothold in the new! May God lead and guide us aright!”

When Great-grandfather got to talking of old times, it seemed to me that I was living in them, so clearly did I see it all. Then I fancied myself driving along in a gilt coach, with fine liveried servants standing on the step behind; I saw the guilds move their signs, and march in procession, with banners, and with music at their head; I was present at the merry Christmas feasts, where games of forfeit were being played, and where the players were dressed in fancy dress and mask. It is true that in those old times cruel and dreadful things used to happen, such as torture, and rack, and bloodshed; but all these horrors had something stirring about them that fascinated me. I used to fancy how it was when the Danish lords gave the peasants their liberty, and when the Crown Prince of Denmark abolished the slave-trade.

It was famous to hear Great-grandfather tell of all this, and to hear him speak of his youth. But I think the times before that, even, were the very best of all—so strong and great!

“It was a rude time!” said brother Frederick; “thank God we are well out of it!” And he used to say this right out to Great-grandfather: that was very improper, I know, but I had great respect for Frederick all the same. He was my oldest brother, and he said he was old enough to be my father—but then he said so many odd things. He had graduated with honours, and was so bright and clever at his work in father’s office that father intended to take him into partnership soon. He was the one, of us all, that Great-grandfather talked most to; but they did not get on well, and always fell to arguing; they did not understand each other, those two—and never would, said the family; but, small as I was, I soon saw that neither of them could do without the other. Great-grandfather used to listen with the brightest look in his eyes, when Frederick read aloud about the progress in science, or new discoveries of natural laws, and of all the other wonders of our age.

“The human race grows cleverer, but not better,” Great-grandfather used to say; “they take pains to contrive the most dreadful and hurtful weapons to kill and maim each other.”

“So much the sooner will the war be over,” Frederick would reply; “then one need not wait seven years for the blessings of peace. The world is full-blooded, and needs a blood-letting from time to time—that is a necessity.”

One day Frederick told him of something that had really happened in a small country, and in our age. The mayor’s clock—the large clock on the City Hall—marked the time for the city, and for all its inhabitants. The clock did not go very well, but that did not matter, nor prevent everybody from being guided by it. Then by and by railways were built in that country, and clocks are always connected with the railways in other countries—for one must be very sure of the time, and know it very exactly, or else there will be collisions. At the railway station they had a sun-regulated clock that was perfectly reliable and exact—but not so the mayor’s—and now everybody went by the railway clock.

I laughed, and thought it was a funny story, but Great-grandfather did not laugh; he grew very serious.

“There is a deep meaning in what you have been telling me,” he said, “and I understand the thought that prompted you to tell it to me. There is a moral in that clock-work; it makes me think of another clock—my parents’ plain, old-fashioned Barnholm clock, with the leaden weights. It was the time-measurer for their lives, and for my childhood. I dare say it did not go very correctly, but it did go, and we used to look at the hour-hand, and believed in it, and never thought about the wheels inside. The government machinery was like that old clock; in those days everybody had faith in it, and only looked at the hour-hand. Now the government machinery is like a clock in a glass case, so that one can look right into the machinery, and see the wheels turning and whizzing: one gets quite anxious, sometimes, as to what will become of that spring, or that wheel! And then I think how will it be possible for all this to keep time? and I miss my childish faith in the faultlessness of the old clock. That is the weakness of these times!”

And then Great-grandfather would talk till he got quite angry. He and Frederick did not agree well, and yet they could not bear to be separated—just like “the old times and the new.” They both felt this when Frederick was to start on his journey—far away, to America. It was on business for the firm, that he had to go. A sad parting it was for Great-grandfather, and a long, long journey—quite across an immense ocean, and to another part of the globe.

“You shall have a letter from me every fortnight,” said Frederick, “and, quicker than by any letter you will hear of me by means of the telegraph. The days will be like hours, and the hours like minutes!”

Through the telegraph came a greeting from Frederick, from England, when he was going on board the steamer. Sooner than by letter—even if the quick sailing clouds had been postmen—came news from America, where Frederick had gone on shore but a few hours since.

“What a glorious, divine thought this is, that is given us in this age,” said Great-grandfather; “it is a real blessing for the human race.”

“And it was in our country,” I said, “that that law of nature was first understood and expressed. Frederick told me so!”

“Yes,” said Great-grandfather, and kissed me; “and I have looked into the two kind eyes that were the first to see this wonderful law of nature—they were child’s eyes, like yours—and I have pressed his hand!” and then he kissed me again.

More than a month had passed, when a letter from Frederick brought us the news that he was engaged to a beautiful and lovable young girl, whom he was sure the whole family would be delighted with. He sent her photograph, too, and we all looked at it just so with our eyes, and then with a magnifying-glass; for this is the beauty of those pictures—that not only can they bear the closest inspection by the sharpest magnifying-glass, but that then, and not till then, you get the full likeness. This is what no painter has been able to do, not even the greatest in old times.

“If only that discovery had been made earlier in my time,” said Great-grandfather, “then we might now have seen, face to face, the world’s greatest and best men! How good and gentle this young girl looks,” and he gazed long at her through the glass. “Now I know her face, I shall recognize her at once when she comes in the door.” But that had very nearly never come to pass; luckily, we at home did not hear of the danger till it had past.

The young couple reached England pleasantly and safely, and from there they meant to go by steamer to Copenhagen. They were in sight of land—the Danish coast, and the white, sandy downs of the west coast of Jutland. There was a heavy sea, that threatened to dash the ship on the shore, and no lifeboat could get out to them. Then came the night, dark and dismal; but in the midst of the darkness came a bright blazing rocket from the shore, and shot out far over the ship that was aground. The rocket carried a rope, that fell down on the ship; and thus the connection between those on shore and those at sea was established. And soon, through the heavy, rolling sea, the rescue-car was being drawn slowly toward the shore: and in it was a young and lovely woman, alive and well; and wonderfully happy was she when her young husband stood by her side on the firm, sandy beach. All on board were saved, and that before daybreak.

We were sound asleep here in Copenhagen, thinking neither of sorrow nor danger. When we were all assembled for breakfast came a rumour, caused by a telegram, of the wreck of an English steamer on the west coast. We all grew heartsore and anxious; but within the hour came a telegram from the dear ones, who were saved—Frederick and his young wife—who would soon be with us.

All cried; I cried too, and Great-grandfather cried, and folded his hands, and—I am sure of it—blessed the present age.

That day Great-grandfather gave two hundred dollars toward erecting the monument to Hans Christian Orsted. When Frederick came home with his young wife, and heard of it, he said: “That was right, Great-grandfather! Now I’ll read for you what Orsted wrote, many, many years ago, about old times and new times!”

“I suppose he was of your opinion,” said Great-grandfather. “Yes, that you may be sure of,” said Frederick; “and so are you, for you have given something to his monument!”

[ 1870 ]

The Swans’ Nest

—

Between the Baltic and the North Sea lies an old Swans’ Nest—it is called Denmark; in it have been born, and will be born hereafter, Swans whose names shall never die.

In the olden time, a flock of Swans flew thence over the Alps to Milan’s lovely green plains. There they alighted down and dwelt, for right pleasant was it there to dwell. These Swans were called Lombards.

Another flock, with bright shining plumage, and clear, truthful eyes, lighted down at Byzantium, nestled round the Emperor’s throne, and spread out their broad white wings as shields to protect him. These were known as Varangians.

From the coasts of France arose a cry of anguish and terror—terror at the bloody Swans who, with fire under their wings, flew thither from the North. Loud was the prayer of village and town, “God save us from the wild Normans!”

On England’s fresh meadow-turf, near the shore, wearing a triple crown on his kingly head, his golden sceptre stretching far over the land, stood the royal Swan, Kanut the Dane.

And on Pomerania’s shores the heathens bowed the knee, for there, too, with drawn swords and bearing the standard of the cross, had flown the Danish Swans.

“But this was in the days of old,” you say.

In times nearer our own, then, have mighty Swans been seen to fly out from the Nest. A flash of lightning cleft the air—lightning that shone over all Europe—for a Swan had flapped his strong wings and scattered the twilight mist, and the starry heavens became more visible—were brought, as it were, nearer the earth. The Swan’s name was Tycho Brahe.

“Yes, then,” you say; “but now, in our own days?”

Well, in our own generation we have beheld Swans soaring is a high and glorious flight.

One we saw gently sweep his wings over the golden chords of the harp, and sweet music thrilled through the northern lands, the wild Norwegian mountains lifted their proud crests higher in the full sunlight of the olden time, pine and birch bowed their heads and rustled their leaves, the “Gods of the North”—the heroes and noble women of Scandinavian history—lived and breathed again, their tall, stately figures standing out from the dark background of deep forests.

A second Swan we saw strike his pinions upon the hard marble rock till it cleft asunder, and new forms of beauty, hitherto shut up in the stone, were revealed to the light of day, and the nations of Europe gazed in wonder and admiration at the glorious statuary.

A third Swan we have seen weaving threads of thoughts that spun and spread around the earth, so that words can fly with lightning speed from land to land.

Dear to the protecting heavens above is the old Swans’ Nest between the Baltic and the North Sea. Let mighty birds of prey, if they will, speed there to tear it down. It shall not be! Even the unfledged, unplumed young ones will press forward to the margin of the Nest—we have seen it—will fight desperately with beak and claw, will offer their bleeding breasts in defence of their home.

Centuries will pass away, and Swans will still fly forth from the Nest, and make themselves seen and heard far over the world; long will it be before the time shall come when in sad truth it may be said, “Behold the last Swan!—Listen to the last sweet song from the Swans’ Nest!”

[ 1852 ]

Holger the Dane

—

There is an old castle in Denmark which is called Kronborg; it juts out into the Sound, and great ships sail past it every day by hundreds. There are Russian and English and Prussian ships, and many other nationalities; they all fire a salute when they pass the old castle; “boom,” and the castle answers, “boom.” That is the way cannons say “how do you do” and “thank you.” No ships sail in the winter, the water is frozen over, right up to the Swedish coast, and it becomes a great highway. Swedish and Danish flags fly, and the Danes and the Swedes say “how do you do” and “thank you” to each other, not with cannons, but with a friendly shake of the hand. They buy fancy bread and cakes of each other, for strange food tastes best. But old Kronborg is always the chief feature, and down inside it, in the deep dark cellar, lives Holger Danske. He is clad in steel and iron, and rests his head upon his strong arms, and his long beard hangs over the marble table where it has grown fast; he sleeps and dreams, but in his dreams he sees all that is happening up there in Denmark. Every Christmas Eve a holy angel comes and tells him that he has dreamed aright, and that he may go to sleep again, because Denmark is not yet in any real danger. But should danger come, then old Holger the Dane will rise up, so that the table will burst asunder when he wrenches his beard away from it, then he will come forward and strike a blow that will resound in all parts of the world.

An old grandfather was sitting telling his little grandson all this about Holger the Dane, and the little boy knew that all that his grandfather said was true. While the old man was talking, he sat carving a big wooden figure; it was to represent Holger the Dane as the figurehead of a ship; for the old grandfather was a carver, the sort of man who carves a figurehead for each ship, according to its name. Here he had carved Holger the Dane, who stood erect and proud, with his long beard. He held in his hand a great broadsword, and rested his other hand upon a shield with the Danish Arms. The old grandfather had so much to tell about remarkable Danish men and women, that the little boy at last thought he must know as much as Holger the Dane, who, after all, only dreamed about these things. When the little fellow went to bed, he thought so much about the things he had heard, and he pressed his chin so hard into the quilt, that he thought it was a long beard grown fast to it.

The old grandfather remained sitting at his work, carving away at the last bit of it, which was the arms on the shield. At last it was finished. He looked at it complete, and thought of all the things he had heard and read, and what he had been telling the little boy in the evening. He nodded, and wiped his spectacles, and put them on again, and said, “Well, I don’t suppose Holger the Dane will come in my time, but perhaps the boy in bed there may see him, and have his share of the fighting when the time comes.” And the old grandfather nodded again, and the more he looked at his Holger the Dane, the more plain it became to him that the figure he had made was a good one. He even fancied that the colour came into it, and that the armour shone like polished steel; the hearts in the Danish Arms [68] got redder and redder, and the crowns on the springing lions became golden.

“It’s the finest coat of Arms in the world!” said the old man. “The lions are strength, and the hearts are love and tenderness!” He looked at the uppermost lion, and thought about King Canute [69] who bound the mighty England to Denmark’s throne; and he looked at the second lion and thought of Waldemar I, [70] who united Denmark and subdued the Vandals. He looked at the third lion and thought of Margarethe I, [71] who united Denmark, Sweden and Norway. When he looked at the red hearts, they shone more brightly than ever, they became waving flames of fire, and in his thoughts he followed each of them.

The first led him into a narrow, dark prison; he saw a prisoner, a beautiful woman, Eleanora Ulfeldt, daughter of Christian IV. The flame placed itself like a rose on her bosom, and bloomed in harmony with her heart; she was the noblest and best of Denmark’s women. “That is one heart in the Arms of Denmark,” said the old grandfather. [72]

Then his thoughts followed the next heart, which led him out to sea among the thunder of cannon and ships enveloped in smoke; and the flame attached itself like an order to Hvitfeldt’s breast as he, to save the fleet, blew up his ship and himself with it. [73]

The third heart led him to the miserable huts of Greenland, where Hans Egede, the priest, laboured with loving words and deeds: the flame was a star upon his breast, one heart more for the Danish Arms. [74]

The old grandfather’s heart went in advance of the waving flames, for he knew whither the flames were leading him.

Frederick VI [75] stood in the peasant woman’s poor little room and wrote his name with chalk on the beams. The flame trembled on his breast, trembled in his heart; in the peasant’s room his heart became a heart in Denmark’s Arms. And the old grandfather wiped his eyes, for he had known King Frederick and lived for him, King Frederick with silvery hair and honest blue eyes. Then he folded his hands and sat, looking pensively before him. His daughter-in-law came and told him that it was late and he must rest, the supper was ready.

“What a grand figure you have made, grandfather,” she said. “Holger the Dane and all our beautiful coat of arms—I think I have seen that face before!”

“No, that you haven’t,” said the old man; “but I have seen it, and often before tried to carve it in wood, just as I remember it. It was when the English lay in the roads on the second day of April, and we knew we were true old Danes. Where I stood on the Denmark in Steen Bille’s [76] squadron, I had a man by my side, it seemed as if the balls were afraid of him; there he stood singing old ballads, fighting and struggling as if he were more than a man. I remember his face still, but whence he came or whither he went, I haven’t an idea, nor anyone else either. I have often thought it must have been old Holger the Dane himself, who had swum down from Kronborg to help us in the hour of danger. Now that’s my idea, and there stands his portrait.”

The figure threw its shadow right up the wall as high as the ceiling, it looked as if it were the real Holger the Dane himself standing behind; the shadow seemed to move, but perhaps that was because the candle was not burning very steadily. The old man’s daughter-in-law kissed him, and led him to the big arm-chair by the table, and she and her husband, who was the old man’s son, and father of the little boy in bed, sat eating their supper and chatting.

The old grandfather’s head was full of Danish lions and Danish hearts and strength and gentleness; he could talk of nothing else. He complained to them that there is another strength besides the strength of the sword, and he pointed to the shelf where his old books lay, all Holberg’s plays, which were so much read, because they were so amusing; all the characters from olden times were quite familiar to him.

“You see he knew how to fight too,” said the old man. “He spent all his life in showing up in his plays the follies and peculiarities of those around him!”

Then the grandfather nodded to a place above the looking-glass, where an almanac hung with a picture of the Round Tower [77] on it, and he said, “There was Tycho Brahe, [78] he was another who used the sword; not to hack at legs and arms, but to cut out a plainer path among the stars of heaven! And then he whose father belonged to my calling; Thorwaldsen the old woodcarver’s son. We have seen him ourselves with the silvery locks falling on his broad shoulders, whose name is known to all the world—ah, he is a sculptor, and I am only a woodcarver. Yes, Holger the Dane comes in many guises, that the strength of Denmark may be known all over the world. Shall we drink to the health of Bertel?” [79]

The little boy in bed distinctly saw the castle of Kronborg and the real Holger the Dane, who lived down below it, with his beard grown fast to the marble table, and dreaming about all that happens up above. Holger the Dane also dreamed about the poor little room where the woodcarver lived; he heard everything that was said and nodded in his dreams, murmuring, “Yes, remember me, ye Danish people! Keep me in mind, I shall come in time of need.”

Outside Kronborg it was bright daylight and the wind bore the notes of the huntsman’s horn from the opposite shore. The ships sailed past with their greeting, “boom, boom!” with the answer from Kronborg, “boom, boom.” Holger the Dane did not wake, however loud they thundered, because it was only “how do you do!” and “many thanks!” It will have to be a different kind of firing to rouse him, but he will wake, never fear; there is grit in Holger the Dane.

[ 1845 ]

The Thorny Path of Honour

—

An old story yet lives of the “Thorny Road of Honour,” of a marksman, who indeed attained to rank and office, but only after a lifelong and weary strife against difficulties. Who has not, in reading this story, thought of his own “thorny road,” and of his own numerous “difficulties?” The story is very closely akin to reality; but still the story has its harmonious conclusion here on earth, while reality often points beyond earthly life into the regions of eternity.

The history of the world is like a magic lantern that displays to us, in light pictures upon the dark ground of the present, how the benefactors of mankind, the martyrs of genius, wandered along the thorny road of honour.

From all periods, and from every country, these shining pictures display themselves to us. Each only appears for a few moments, but each represents a whole life, sometimes a whole age, with its conflicts and victories. Let us contemplate here and there one of the company of martyrs—the company which will receive new members until the world itself shall pass away.

We look down upon a crowded amphitheatre. Out of the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, satire and humour are pouring down in streams upon the audience; on the stage Socrates, the most remarkable man in Athens, he who had been the shield and defence of the people against the Thirty Tyrants, is held up mentally and bodily to ridicule—Socrates, who saved Alcibiades and Xenophon in the turmoil of battle, [80] and whose genius soared far above the gods of the ancients. He himself is present; he has risen from the spectator’s bench, and has stepped forward, that the laughing Athenians may well appreciate the likeness between himself and the caricature on the stage. There he stands before them, towering high above them all.

Thou juicy, green, poisonous hemlock, throw thy shadow over Athens—not thou, olive tree of fame!

Seven cities contended for the honour of giving birth to Homer—that is to say, they contended after his death! Let us look at him as he was in his lifetime. He wanders on foot through the cities, and recites his verses for a livelihood; the thought for the morrow turns his hair grey! He, the great seer, is blind, and painfully pursues his way—the sharp thorn tears the mantle of the king of poets. His song yet lives, and through that alone live all the heroes and gods of antiquity.

One picture after another springs up from the east, from the west, far removed from each other in time and place, and yet each one forming a portion of the thorny road of honour, on which the thistle indeed displays a flower, but only to adorn the grave.

The camels pass along under the palm trees; they are richly laden with indigo and other precious things, sent by the ruler of the land to him whose songs are the delight of the people, the fame of the country. He whom envy and falsehood have driven into exile has been found, and the caravan approaches the little town in which he has taken refuge. A poor corpse is carried out of the town gate, and the funeral procession causes the caravan to halt. The dead man is he whom they have been sent to seek—Firdusi—who has wandered the Thorny road of honour even to the end. [81]

An African, with blunt features and woolly hair, sits on the marble steps of the palace in the capital of Portugal, and begs. He is the faithful slave of Camöens, and but for him, and for the copper coins thrown to him by the passers-by, his master, the poet of the “Lusiad,” would die of hunger. Now, a costly monument marks the grave of Camöens. [82]

Here is a new picture.

Behind the iron grating a man appears, pale as death, with long and matted beard. “I have made a discovery,” he says, “the greatest that has been made for centuries; and they have kept me locked up here for more than twenty years!” Who is the man? “A madman,” replies the keeper of the madhouse. “What whimsical ideas these lunatics have! He imagines that one can propel things by means of steam.” It is Solomon de Caus, the discoverer of the power of steam. His theory is not understood by Richelieu; and he dies in the madhouse.

Here stands Columbus, whom the street boys used once to follow and jeer, because he wanted to discover a new world; and he has discovered it. Shouts of joy greet him from the breasts of all, and the clash of bells sounds to celebrate his triumphant return; but the clash of the bells of envy soon drowns the others. The discoverer of a world—he who lifted the American gold land from the sea, and gave it to his king—he is rewarded with iron chains. He wishes that these chains may be placed in his coffin, for they witness to the world of the way in which a man’s contemporaries reward good service.

One picture after another comes crowding on; the thorny path of honour and of fame is over-filled.

Here in dark night sits the man who measured the mountains in the moon; he who forced his way out into the endless space, among stars and planets; he, the mighty man who understood the spirit of nature, and felt the earth moving beneath his feet—Galileo. Blind and deaf he sits—an old man thrust through with the spear of suffering, and amid the torments of neglect, scarcely able to lift his foot—that foot with which, in the anguish of his soul, when men denied the truth, he stamped upon the ground, with the exclamation, “Yet it moves!”

Here stands a woman of childlike mind, yet full of faith and inspiration. She carries the banner in front of the combating army, and brings victory and salvation to her fatherland. The sound of shouting arises, and the pile flames up. They are burning the witch, Joan of Arc. Yes, and a future century jeers at the White Lily. Voltaire, the satyr of human intellect, will sing of “La Pucelle.”

At the Thing or Assembly at Viborg, the Danish nobles burn the laws of the king. They flame up high, illuminating the period and the lawgiver, and throw a glory into the dark prison tower, where an old man is growing grey and bent. With his finger he marks out a groove in the stone table. It is the popular king who sits there, once the ruler of three kingdoms, the friend of the citizen and the peasant. It is Christian the Second. Enemies wrote his history. Let us remember his improvements of seven and twenty years, if we cannot forget his crime.

A ship sails away, quitting the Danish shores. A man leans against the mast, casting a last glance towards the Island Hven. It is Tycho Brahe. He raised the name of Denmark to the stars, and was rewarded with injury, loss and sorrow. He is going to a strange country. “The vault of heaven is above me everywhere,” he says, “and what do I want more?” And away sails the famous Dane, the astronomer, to live honoured and free in a strange land.

“Ah, free, if only from the unbearable sufferings of the body!” comes in a sigh through time, and strikes upon our ear. What a picture! Griffenfeldt, a Danish Prometheus, bound to the rocky island of Munkholm. [83]

We are in America, on the margin of one of the largest rivers; an innumerable crowd has gathered, for it is said that a ship is to sail against the wind and weather, bidding defiance to the elements. The man who thinks he can solve the problem is named Robert Fulton. The ship begins its passage, but suddenly it stops. The crowd begins to laugh and whistle and hiss—his own father hoots with the rest. “Conceit! Foolery!” is the cry. “It has happened just as he deserved. Put the crack-brain under lock and key!” Then suddenly a little nail breaks, which had stopped the machine for a few moments; and now the wheels turn again and break the opposition of the waves—the ship sails. Steam’s weaver-shuttle shortens the distance between far lands from hours into minutes.

O humanity, canst thou grasp the happiness of such a minute of consciousness, this penetration of the soul by its mission, the moment in which all dejection, and every wound—even those caused by one’s own fault—is changed into health and strength and clearness—when discord is converted to harmony—the minute in which men seem to recognize the manifestation of the heavenly grace in one man, and feel how this one imparts it to all?

Then the Thorny Path of Honour shines like a glory round the earth. Happy he who is chosen to be a pilgrim thereon, and without any merit of his own, to be made one of the master builders of the bridge between God and man.

The Spirit of History wings his mighty way throughout the ages, and gives us comfort and good cheer and thoughtful calm of mind, by showing, in sun-bright pictures upon murky backgrounds, the Thorny Path of Honour: not a path that ends, like a fairy tale, in gladness and glitter here on earth, but one that points onward and upward, far away into time and eternity.

[ 1856 ]

Two Brothers

—

On one of the Danish islands, where old Thingstones, the seats of justice of our forefathers, still stand in the cornfields, and huge trees rise in the forests of beech, there lies a little town whose low houses are covered with red tiles. In one of these houses strange things were brewing over the glowing coals on the open hearth; there was a boiling going on in glasses, and a mixing and distilling, while herbs were being cut up and pounded in mortars. An elderly man looked after it all.

“One must only do the right thing,” he said; “yes, the right—the correct thing. One must find out the truth concerning every created particle, and keep to that.”

In the room with the good housewife sat her two sons; they were still small, but had great thoughts. Their mother, too, had always spoken to them of right and justice, and exhorted them to keep to the truth, which she said was the countenance of the Lord in this world.

The elder of the boys looked roguish and enterprising. He took a delight in reading of the forces of nature, of the sun and the moon; no fairy tale pleased him so much. Oh, how beautiful it must be, he thought, to go on voyages of discovery, or to find out how to imitate the wings of birds and then to be able to fly! Yes, to find that out was the right thing. Father was right, and mother was right—truth holds the world together.

The younger brother was quieter, and buried himself entirely in his books. When he read about Jacob dressing himself in sheep-skins to impersonate Esau, and so to usurp his brother’s birthright, he would clench his little fist in anger against the deceiver; when he read of tyrants and of the injustice and wickedness of the world, tears would come into his eyes, and he was quite filled with the thought of the justice and truth which must and would triumph.

One evening he was lying in bed, but the curtains were not yet drawn close, and the light streamed in upon him; he had taken his book into bed with him, for he wanted to finish reading the story of Solon. His thoughts lifted and carried him away a wonderful distance; it seemed to him as if the bed had become a ship flying along under full sail. Was he dreaming, or what was happening? It glided over the rolling waves and across the ocean of time, and to him came the voice of Solon; spoken in a strange tongue, yet intelligible to him, he heard the Danish motto: “By law the land is ruled.”

The spirit of the human race stood in the humble room, bent down over the bed and imprinted a kiss on the boy’s forehead: “Be thou strong in fame and strong in the battle of life! With truth in thy heart fly toward the land of truth!”

The elder brother was not yet in bed; he was standing at the window looking out at the mist which rose from the meadows. They were not elves dancing out there, as their old nurse had told him; he knew better—they were vapours which were warmer than the air, and that is why they rose. A shooting star lit up the sky, and the boy’s thoughts passed in a second from the vapours of the earth up to the shining meteor. The stars gleamed in the heavens, and it seemed as if long golden threads hung down from them to the earth.

“Fly with me,” sang a voice, which the boy heard in his heart. And the mighty spirit of mankind, swifter than a bird, swifter than an arrow—swifter than anything of earthly origin—carried him out into space, where the heavenly bodies are bound together by the rays that pass from star to star. Our earth revolved in the thin air, and the cities upon it seemed to lie close to each other. Through the spheres echoed the words:

“What is near, what is far, when thou art lifted by the mighty genius of mind?”

And again the boy stood by the window, gazing out, whilst his younger brother lay in bed. Their mother called them by their names: “Anders Sandoe” and “Hans Christian.”

Denmark and the whole world knows them—the two brothers Oersted.

[ 1859 ]

The Great Sea-Serpent

—

There was a little fish—a salt-water fish—of good family: I don’t recall the name—you will have to get that from the learned people. This little fish had eighteen hundred brothers and sisters, all just as old as he; they did not know their father and mother, and were obliged to look out for themselves at the very beginning, and swim round, but that was great sport. They had water enough to drink, the entire ocean; they thought nothing about their food, it came when they wanted it. Each did as it pleased, each was to make out its own story—aye, rather none of them thought at all about that. The sun shone down on the water that was light about them, so clear was it. It was a world with the strangest creatures, and some very horrid and big, with great gaping mouths that could gulp down all the eighteen hundred brothers and sisters, but neither did they think of that, for none of them as yet had been swallowed. The small ones swam side by side close together, as herrings and mackerel swim.

But as they were swimming their prettiest in the water and thinking of nothing, there sank with prodigious noise, from above, right down through them, a long heavy thing that looked as if it never would come to an end; it stretched out farther and farther, and every one of the little fishes that scampered off was either crushed or got a crack that it could not stand. All the little fishes, and the great ones with them, from the level of the sea to the bottom, were thrown into a panic. The great horrid thing sank deeper and deeper, and grew longer and longer, miles and miles long. The fishes and snails, everything that swims, or creeps, or is driven by the current, saw this fearful thing, this enormous incomprehensible sea-eel which had come down upon them in this fashion.

What was the thing, anyway? ah, we know; it was the great interminable telegraph cable that people were laying between Europe and America.

There was a confusion and commotion amongst all the rightful occupants of the sea where the cable was laid. The flying fishes shot up above the surface as high as they could fling themselves; the blow-fish took a leap an entire gunshot in length over the water, for it can do that; the other fish made for the bottom of the sea, and went down with such haste that they reached it long before the telegraph was seen or known about down there; they poured in on the cod and flounders that lived peaceably at the bottom of the sea and ate their neighbours. One or two of the sea-anemones were so agitated that they threw up their stomachs, but they lived after it just the same, for they can do that. A good many lobsters and crabs got out of their excellent shells, and were obliged to wait for their bones to grow back again.

In all this fright and confusion, the eighteen hundred brethren and sisters became separated, and never again met, or ever knew each other after that; only some ten of them remained still in the same place, and so in a few hours they got over the first fright and began to be curious about the affair. They looked about them, they looked up and they looked down, and down in the depths they fancied they saw the fearful thing that had scared them—yes, had scared all, great and small, lying on the bottom of the sea, as far as their eyes could reach; it was quite thin, but they did not know how thick it might be able to make itself, or how strong it was; it lay very quiet, but then that might be a part of its cunning, they thought.

“Let it lie; it does not come near us!” said the most cautious of the little fishes; but the smallest one of all would not give up trying to find out what the thing could be. It had come down from above, so it was up above that one could best find out about it. So they swam up to the surface. It was perfectly still. They met a dolphin there. The dolphin is a sprightly fellow that can turn somersaults on the water, and it has eyes to see with, so it must have seen this and known all about it. They asked him, but he had only been thinking about himself and his somersaults, he’d seen nothing, had no answer for them, and only looked high and mighty.

Then they turned to the seal, which was just plunging in; it was more civil, for all that it eats small fish; but today it had had enough. It knew little more than the dolphin.

“Many a night have I lain upon a wet stone and looked far into the country, miles away from here; there are crafty creatures, called in their speech ‘men-folk.’ They plot against us, but usually we slip away from them; that I know well, and the sea-eel too, that you are asking about, he knows it. He has been under their sway, up there on the earth, time out of mind, and it was from there that they were carrying him off on a ship to a distant land. I saw what a trouble they had, but they could manage him, because he had become weak on the earth. They laid him in coils and circles. I heard how he ringled and rangled when they laid him down and when he slipped away from them out here. They held on to him with all their might—ever so many hands had hold of him, but he kept slipping away from them down to the bottom; there he is lying now—till further notice, I rather think.”

“He is quite thin,” said the small fishes.

“They have starved him,” said the seal, “but he will soon come to himself, and get his old size and corpulence again. I suppose he is the great sea-serpent that men are so afraid of and talk so much about. I never saw him before, and never believed in a sea-serpent; now I do. I believe he is the sea-serpent,” and with that down went the seal.

“How much he knew! how he talked!” said the small fishes; “I never was so wise before; if it only isn’t all an untruth.”

“We can, anyway, swim down and see for ourselves,” said the littlest fish; “on the way we can hear what the others think about it.”

“I wouldn’t make a stroke with my fins to get at something to know,” said the others, and turned away.

“But I would!“said the littlest fellow, and put off down into deep water; but it was a good distance from the place where “the long thing that sank” lay. The little fish looked and hunted on all sides down in the deep water. Never before had it imagined the world to be so big. The herrings went in great shoals, shining like a mighty ribbon of silver; the mackerel followed after, and looked even finer. There were fishes there of all fashions and marked with every possible colour: jelly-fish, like half-transparent flowers, borne along by the currents. Great plants grew up from the floor of the ocean; grass, fathoms long, and palm-like trees, every leaf tenanted by shining shell-fish.

At last the little fish spied a long dark streak away down, and made his way toward it, but it was neither fish nor cable: it was the gunwale of a sunken vessel, which above and below the deck was broken in two by the force of the sea. The little fish swam into the cabin, where the people who perished when the vessel sank were all washed away, except two: a young woman lay there stretched out, with her little child in her arms. They seemed to be sleeping. The little fish was quite frightened, for it did not know that they never again could waken. Seaweed hung like a network of foliage over the gunwale above the two beautiful bodies of mother and babe. it was so quiet, so solitary: the little fish scampered away as fast as it could, out where the water was bright and clear, and there were fishes to see. It had not gone far before it met a whale, fearfully big.

“Don’t swallow me!” cried the little fish; “I am not even to be tasted, I am so small. and it is a great comfort to me to live.”

“What are you doing away down here, where your kind never come?” asked the whale.

So then the little fish told about the astonishingly long eel, or whatever the thing was, that had sunk down from above and produced such a panic amongst all the other creatures in the sea.

“Ho, ho!” said the whale, and he drew in such a rush of water that he was ready to make a prodigious spout when he came to the surface for a breath. “Ho, ho! so that was the thing that tickled me on the back when I was turning round. I thought it was a ship’s mast, that I could break up into clothes-pins. But it was not here that it was; no, a good deal farther out lies the thing. I’ll go with you and look for it, for I have nothing else to do;” and so it swam off, and the little fish behind it, not too near, because there was a tearing stream, as it were, in the wake of the whale.

They met a shark and an old saw-fish; they, too, had heard of the famous sea-eel, so long and so thin; they had not seen it, but now they would.

“I’ll go with you,” said the shark, who was on the same road; “if the great sea-serpent is no thicker than a cable, then I can bite through it in one bite,” and he opened his mouth and showed his six rows of teeth—“I can bite dents in a ship’s anchor, and certainly can bite off the shank.”

“There it is!” said the great whale; “I see him.” He thought he saw better than the others. “See how it rises, how it bends and bows and curves!”

But it was not the sea-serpent, but an extraordinarily great eel, ever so many ells long, that drew near.

“Why, I have seen him before!” said the saw-fish. “He never has made a hullabaloo in the sea or frightened any big fish out of his wits.” And so they talked to him of the new eel, and asked him if he would go with them on their voyage of discovery.

“If that eel is longer than I am,” said the sea-eel, “there will be something disagreeable happening.”

“At, that there will,” said the others; “there are enough of us not to tolerate him!” and so they shot ahead. But then there came right in their way a great monster, bigger than all of them put together; it looked like a floating island, that could not stop itself. It was a venerable whale. Its head was grown over with seaweed, its back covered with barnacles, and such innumerable oysters and mussels, that its black skin was altogether whitened.

“Come with us, old fellow!” said they. “Here is a new fish come, and we won’t stand it.”

“I would rather lie where I am lying,” said the whale. “Leave me alone; leave me alone. O ah, 0 ah! I suffer from a dreadful disease! My only relief is to get up toward the surface and get my back up higher; then the great sea-fowl can come and pick at me. That feels so good! only when they do not drive their beaks in too far; sometimes they go in too deep, quite into my blubber. You can see now how a complete skeleton of a fowl is fixed in my back; she struck her claws in too deep, and could not get them out when I went down to the bottom. And now the little fishes have picked at her. See how she looks, and how I look. I am all diseased!”

“That is all imagination!” said the shark. “I am never sick. No fish is ever sick.”

“Pardon me,” said the whale. “The eel suffers from headache, the carp has the smallpox, and we all have intestinal worms.”

“Nonsense!” said the shark, and refused to hear any further, and the others also would rather not; they had something else to attend to.

At last they came to the place where the telegraph cable lay. It has a pretty long bed on the floor of the sea from Europe to America, over sand-banks and sea-mud, rocky ground and weedy places, entire forests of coral. The currents down there, too, change, whirlpools eddy, and fishes swarm in greater masses than the countless flocks of birds that men see when birds of passage take their flight. There is a stir, a splashing there, a humming and rushing; the rushing still haunts a little the great empty conch-shells when we hold them to our ears.

“There lies the fellow!” cried all the great fishes and the little one with them. They saw the cable, the beginning and end of which vanished beyond the reach of their eyes. Sponges and polyps swayed from the ground, rose and fell over it, so that now it was hidden, now came to view. Sea-porcupines, snails, and worms moved over it. Gigantic crabs, that had a complete fringe of creeping things, stalked about it. Dark sea-anemones, or whatever the creature is called that eats with its entire body, lay beside it and smelled of the new creature that had stretched itself on the bottom of the sea. Flounders and codfish turned over in the water so as to get an idea about it from all sides. The star-fish, that always bores down into the mud and can keep its eyes outside, lay and stared to see what was to come of all this bustle.

The telegraph cable lay without stirring, but life and thought were in it. Human thought went through it. “The thing is crafty,” said the whale; “it is able to strike me in the stomach, and that is my weak point.”

“Let us grope along,” said the polyps. “I have long arms and limber fingers; I have been moving by the side of it; now I’ll go a little faster,” and so it stretched its most flexible, longest arms down to the cable and round about it. “It has no scales!” said the polyps; “it has no skin at all. I do believe it never feeds its own young.”

The sea-eel laid itself by the side of the telegraph cable and stretched out as far as it could. “The thing is longer than I am,” it said; “but it is not length that does anything; one must have skin, stomach, and flexibility.”

The whale dove down deeper than it ever had been. “Art thou fish or art thou plant?” it asked, “or art thou only some piece of work made up above that cannot thrive down here amongst us?”

The telegraph cable did not answer; it has no power for that. Yet thoughts go through it, men’s thoughts, that rush in one second miles upon miles from land to land.

“Will you answer, or will you take a crack?” asked the fierce shark, and all the other great fishes asked the same thing.

The cable did not stir, but it had its private thought, and such a one it had a right to have when it was full of thoughts. “Let them only give me a crack! then I shall be hauled up and be myself again; that has happened to others of my race in shallower waters.” So it gave no answer; it had something else to attend to; it telegraphed and lay in its lawful place at the bottom of the ocean.

Up above, the sun now went down, as men say. It became like flaming fire, and all the clouds glowed with fiery colour, each more splendid than the other. “Now we shall get the red light,” said the polyps, “and can see the thing better, if need be.”

“At it! at it!” shouted the shark. “At it! at it!” said the sword-fish and the whale and the eel. They rushed forward, the shark foremost. But just as it was about to grip the wire, the sword-fish, out of pure politeness, ran his saw right into the back of the shark. It was a great mistake, and the shark lost all his strength for biting. There was a hubbub down in the mud. Great fishes and small, sea-anemones and snails rushed at one another, ate each other, mashed and squeezed in. The cable lay quietly and attended to its affairs, and that one ought to do.

The dark night brooded over them, but the ocean’s millions upon millions of living creatures lighted it; crayfish, not so big as a pin-head, gave out light. Some were so small that it took a thousand to make one pin-head, and yet they gave light. It certainly is astonishing, but that’s the way it is.

These sea creatures looked at the telegraph wire. “What is that thing?” they asked, “and what isn’t it?” At, that was the question.

Then there came an old sea-cow. Folks on the earth call its kind a mermaid, or else a merman. This was a she, had a tail and two short arms to splash with, hanging breasts, and seaweed and sponges on her head, and that was what she was proud of.

“Will you have the society of intelligent people?” said she. “I’m the only one down here that can give it. But I ask in return for it perfectly secure pasturage on the bottom of the sea for me and mine. I am a fish, as you see, and I am also an amphibious animal—with practice. I am the wisest cow in the sea. I know about everything that goes on down here, and all that goes on above. That thing you are pondering over is from above, and whatever plumps down from up there is either dead or comes to be dead and powerless; let it lie there for what it is; it’s only some invention of man.”

“Now I think there is something more to it,” said the little fish.

“Hold your tongue, mackerel!” said the great sea-cow.

“Stickleback!” said the rest, and that was even more insulting.

And the sea-cow explained to them that this terrible thing, which, to be sure, had not given out a single mutter, was only some invention from the dry land. And it delivered a little oration upon the rottenness of men.

“They want to get hold of us.” said she. “That’s all they live for. They stretch nets for us, and come with bait on a hook to catch us. That thing there is some kind of big string which they think we are going to bite at. They are such stupids! We are not. Only do not touch it, and it will shrivel up and all turn to dust and mud. Everything that comes down from up there is full of cracks and breaks—it’s all good for nothing.”

“Good for nothing!” said all the creatures in the sea, and held fast to the sea-cow’s opinion, so as to have an opinion. The little fish had its own thoughts. “That exceedingly long, thin serpent is perhaps the most wonderful fish in the ocean. I have a feeling it is.”

“The very most wonderful,” say we human folks, and say it with knowledge and assurance. It is the great sea-serpent, long ago the theme of song and story. It was born and nourished and sprang forth from men’s cunning and was laid upon the bottom of the sea, stretching from the Eastern to the Western land, bearing messages, quick as light flashes to our earth. It grows in might and in length, grows year by year through all seas, round the world, beneath the stormy waves and the lucid waters, where the skipper looks down as if he sailed through the transparent air, and sees the swarming fish, brilliant fireworks of colour. Down, far down, stretches the serpent, Midgard’s snake, that bites its own tail as it encircles the earth. Fish and reptiles beat upon it with their heads—they cannot understand the thing—it is from above. Men’s thoughts in all languages course through it noiselessly. “The serpent of science for good and evil, Midgard’s snake, the most wonderful of all the ocean’s wonders, our Great Sea-Serpent!”

[ 1871 ]

The Old Church-Bell

—

In the country of Wurtemburg, in Germany, where the acacias grow by the public road, where the apple trees and the pear trees in autumn bend to the earth with the weight of the precious fruit, lies the little town of Marbach. It is charmingly situated on the banks of the river Neckar, which rushes rapidly by, passing villages, old knights’ castles, and green vineyards, till its waters mingle with those of the stately Rhine.

It was late in the autumn; the vine-leaves still hung upon the branches of the vines, but they were already tinted with red and gold; heavy showers fell on the surrounding country, and the cold autumn wind blew sharp and strong. It was not at all pleasant weather for the poor.

The days were dark, but it was darker still within the small, old-fashioned houses of the village. One of these houses turned its gable towards the street, and stood there with its small, low windows, poor and insignificant; the family who lived in this house were also poor, but they were brave and industrious, and they feared and loved God. The mother lay in pain and anguish, for the hour approached when God would give her another child.

Then pealed forth from the church tower the sound of festive bells. In that solemn hour the sweet and joyous chiming filled the hearts of those in the humble dwelling with thankfulness and trust; and when, amidst these joyous sounds, a little son was born to them, the words of prayer and praise arose from their overflowing hearts, and their happiness seemed to ring out over town and country in the liquid tones of the church bells’ chime. The little one, with his bright eyes and golden hair, had been welcomed joyously on that dark November day. Its parents kissed him lovingly, and the father wrote in the Bible, “On the tenth of November, 1759, God sent us a son,” and added afterward, “he received at his baptism the names Johann Christoph Friederich.”

And what became of the little lad?—the poor boy of the humble town of Marbach? Ah, indeed, there was no one who thought or supposed, not even the old church bell which had been the first to sound and chime for him, that he would be the first to sing the beautiful “Song of The Bell.” The boy grew apace, and the world advanced with him.

While he was yet a child, his parents settled in another town; but their dearest friends remained behind at Marbach, and sometimes the mother and her son would pay a visit to the little town. The boy was at this time about six years old, and already knew a great many stories out of the Bible, and several religious psalms. While seated in the evening on his little cane-chair, he had often heard his father read from Gellert’s “Fables” or from Klopstock’s grand poem, “The Messiah.” He and his sister, two years older than himself, had often wept scalding tears over the story of Him who suffered death on the cross for us all.

On his first visit to Marbach, the town appeared to have changed but very little, and it was not far enough away to be forgotten. The house, with its pointed gable, narrow windows, and stories projecting one beyond another, looked just the same as in former times. But in the churchyard there were several new graves; and there also, in the grass, close by the wall, lay the old church bell! It had been taken down from its high position; it had cracked and could ring no longer, and a new bell now occupied its place.

The mother and son were walking in the churchyard when they discovered the old bell, and they stood still to look at it. Then the mother told her little boy of what a useful bell this had been for many hundred years. It had chimed for weddings and for christenings; it had tolled for funerals, and to give the alarm in case of fire. With every event in the life of man the bell had made its voice heard. His mother also told him how the chiming of that old bell had once filled her heart with joy and confidence, and that in the midst of the sweet tones her child had been given to her. The child looked almost with awe at the great old bell, and he bent over it and kissed it as it lay there, old and broken, and thrown away among nettles and rank weeds.

The boy never forgot what his mother told him, and the tones of the old bell reverberated in his heart till he reached manhood. In such sweet remembrance was the old bell cherished by the boy, who grew up in poverty to be tall and slender, with a freckled face and hair almost red; but his eyes were clear and blue as the deep sea.

And how did it fare with him? Very well, so well that many people would envy him. We find him taking high honours at the military school, even into the division where the sons of the nobility were sitting: that was honour and good fortune enough! He wore top boots, a cravat, and powdered wig; while he got learning on the march halt-right-about-face system. This, indeed, might lead to something!

The old church-bell, hidden and forgotten, would someday no doubt go into the smelting furnace: and what next would become of it? Well, that was impossible to say, and no one could tell either what would come out of the bell within the young man’s breast. There was a seething within him; it rang and echoed, it must sound forth into the wide world, and the more cramped the space within the school walls, the more deafening the sound of “march! halt! right-about face!” the stronger rang it within the youth’s breast; and what he felt he sang to his comrades, and it resounded far beyond the boundaries of the land. But it was not for this he had received a scholarship in the military school, and free clothing and food. He was already numbered as a cog in the great watchwork to which we all belong, as useful matter-of-fact pieces. How little we understand ourselves! How, then, should others, even the best men, understand us? But it is just the pressure that forms the precious stone. The pressure was here—but would the world be able one day to recognise the jewel?

There was a great festival in the capital of the country. Thousands of lamps shone, and rockets sparkled; that splendour is still remembered—remembered because of him who then in tears and sorrow tried to escape unnoticed across his own country. Far away must he go from his native land, from mother and dear ones, or or sink down into the stream of commonplace life

The old bell was well off; it lay in the shelter of the church wall of Marbach, hidden and forgotten! The wind swept over it, and the wind could have told of him at whose birth the bell had rung; could have told how coldly it had blown upon him, when, weary and exhausted, he sank down in a forest in the neighbouring country, and all his treasures, all his hopes for the future, were a few written pages of “Fiesco.” The wind could have told how his only patrons—all artists, indeed—stole away, while he read it aloud, to amuse themselves at nine-pins. The wind could have told of the pale fugitive who lived for weeks and months in the miserable country inn, where the host was brawling and drinking, and vulgar amusements took place while he wrote of the Ideal.

Hard days, dreary days! The heart itself must suffer and pass through the trials of which it is to sing.

Dark days and cold nights also passed over the old bell, and it noticed them not; but the bell in the man’s heart felt it to be a gloomy time. What would become of this young man, and what would become of the old bell?

The old bell was, after a time, carried away to a greater distance than anyone, even the warder in the bell tower, ever imagined; and the bell in the breast of the young man was heard in countries where his feet had never wandered. The tones went forth over the wide ocean to every part of the round world.

We will now follow the career of the old bell. It was, as we have said, carried far away from Marbach and sold as old copper; then sent to Bavaria to be melted down in a furnace. And then what happened?

In the royal city of Bavaria, many years after the bell had been removed from the tower and melted down, some metal was required for a a great and glorious monument, a statue of one of Germany’s great men. And now we see how wonderfully things are ordered. Strange things sometimes happen in this world.

In Denmark, in one of those green islands where the foliage of the beech-woods rustles in the wind, and where many Huns’ graves may be seen, was another poor boy born. He walked in wooden shoes when he carried his father’s dinner, wrapped in an old faded handkerchief, out to him at the wharves where he carved ships’ figureheads. This poor child was now the pride of his country; for the sculptured marble, the work of his hands, had astonished the world. [84] To this very man the honourable task had been entrusted of shaping in clay a beautiful and majestic figure, to be afterwards cast in bronze, to produce the statue of him whose name the father had once written in his Bible as Johann Christoph Friedrich.

And the bronze streamed glowing into the mould. The church-bell—ah! nobody thought of its home, or of its chimes and peals that had died away long ago—the bell, too, flowed into the mould, and became the head and the breast of the statue that stands now unveiled before the old palace. There it stands, the form of him who was born in poverty, the boy from Marbach, the pupil of the military school, the fugitive who struggled against poverty and oppression; Germany’s great and immortal poet, who sung of Switzerland’s deliverer, William Tell, and of the heaven-inspired Maid of Orleans.

It was a beautiful sunny day; colours were streaming down from the towers and roofs in the royal city of Stuttgart; in honour of the festival the church bells pealed merrily; one bell alone was silent, but it shone in the bright sunshine from the face and the breast of the statue of glory. Just a hundred years had passed since the day when the church bell had rung consolation and joy to the mother, when she gave birth to her son in the poor cottage, who was, later on, the rich man, whose treasures the world blesses—the poet who sang the praise of noble women, the singer of the sublime and magnificent—Johann Christoph Friederich Schiller.

[ 1861 ]

The Bird of Popular Song

—

It is winter time; earth wears a sheet of snow, looking like marble hewn from a quarry; the sky is high and clear; the wind is as sharp as an elfin sword; the trees stand like white corals, like blooming almond branches; and here it is keen as on the lofty Alps. The night is splendid with streaming Northern Lights and countless glittering stars.

The storms come; the clouds arise, scattering forth swan leathers; the snow-flakes drift; they cover the lane, and the house it leads to, the open field, and the close streets. But we sit in the snug room, by the ruddy fire, and tell tales of olden times. Now listen to a legend.

Near the open sea stood a warrior’s grave, and there at midnight sat the spectre of the buried hero; a king he had been; the golden ring encircled his brow; his hair fluttered in the wind; he was clad in iron and steel. He bent his head mournfully, and sighed in deep sorrow, as an unquiet spirit might sigh.

Then a ship neared the shore. The men cast anchor and came to land. Among them was a Skald; and he approached the royal spirit, and asked, “What is thy sorrow and thy suffering?”

Then answered the dead, “No one has sung the deeds of my life; they are dead and forgotten. Song doth not carry them forth over the lands, nor into the hearts of men; therefore I have no rest and no peace.”

And he recounted his labours and bold exploits; the men of his own time had known them, but not sung them, because there was no singer among his companions.

Then the old Skald struck the strings of his harp, and he sang of the hero—of his daring in youth, his strength in manhood, and the greatness of his noble deeds. The face of the dead one brightened, like the edge of the cloud in moonlight. The form arose in splendour and in majesty, and vanished like the glancing of the northern light. Nothing was to be seen but the green turfy mound with the runeless stones; but over it, at the last sound of the chords, as though he had come out of the harp, soared a little bird, a most beautiful songbird, with the ringing melodies of the thrush, with the speaking melodies of the human heart, with a voice that told of home, as the bird of passage hears them. The songbird flew over hill and dale, over wood and field. He was the Bird of Popular Song, who never dies.

We hear his song, we listen to it now in the winter evening, while the white bees are swarming outside, and the storm-wind shakes the house. The bird sings not only hero lays, he has many a sweet and plaintive song of love in the North, so tender and so true; he gives us fairy tales in tones and words; he has proverbs and mystic rhymes that make the old world speak, Runes laid under a dead man’s tongue. We know his homeland; he is the Bird of Popular Song!

In the heathen days of yore, in the Viking times, his nest was in the harp of the bard. In the days of the baron’s castle, when the iron fist held the scales of justice, and power was right, when the peasant and the dog were of equal value, where then did the singing-bird find a shelter and nest? Brutality and servility took no heed of him. In the bay window of the castle, where the lady sat over her parchment, and wrote down old records in song or in legend; in the turf-built hut, where the wandering pedlar sat on the bench by the goodwife, and told her tales—there above them fluttered and flew, twittered and sang the bird that never dies, as long as earth has a green mound for its foot—the Bird of Popular Song.

Now he sings for us in here. Outside are night and snow-storm—the bird lays runes under our tongue, and we know our homeland. God speaks our mother tongue to us in the melodies of the song-bird: and olden times arise before us; the faded colours grow fresh again; song and tale cheer us with a blessed draught, that lifts both mind and soul till the evening seems like a Christmas feast. The snow is drifting, the ice is crashing, the storm-wind is their king and master, he is a lord, but not our Lord.

It is winter time; the wind is sharp like an elfin sword; the snow is drifting; it has been drifting, so it seems, for days and weeks, and lies like a monstrous snowberg upon the great town—a heavy dream in the winter night. All beneath is shrouded and shapeless; only the golden cross on the church, the symbol of faith, rises above the snow-grave, and glitters in the blue air, in clear sunshine.

And away over the buried town fly the birds, the small and the great ones; they chirp and sing as best they may, each bird in his own tongue.

First comes the flock of sparrows; they chirp about all the odds and ends in street and lane, in the nest and in the house; they know stories of the kitchen and of the drawing-room. “We know that buried town,” so they say; “every living soul there has cheep, cheep, cheep!”

The black raven and crows fly away over the white snow. “Scrape, scrape!” they scream; “down below there is something still to pick, something to swallow, this is the main thing; people down there think much the same, and what they think is, craw, craw craw!”

The wild swans come on whistling wings, and sing of the greatness and the glory there are still springing in the thoughts and hearts of men down in the snow-wrapped slumber of yonder city. That is not the sleep of death; life is at the fountainhead; we are warned of its presence there by tones of music, now solemn as an organ-peal, now thrilling as a strain from the elfin mound, now like an Ossianic song, and now like the winged rush of a Valkyria. Hark! what a wondrous harmony! It speaks into our inmost heart, it lifts our soul. It is the Bird of Popular Song we hear.

And now, even now, God’s warm breath breathes from above; the snow cover splits, the sun shines through it; spring is at hand; the birds are coming—new races with the same old homely tones. Listen to the Drapa of the year! the mighty snow-storm, the winter night’s drowsy dream; their bonds shall be broken, and all this buried life shall rise again, at the beautiful Voice of Popular Song—the bird who never dies.

[ 1865 ]

The Old Grave-Stone

—

In one of our small trading towns, at that time of year when folk say “The evenings are drawing in,” a whole family was assembled together. The air was still mild and warm, the lamp was lighted, the long curtains hung down before the windows, and outside in the open air it was a most glorious moonlight night. But they were not talking about this. They were talking about a big old stone that lay down in the yard, close by the kitchen door, where the servants often placed the kitchen utensils, after they had been cleaned, to dry in the sun, and where the children were fond of playing; it was, in fact, an old grave-stone.

“Yes,” said the master of the house, “I believe it comes from the old ruined convent-chapel; pulpit and grave-stones, with all their epitaphs, were sold; my late father bought several of these: the others were broken into paving-stones, but this one was left unused, lying in the yard.”

“It is easy to know it for a grave-stone,” said the eldest of the children. “You can still see an hour-glass and a piece of an angel, but the inscription is almost quite worn out, except the name ‘Preben,’ and a capital ‘S’ a little farther on, and underneath it ‘Martha,’ but it is impossible to make out any more, and that you can only read after it has been raining, or when we have washed it.”

“Why, then, it must be the grave-stone of Preben Swan and his wife!” exclaimed an old man; he was so old that he might very well have been the grandfather of all those in the room.

“To be sure, they were among the last that were buried in the old convent church-yard—the grand old couple! Everybody knew them, everybody loved them; they were like king and queen in the town. Folk said they had more than a barrelful of gold, and yet they went about simply clad, in the coarsest cloth, only their linen was always of dazzling whiteness. Yes, that was a charming old pair, Preben and Martha. One was always so glad to see them, sitting together on the bench at the top of their stone staircase, under the old lime tree’s shade. They were so good to the poor! they feasted them, clothed them, and there was good sense and a true Christian spirit in all their benevolence. The wife died first; I remember the day quite well; I was then a little boy, and went with my father to see old Preben: the old man was so grieved, he cried like a child. The body still lay in her bedroom, close to the chamber where we sat; she looked as if she had just fallen asleep. And the old man told my father how he should now be so lonely, how many years they had spent together, and how they had first made acquaintance and came to love each other. As I said before, I was a child, but it moved me strangely to listen to the old man, and watch how he grew more animated as he went on speaking, a faint colour coming into his cheeks as he talked of their youthful days, how pretty she had been, how many little innocent tricks he had played, in order to meet her. And when he spoke of his wedding day his eyes quite sparkled; he seemed to be living his happy time over again—and all the while she was lying dead in the next chamber, an old lady, and he was an old man—ah, how time passes! I was a child then, and now I am as old as Preben Swan. Yes, time and change come to all.

“I remember as well as possible the funeral-day, and Preben Swan following the coffin. They had had their grave-stone carved with names and inscriptions, all except the dates of their death, some years before; that same evening the stone was taken to the grave, and put into its place. The next year the grave had to be reopened, and old Preben rejoined his wife. They did not turn out to be so rich as people had fancied, and what they did leave went to distant relations very far off. The old wooden house, with the bench at the top of the high stone staircase under the lime tree, was ordered to be pulled down, for it was too ruinous to stand any longer. And afterward, when the convent-chapel and cemetery were destroyed, the grave-stone of Preben and Martha was sold, like others, to whoever would buy it. And so now it lies in the yard for the little ones to roll over, and to make a shelf for the kitchen pots and pans. And the paved street now covers the resting-place of old Preben and his wife, and nobody thinks of them any more.”

And the old man who related all this shook his held sadly. “Forgotten! All things are forgotten!”

And the rest began to speak of other matters; but the youngest boy, a child with large, grave eyes, crept up on a chair behind the curtains, and looked out into the yard, where the moon shone brightly on the big stone that before had seemed to him flat and uninteresting enough, but now had become to him like a page of a large-sized story-book. For all that the boy had heard concerning Preben and his wife, the stone seemed to contain within it; and he looked first at the stone, and then at the brilliant moon, which looked to him like a bright kind face looking down through the pure still air upon the earth.

“Forgotten! all shall be forgotten!” These words came to his ears from the room; but at that very moment an invisible angel kissed the boy’s forehead and softly whispered, “Keep the seed carefully, keep it till the time for ripening. Through thee, child as thou art, shall the half-erased inscription, the crumbling grave-stone, stand out in clear, legible characters for generations to come! Through thee shall the old couple again walk arm-in-arm through the ancient gateways, and sit with smiling faces on the bench under the lime tree, greeting rich and poor. The good and the beautiful perish never, they live eternally in tale and song.”

[ 1852 ]

The Phoenix Bird

—

In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one—the one solitary Phoenix bird. The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg.

The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in colour, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant’s cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant’s head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and England’s coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymn-book that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindu maid gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan’s red beak; on Shakespeare’s shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin’s raven, [110]  and whispered in the poet’s ear “Immortality!” and at the minstrels’ feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? He sang to thee the Marseillaise, and thou kissed the pen that fell from his wing; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance thou didst turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise—renewed each century—born in flame, ending in flame! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth—“The Phoenix of Arabia.”

In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee—thy name, Poetry.

[ 1850 ]

The Muse of the Coming Age

—

The Muse of the Coming Age, whom our great-grandchildren, or possibly a later generation still, but not ourselves, shall make acquaintance with—how does she manifest herself? What is her face and form? What is the burden of her song? Whose heart-strings shall she touch? To what summit shall she lift her century?

What questions these, for a busy day as ours? when poesy comes nigh to being in the way; when it is well known that the very “immortal” productions of today’s poets will, in the future, perhaps exist but in the form of charcoal tracings on a prison wall—bait and food for hunters of curiosities.

Poesy is required to do service in the battle-ranks—at the very least to bear the challenge in the wars of party, whether it be blood or ink that flow therein.

This is a partial version, some will say; poesy has not grown obsolete.

Nay, there are yet men who on their holiday grow conscious of an appetite for poetry; and, certes, no sooner do they feel that spiritual rumbling in their comparatively nobler parts, than forthwith is made a levy on the bookseller for no less than four shillings’ worth of poetry, of styles the most approved. Others take much pleasure in such as they can find thrown into bargains; they draw contentment from the scrap that’s on the grocer’s wrapper: ’tis so much cheaper—and economy is wealth! Demand is found for what is supplied; and that is enough! The future’s poetry, no less than the future’s music, is reckoned with the Don Quixotiana; to speak of it would be much like speaking of a voyage of discovery to Uranus.

Time is too brief and precious for mere sport of fantasy; and what is—to speak seriously for once—what is Poesy? These resonant expectorations of feeling and of thought, they are but offspring of the nerves’ vibrations. Enthusiasm, joy, and pain, and all the organism’s movements, the savants tell us, are but nerve-vibrations. We, each of us, are but Aeolian harps.

But who touches these strings? Who causes them to vibrate and to sound? The Spirit, the Godhead’s unseen Spirit, who echoes in them his emotion, his feeling; and these are understood by the fellow-harps, which respond in melting harmonies or else in strong dissonance. Such was it, and such will it be, in mankind’s grand onward march in freedom’s consciousness.

Each century—each world’s age, one may likewise say—has its chief expression in its poetry: born in the passing era, it issues forth and reigns in the new era which follows.

Thus, amid today’s roar of machinery, she is already born—the Muse of the Coming Age. Our welcome to her! may she hear it, or read it sometime—perchance among the charcoal tracings which we mentioned erst!

The rocking of her cradle reached from the farthest point trod by man’s foot on polar voyage, so far as eye can peer into the polar sky’s jet depth. We never heard the rocking for engine-clatter, locomotive-scream, the thunder of the quarry-blast, and the bursting of the ancient mental fetters.

In the vast workshop of the present she is born, where steam exerts his sinews, and where the machine “Master Bloodless” and his lads are toiling day and night.

She holds the womanly heart of love, the vestal’s sacred flame, and passion’s furnace. Reason’s ray, in all its never-ending, shifting prismatic hues of ages, is hers. Fancy’s vast swany tunic is her pride and strength; weft of science—the “elemental forces”—gave it power of wing.

On Father’s side, she is of the people’s blood—sound of sense and heart, with earnest eye, and humour on her lips, Mother is the high-born, academy-schooled emigrant’s daughter, [85] with the golden Rococo reminiscences. The Muse of the Coming Age has blood and soul in her of both.

Splendid birthday gifts were laid upon her cradle. In plenty, like sugar-plums, are strewn there Nature’s occult riddles, with their solutions. The diver’s bell yields mystic curios from the deep. The heavens’ chart—that lofty-hung Pacific Ocean with its myriad isles, each a world—was embroidered in the cradle-cloth. The sun painted her pictures; her toys provide photography.

The nurse has sung to her of Eivind Skalde-spiller and Firdusi, of the Minnesingers, and what Heine, boyish-bold, sang from his very poet’s soul. Much, all too much, the nurse has told her; she knows the Edda, the old great-grandam’s mother’s frightful-sounding tales, where horrors sweep the air on bloody wings. The entire Orient’s Thousand-Nights-and-One she heard in the fourth part of an hour.

The Muse of the Coming Age is but a child; yet she has sprung from out the swathing-clothes, is full of will, though still not knowing what she wills.

And now she is at play in her vast play-house, filled with gems of art and rococo. Greek tragedy and Roman comedy stand sculptured there in marble. The hymns of the nations, like withered vines, festoon the walls: her breath upon them, and in fresh perfume they blossom forth. The tones and thoughts of Mozart, Glück, Beethoven, and the great masters all, encircle her in never-ending chords. On her book-shelves many are laid to rest who were in their time immortal; and room is yet for many another, whose name, once heard clicking from the telegraph of immortality, dies with the telegram.

Fearfully much she has read, all too much, (for is she not born of our age?) and woefully much must again be forgotten; but the Muse, she will know how to forget.

She thinks not of her song, which shall live and flourish in millennia to come, by the side of Moses’ legends and Bidpai’s gold-crowned fable of Reynard’s craft and luck. She thinks not of her mission, nor of her tuneful future; she still is toying, while the nations’ strifes yet stir the air, and sound-figures of pen and cannon mingle to and fro—runes of mystic reading.

She wears a Garibaldi hat, and meanwhile reads her Shakespeare, and for a moment stops to think: When I am grown, he may at last be acted! Calderon rests in the sarcophagus of his works, under the tablet of fame. Holberg—for the Muse is cosmopolitan—she has bound together with Moliere, Plautus, and Aristophanes; but mostly she reads Moliere.

She is free from the unrest that drives the chamois of the Alps, and still her soul pants for the salt of life as does the chamois for the mountain salt; a calm floats through her heart, as in the ancient Hebrew tales the nomad’s voice was wafted o’er green plains ’neath starry skies; and still in song her heart swells mightier than the Thessalonian warrior’s inspired bosom in the Grecian eld.

How is it with her Christendom? She has learned philosophy’s ins and outs; the elements broke one of her milkteeth (but a new one did grow after); the fruit of knowledge she tasted when yet in the cradle, ate and grew wise—so that “Immortality” flashed out from her in mankind’s genial thought.

When begins the Coming Age of Poesy? When shall the Muse be known? When heard?

On a wondrous spring morning, on the locomotive dragon she shall come, careering over viaducts and through dark tunnels; or else on the puffing dolphin’s back across the bland but mighty sea; or else in air borne on the pinions of Montgolfier’s Bird Roc, alighting in the land whence first her godlike voice shall greet the race of Man. Whence? Is it from Columbus’s new-found land—the Land of Freedom, where the Aborigine is game, and the African a beast of burden?—the land wherefrom we heard the song of Hiawatha? Is it from the quarter of antipodes—that golden island in the Southern Sea, the land of opposites, where black swans sing in mossy forests? Or from the land where Mennon’s pillar rang and rings—but we understood not the desert-dwelling sphinx of song? Is it from the isle of anthracite, where Shakespeare, since the age of Elizabeth, has reigned? Is it from Tycho Brahe’s home, which suffered him not? Or from California’s adventurous shore, where the Wellingtonea lifts her head, the queen of all earth’s forests?

When shall the star be lit—the star on the Muse’s brow—the blossom in whose petals is inscribed the future’s thought of beauty in form, and tint, and fragrance?

“What is the Muse’s platform?” queries the astute politician of the day. “What will she?”

Better ask what will she not!

She will not appear as a ghost of times defunct! she will not build dramas from the shining shards of olden scenes, nor deck the bungles of dramatic architecture with the flaunting hues of lyric drapery! her flight forth from among us will be as from the car of Thespis to the marble amphitheatre. She will not shatter healthy human speech to fragments, and clink these together for a music-box with tones of troubadour-tourneys. Nor will she blazon Verse patrician and plain Prose plebeian! twin-paired are they in voice, and sense, and might. Nor will she chisel out from Iceland’s saga-blocks the ancient gods! for they are dead: no sympathy nor fellowship awaits them in our day! Nor will she bid her generation hide their thought in French-novel fabric; nor will she numb them with the chloroform of every-day historia!—a life-elixir will she bring: her song in verse or prose is brief, and clear, and rich! The nations’ heartbeats—each but a letter in the endless alphabet of growth—she grasps the letters each with equal lovingness, and ranges them in words and weaves her words in rhythms for her Age’s Hymn.

And when shall the hour be full?

’Twill be long to us, who yet are lingering back; ’tis brief for those who flew ahead.

Soon falls the Chinese Wall. Europe’s railways hedge old Asia’s fast-sealed culture-archives—the opposing streams of human culture meet!—mayhap with thunderous clang resounds the whirl; the wiseacres of our time will tremble with the sound and hear therein a judgment, the fall of the ancient gods; forgetting that times and peoples may pass away, and only a little image, locked in a word-casket, remains of each, floating as a lotus flower on eternity’s stream and telling us that they all were flesh of our flesh, in various garb: the Jewish image shines radiant from the Bible; the Greek from the Iliad and the Odyssey; and ours?—Inquire of the Coming Muse, at the judgment, when the new heaven’s lifted into light and sight.

All power of steam, all prints of modern times were lifting levers! Master Bloodless and his busy lads, who seem out day’s all-powerful kings, are but its servants, its blackamoor slaves, which adorn the festive hall, unmask its treasures, deck its boards, for the great feast-day when the Muse—a child of innocence, a maid of inspiration, a matron of sweet calm and wisdom—shall lift on high the wondrous Lamp of Poesy, the rich, full, human heart, aflame with fire of God.

Be greeted, thou Muse of Poesy’s Coming Age! may our greeting be lifted up and heard, as the cricket’s hymn of thanks is heard—the cricket that beneath the plough is crushed, while a new springtime is dawning and the ploughshare draws its furrow through us crickets, crushing us, that health may blossom to the Coming Generation.

Be greeted, O Muse of the Coming Age!

[ 1861 ]

The Bond of Friendship

—

Our house was built of clay, but the doorposts were fluted marble pillars found on the spot where the house was built. The thatched roof almost reached down to the ground. Now it is dark brown and ugly, but when it was made it consisted of flowering oleander and fresh bay branches fetched from the mountain slopes. Round our dwelling it was narrow; walls of rock rose steeply up, bare and black; round their summits clouds were often hanging, like white living beings. I never heard a singing bird here, nor did men dance to the sound of the pipe; but the place was sacred from time immemorial—its very name reminded us of it, for it was called Delphi. The dark gloomy mountains were all covered with snow. The highest—the one that reflected the red evening sun longest—was Parnassus; the brook near our house rushed down from it, and was also once sacred; now the donkey sullies it with its feet, but the current rolls on and becomes clear again. How well I remember every spot in its sacred deep solitude! In the middle of the cottage a fire was lit, and when the ashes lay high and glowing, bread was baked in it. When the snow was piled up so high round our cottage that it was almost hidden, then my mother was at her brightest, then she would hold my head between her hands, kiss my forehead, and sing songs which she never sang at other times, for the Turks, our masters, would not suffer it. She sang:

“On the summit of Olympus, in the wood of dwarf firs, lived an old stag; its eyes were heavy with tears. It wept red, green, and pale blue tears, and a roebuck passed. ‘What ails thee, that thou weepest such red, green, and pale blue tears?’ ‘The Turks have taken our city. They have wild hounds for their hunt, a goodly pack.’ ‘I will chase them over the islands,’ said the young roebuck; ‘I will chase them over the islands into the deep sea.’ But before the sun set the roebuck was slain, and before nightfall the stag was chased and dead.’

And when my mother thus sang her eyes became wet, and on her long lashes hung a tear, but she concealed it and then baked our black bread in the ashes. Then I clenched my fist and said, “Let us kill the Turks.’ But she repeated from the song: “I will chase them over the islands into the deep sea.’ But ere the sun set the roebuck was slain, and before nightfall the stag was chased and dead.”

We had been lonely in our cottage for several days and nights when my father came. I knew he would bring me shells from the Gulf of Lepanto, or perhaps a knife, sharp and glittering. This time he brought us a child, a little half-naked girl, whom he carried beneath his sheepskin coat. She was wrapped in a skin, and when this was taken off and she lay in my mother’s lap, all the little one possessed were three silver coins fastened to her black hair. My father told us about the Turks who had slain the child’s parents; he talked so much about them that I dreamed of it all night. My father was himself wounded. My mother dressed his arm; the wound was deep, and the thick sheepskin was stiff with frozen blood. The little girl was to be my sister. How radiantly beautiful she was! My mother’s eyes were not softer than hers. Anastasia, as she was called, was to be my sister, for her father was united to mine by an old custom which we still keep. They had in their youth become brothers, and had chosen the most beautiful and most virtuous girl in the whole neighbourhood to consecrate their bond of friendship. I often heard of this strange good custom.

Now the little girl was my sister, she sat on my knee. I brought her flowers and feathers of the field-birds; we drank together from the waters of Parnassus, and slept head to head under the laurel roof of the cottage, while my mother sang yet full many a winter of the red, green, and pale-blue tears. But I did not yet understand that the sorrows of my own countrymen were mirrored in those tears.

“One day three Franks arrived. Their dress was different from ours. They had their beds and tents on horses, and more than twenty Turks, all armed with sabres and guns, accompanied them, for they were friends of the Pasha, and they had letters of safe conduct from him. They only came to see our mountains, to ascend Parnassus in snow and clouds, and to look at the strange black steep rocks surrounding our hut. There was not room enough for them inside, nor could they bear the smoke, which passed along the ceiling and escaped through the low door; they pitched their tents on the narrow place near our hut, roasted lambs and birds, and partook of strong sweet wines; but the Turks were not allowed to drink them.

“When they started, I accompanied them some distance, and my little sister Anastasia hung in a goatskin upon my back. One of the Frankish gentlemen placed me against a rock, and drew us so strikingly well as we stood there that we looked like one being. I had never thought of it, but Anastasia and I were really one; she always lay on my knee or hung on my back, and when I dreamed, she appeared in my dreams.

“Two nights after this, other people armed with knives and guns came to our hut. They were Albanese: courageous men, as my mother said. They only stayed a short time. My sister Anastasia sat on the knee of one of them, and when they were gone she had two instead of three silver coins in her hair. They wrapped tobacco in strips of paper and smoked it; the eldest spoke of the way they were to take, and was uncertain about it.

But one way had to be chosen; they went off and my father accompanied them. Soon afterward we heard the report of guns, and after a little while again; then soldiers rushed into our hut, and took my mother, myself, and Anastasia prisoners; the robbers, they said, had stayed with us, and my father was their guide, therefore we were to follow them. I saw the bodies of the robbers, I saw my father’s body, and cried until I fell asleep. When I awoke we were in prison, but the room was not worse than our own hut. They gave me onions and resinous wine, which they poured out of a tarred sack; our fare at home was not any better.

I do not know how long we were kept in prison; but many days and many nights passed. When we were released it was holy Eastertide; I carried Anastasia on my back, for my mother was ill, and could only walk very slowly, and it was a long way down to the sea, at the Gulf of Lepanto.

We entered a church which shone with pictures in golden frames. They were pictures of angels, which were very beautiful, but it seemed to me that our little Anastasia was just as beautiful. In the centre of the floor stood a coffin filled with roses: ‘Our Lord Christ lies there represented by beautiful flowers,’ said my mother; and the priest announced: ‘Christ has risen from the dead!’ All the people kissed one another, every one of them held a burning candle, I myself received one, and so did little Anastasia. The music sounded, and the men danced hand in hand out of the church, while the women were roasting the Easter lamb outside. We were invited to share the meal; I sat by the fire, when a boy older than myself kissed and embraced me saying: ‘Christ has risen!’ Thus Aphtanides and I saw each other for the first time.

My mother could make fishing nets, and by this she earned a good living at the Gulf, and we remained a long time by the sea—the beautiful sea, which tasted like tears, and the colours of which reminded me of the tears of the stag, for indeed, it was sometimes red, sometimes green, and then blue again.

Aphtanides knew how to guide a boat, and when I was sitting in it with my little Anastasia it was gliding over the water like a cloud over the sky. When the sun set, the mountains assumed a deeper blue; one range of mountains rose above the other, and in the far distance stood Pamassus covered with snow. Its summit glittered in the evening sun like red-hot iron; it looked as if the light came from its inside, for long after the sun had set, it shone in the blue shimmering air. The white seabirds touched the surface of the water with their wings, and it was indeed as quiet here as between the black rocks near Delphi. I was lying on my back in the boat, while Anastasia rested on my breast, and the stars over us sparkled much more brightly than the lamps in our church. They were the same stars and stood in exactly the same places above me, which I saw when sat before our hut at Delphi. At last it seemed to me as if I were still there! Then there was a splash in the water and the boat rocked to and fro; I uttered a loud cry, for Anastasia had fallen in, but just as quickly Aphtanides jumped in after her, and lifted her up to me! We undressed her, wrung the water out of her clothes, and then put them on again; all this Aphtanides did. We remained on the water until her things were dry, and nobody heard anything about the fright we had over our little foster-sister, whose life Aphtanides had saved.

The summer came. The sun burned so hot that the leaves on the trees were scorched; I thought of our cool mountains and of their fresh water; my mother too was longing for them, and one night we started to return thither. What calm, what quietness! We walked on through the high thyme, which still smelt sweetly, although the sun had burned its leaves. All was quiet and deserted; only a shooting star told us there was life up there in the sky. I do not know whether the clear blue air which gave light, or whether it was the rays of the stars; we could easily distinguish the outlines of the mountains. My mother kindled a fire and fried onions which she had brought with her; my little sister and I slept in the thyme, without fear of the ugly smidraki, [86] from the throat of which fire spurts forth, and much less of the wolf and the jackal; my mother sat by our side and this I considered sufficient protection.

We reached our old home, but the hut was a heap of ashes—a new one had to be built. Some women helped my mother, and in a few days walls were erected and a new roof of oleander made. My mother obtained a living by making bottle cases of bark and skins, and I kept the sheep of the priests; [87] Anastasia and the little tortoises were my playmates.

One day we had a visit from our beloved Aphtanides; he had longed to see us so much, and he stayed with us two whole happy days. After a month he came again, and told us that he was going on a ship to Patras and Corfu. He had come to say good-bye to us; he brought a large fish for our mother. He knew many things to tell us, not only of the fishermen at the Gulf of Lepanto, but also of the kings and heroes which once ruled over Greece as the Turks do now.

I have seen a bud on a rose-bush come out and develop into a flower in the course of days and weeks; it became one before I thought how large, fine, and red it was. The same thing happened to me concerning Anastasia. She was a beautiful tall girl, and I a strong lad. The wolf-skins on the couches of my mother and Anastasia I had myself taken from the animals which I had shot.

Years passed. Then one night Aphtanides came: he was as slender as a reed, strong and brown; he kissed us all, and told us much about the great sea—of Malta’s fortifications, and of Egypt’s strange tombs. It sounded wonderful, like a legend of the priests. I looked up to him with a sort of reverence.

“How much you know!” I said. “How well you can tell it!”

“You have after all told me the best one day,” he said; “you have spoken to me of something that has never been out of my thoughts, of the fine old custom—the bond of friendship; I wish very much to follow this custom. Brother, let us go to the church, as your father and Anastasia’s father once did. Your sister Anastasia is the most beautiful, most innocent girl: she shall consecrate us! No nation has better customs than we Greeks!”

Anastasia blushed like a young rose, and my mother kissed Aphtanides.

About an hour’s walk from our hut, where loose mould lies on the rocks and some trees give shade, stood the little church; a silver lamp was hanging before the altar.

I had put on my best clothes, the white tunic fell in rich folds over my hips, the red jacket fitted tight and close, the tassel on my fez cap was silver, and my knife and pistols stuck in my girdle. Aphtanides wore the blue costume of a Greek sailor; a silver plate, with a figure of the Virgin Mary hung on his breast; his sash was as costly as those worn by rich lords. Everyone could see that we went to some celebration. We entered the small simple church, where the rays of the evening sun fell on the burning lamp and on the coloured pictures on golden backgrounds. We knelt on the altar-steps, and Anastasia came before us; her long white dress hung loosely and lightly round her beautiful form; her white neck and bosom were covered with a chain of old and new coins, forming a kind of collar. Her black hair was tied into a single knot, held together by a head-dress, consisting of silver and gold coins, found in ancient temples. No Greek girl had finer ornaments than these. Her face beamed, her eyes were like two stars.

We all three prayed silently; then she asked us: “Will you be friends in life and death?”

“Yes,” we replied.

“Will you, whatever may happen, remember: my brother is part of me, his secret is my secret, my happiness is his; devotion, perseverance, every virtue in me belongs to him, as well as to me?”

Again we answered “Yes!”

“She placed our hands together, kissed us on the forehead, and we again prayed silently. Then the priest came out of the door close to the altar, and blessed us all three, while a hymn was sung by the other holy men behind the altar screen. The bond of eternal friendship was concluded. When we rose I saw my mother crying bitterly near the church door.

How bright it was in our little hut, at the springs of Delphi!

The evening before his departure, Aphtanides and I were pensively sitting on the slope of the rock; his arm was slung round my waist, mine round his neck; we spoke of the distress of Greece, and Of the men in whom she could trust. Every thought of our souls lay clearly before us both. Then I seized his hand.

“One thing I have yet to tell you—one thing, which was up to the present only known to God and myself! My whole soul is love! A love much stronger than that which I feel for my mother and for you—!”

“And whom do you love?” asked Aphtanides, his face and neck turning crimson.

“I love Anastasia!” I said.

His hand trembled in mine; he turned as pale as a corpse. I saw it; I understood him, and I thought that also my hand trembled, I bent down to him, kissed his forehead, and whispered

“I have never told her about it; perhaps she does not love me! Brother, think or this: I have seen her daily; she has grown up by my side, and has become part of my soul!’

“And yours she shall be!” he said. “Yours! I must not deceive you, and I will not do so. I love her also—but tomorrow I am off. In a year we shall see each other again, and then you will be married—don’t you think so? I have a little gold; it shall be yours—you must, you shall take it.”

Silently we walked over the rocks; it was late in the evening when we arrived at my mother’s hut. Anastasia raised the lamp as we entered; my mother was not there. She looked sorrowfully at Aphtanides. “Tomorrow you will go from us,” she said, “how sad it makes me.”

“Makes you sad?” he said—his words seemed to express a pain as great as my own. I was unable to speak, but he seized her hand and said:

“Our brother loves you, he is dear to you! His silence is the best proof of his love.”

Anastasia trembled, and burst into tears. Then I only saw her, only thought of her, flung my arms round her, and said:

“Yes, I love you!”

She pressed her lips to mine, and placed her arms round my neck; but the lamp had fallen on the floor: it was dark around us, as dark as the heart of poor Aphtanides.

Before daybreak he got up, kissed us all, and departed. He had given his money to my mother for us. Anastasia was my betrothed, and in a few days became my wife.

[ 1842 ]

Ib and Christine

—

Near the clear stream called the Gudenau, in North Jutland, in the forest which extends from its banks far into the country, there rises a high ridge of land stretching like a wall through the wood. To the west of this stands a farm-house, surrounded by some poor farm-land; the sandy soil may be seen through the spare rye and barley that grow there. Some years ago some people lived here who cultivated the fields, and kept, moreover, three sheep, a pig, and two oxen; in fact, they supported themselves very well, and had enough to live on, if one takes life as it comes. Indeed, they might even have managed to keep two horses, but, like the other peasants of the neighbourhood, they said: “A horse eats itself up”—that is to say, it eats as much as it earns. Jeppe Jänsens cultivated his fields in summer; in winter he made wooden shoes, and then he had an assistant, a journeyman who, like him, knew how to make the shoes strong, though light and “fashionable.” They cut out shoes and spoons, and that brought in money, so it would have been unfair to the Jeppe Jänsens to call them poor people.

Little Ib, a boy seven years old, the only child of the family, would sit by and look at the men at work, whittling away at a stick, and occasionally cutting his fingers. But one day Ib had succeeded so well with two bits of wood that they looked like little wooden shoes, and these he intended to give to little Christine. And who was little Christine?

She was the boatman’s little daughter, as dainty and delicate as a nobleman’s child; if she had been dressed as such, no one would have believed that she lived in the hut on the neighbouring heath. There dwelt her father, who was a widower, and earned his living by carrying firewood in his large boat from the forest to the neighbouring estate of Silkeborg, with its fine eel-fisheries and eel weir, and sometimes even as far as the distant hamlet of Randers. He had no one who could have taken care of Christine; therefore the little girl was almost always in the boat with him, or in the wood amongst the ferns and blackberry bushes. Occasionally, when he went to the little town, he would take Christine, who was a year younger than Ib, across the heath to Jeppe Jänsens’.

Ib and Christine agreed very well in everything; they shared each other’s bread and blackberries when they were hungry, and they dug up the earth together, running, creeping and playing about everywhere. One day they even ventured quite alone up the high ridge and a long way into the wood; once they found a few snipe’s eggs there, and that was a great event.

Ib had never yet been on the heath where Christine’s father lived, nor had he been on the river. But at last he was to go; Christine’s father had invited him, and on the evening before the excursion he followed the boatman across the heath to his house.

Early the next morning both the children were sitting high up on the pile of firewood in the boat, eating bread and blackberries, while Christine’s father and his assistant drove the boat along with poles. They had the current with them, and they glided swiftly along the stream and across the lakes which it forms. Sometimes they seemed quite enclosed by reeds and water-plants, yet there was always room for them to pass through, although the old trees overhung the water and the old oaks stretched out their bare branches, as if they had turned up their sleeves to show their knotty, naked arms. Old alders, which had been washed away from the banks by the current, clung fast by their roots to the bed of the river, and looked like little wooded islands; while the water-lilies rocked themselves on the stream. It was a glorious journey, and at last they reached the great eel-weir, with the water rushing through the sluices. It was too beautiful, thought Ib and Christine.

In those days there was no factory there, nor any town; only the great old farmyard was to be seen, with its scanty fields and its few servants and a small number of cattle; and the rush of the water through the weir and the cries of the wild ducks were the only life stirring at Silkeborg. After the firewood had been unloaded, Christine’s father bought a bundle of eels and a slaughtered sucking-pig, and put them into a basket placed in the back of the boat. Then they went back again up the stream, but the wind was in their favour, and when they had hoisted the sails, it was as good as if they were being towed by two horses.

When they reached a point on the river near which the boat man’s assistant lived, not far from the bank, the boat was made fast, and both men landed, after impressing upon the children to remain quiet. But the children did not obey—at least only for a very short time. They wanted to peep into the basket in which the eels and the sucking-pig lay. They must needs take the pig out, hold it in their hands, and feel and touch it; and as they both wanted to do this at the same time, they happened to let it fall into the water, and away floated the pig with the stream. Here was a terrible calamity!

Ib sprang ashore and ran a little distance away from the boat, and Christine sprang after him, crying, “Take me with you!” In a few moments they were deep in the bushes, and could no longer see either the boat or the bank; they ran on a little farther, and then Christine fell down and began to cry. But Ib picked her up again.

“Follow me,” he said. “There’s the house over there.”

But the house was not over there. They wandered farther and farther, over the dry rustling last year’s leaves, over fallen branches that cracked under their little feet. Soon they heard a loud piercing cry. They stood still and listened, and then the cry of an eagle echoed through the wood. It was a horrible scream, and it frightened them; but before them, there in the wood, grew the finest blackberries in immense numbers. This was too inviting for them to do otherwise than stop, so they stayed and ate blackberries till they had black mouths and black cheeks. Again they heard the cry that had startled them before.

“We shall get into trouble about the pig,” said Christine. “Come, let us go home,” said Ib; “it is here in the wood.” And they went on. They came to a road, but it did not lead them home, and as it was growing dark they got frightened. The wonderful stillness that reigned all around was broken by the ugly cries of the horned owl and other birds. At last they lost themselves in some bushes. Christine cried, and Ib cried, and when they had both cried some time they lay down on the dry leaves and fell asleep.

The sun was high in the heavens when the two children awoke. They felt frozen, but near their bed, on the hill, the sun shone through the trees, and there they would go to warm themselves; thence too, thought Ib, they would be able to see his parents’ house. But they were far from the house, in quite another part of the forest. They climbed up the hill, and found themselves on a slope by a clear lake; the fish were near the surface in great numbers illumined by the sun’s rays. The sight of all this was as unexpected as it was sudden. Close beside them grew a nut-bush full of the finest hazel-nuts; these they picked and cracked, and ate the delicate young kernels. But there was yet another surprise, another fright, in store for them. Out of the bushes came a tall old woman with jet black shining hair, and the whites of her eyes shone like those of a Moor. On her back she carried a bundle and in her hand was a knotted stick: she was a gipsy. The children did not understand at first what she said. She took three large nuts out of her pocket and told them that these contained the finest and most beautiful things: they were wishing-nuts.

Ib looked at her, and as she spoke so friendly, he summoned up courage and asked her whether she would give him the nuts. The woman gave them to him, and picked herself some more, a whole pocketful, from the nut-bush.

Ib and Christine stared at the three wishing-nuts with wondering eyes.

“Can there be a cart with two horses in this nut?” asked Ib.

“Yes, there is a golden carriage and golden horses,” answered the woman.

“Then give me the nut,” said Christine; and Ib gave it to her, while the strange woman tied it in her neckerchief for her.

“Can there be a pretty little neckerchief in this nut, like the one Christine has round her neck?” asked Ib.

“There are neckerchiefs in it,” said the woman. “There are fine dresses, stockings, a hat, and a veil.”

“Then I want that one too,” said Christine; and Ib gave her the second nut too. The third was a little black thing.

“You must keep that,” said Christine, “and it is a pretty one too.”

“What is in it?” asked Ib.

“The best of all things for you,” replied the gipsy woman. And Ib held the nut very tight. The woman promised to lead the children to the right path, so that they could find their way home; and now they went on, certainly in quite another direction to that which they should have taken, but that is no reason why we should suspect the old woman of wanting to steal the children.

In the wild paths through the woods they met the forest ranger, who knew Ib, and with his help Ib and Christine got home, where there had been great anxiety about them. They were pardoned and forgiven, although they had indeed both deserved to “get into trouble”—first, for having let the pig fall into the water; and secondly, for having run away.

Christine was taken back to her father on the heath, and Ib remained in the farmhouse on the edge of the wood near the great ridge.

The first thing he did in the evening was to take out of his pocket the little black nut that contained the “best of all things.” Placing it carefully between the door and the door-post, he closed the former upon it; the nut cracked right enough, but there was not much kernel to be seen. It looked as if it were filled with snuff or rich black earth; it was a bad one, or worm-eaten, as people call it.

“Yes, I thought as much,” said Ib. “How could there be room in the little nut for the best of all? Christine will get just as little out of her two nuts—neither fine clothes nor a golden carriage.”

•  •  •

Winter came on, and the new year began; indeed, several years went by. At last Ib was to be confirmed, and therefore he used to go over to the clergyman’s in the village to be taught during a whole winter. About this time the boatman one day visited Ib’s parents, and told them that Christine was going into service, and that it was really a piece of luck for her to fall into such hands and to get such a good place with such nice people; for, only fancy, she was going to the rich innkeeper’s at Herning, far in the west, many miles from Ib. There she was to assist the hostess in the housekeeping, and afterwards, if she took to it, and was confirmed there, the worthy couple would adopt her as their daughter.

So Ib and Christine took leave of one another—“the engaged couple,” people called them; and at parting she showed him that she still had the two nuts which he had given her during their adventure in the wood, and she also told him that she kept in a drawer the little wooden shoes which he had carved and given to her when a boy. With this they parted.

Ib was confirmed. But he remained in his mother’s house, for he had become a clever maker of wooden shoes; in summer he looked after the field, for which his mother no longer kept a man. He did it all alone too, for his father had died long ago.

Only very rarely, and mostly through a postillion or an eel fisher, did any news come from Christine. But she was getting on very well at the rich innkeeper’s, and after she had been confirmed, she wrote her father a letter in which she sent her compliments to Ib and his mother. In the letter she also spoke of some new linen and a fine dress that had been given her by her employers. All this was certainly good news.

One day in the following spring there was a knock at the door of Ib’s mother, and there stood the boatman and Christine. She had come over to spend the day; a carriage had to go from the inn at Herning to the next village, and she had taken the opportunity to go and see her friends once more. She was as handsome as a grand lady, and had fine clothes on, which had been well made and expressly for her. She stood there in all her finery, and Ib was in his everyday clothes. He could not bring a word out; he certainly caught her hand and held it in his own, and was heartily glad; but he could not get his tongue to move. Christine, however, could, and went on talking and talking, and kissed Ib right on the lips without more ado.

“Did you know me again at once, Ib?” she said; but even when they were afterwards quite alone, and he still stood there holding her hand, he could only say: “You have become quite a grand lady, and I look so rough. How often I have thought of you, Christine, and of the old times!”

Arm in arm they sauntered up the great ridge and looked out across the stream towards the heath and the great hills covered with flowers. Although Ib said nothing, yet by the time they parted it had become clear to him that Christine must be his wife. Had they not been called the “engaged couple” from their childhood? It seemed to him that they were really betrothed, even though neither of them had ever said a word on the matter.

They could only stay together a few hours longer, for Christine had to go back to the next village, whence the carriage was to start early next morning for Herning. Her father and Ib accompanied her as far as the village. It was a fine moonlight night, and when they reached their journey’s end, and Ib was holding Christine’s hand in his own, he could not let it go. His eyes sparkled, but the words fell slowly from his lips; still, they came from the depths of his heart, and he said, “If you have not become too fine, Christine, and can make up your mind to live in my mother’s house as my wife, then we shall get married someday; but we can wait a little while yet.”

“Yes, let us leave it like that for a time, Ib,” she said, as she pressed his hand, and he kissed her on the lips.

“I trust you, Ib,” said Christine, “and I believe that I love you. But I will sleep upon it.”

With that they parted. On the way back Ib told the boatman that he and Christine were as good as engaged, and the boatman said that it was what he had always foreseen; he went home with Ib that night and stayed till the morning. Nothing more was said of the engagement.

A year passed, in the course of which two letters were exchanged between Ib and Christine. “True till death” was written at the bottom.

One day the boatman came in to Ib to bring him a greeting from Christine. What else he had to say came out rather slowly, but it was to the effect that all was well—indeed, more than well with Christine; that she was now a pretty girl, courted and beloved.

The innkeeper’s son had been home on a visit; he was employed in the office of some great institution in Copenhagen. He was very fond of Christine, and she thought him very nice; his parents too were not unwilling to give their consent; but it weighed upon Christine’s heart that she was so much in Ib’s thoughts, and she had therefore “decided to refuse this good fortune,” said the boatman.

At first lb did not say a word, but he turned as white as the wall, and shook his head a little. Then he said slowly: “Christine must not refuse this good fortune.”

“Well, then, write her a few words,” said the boatman.

And Ib sat down to write, but he could not put the words as he wished to, and first he altered, and then tore up, what he had written. But the next morning a letter lay ready for Christine, running thus:

“I have read the letter you have written to your father, and learn from it that all is well with you, and that you may attain even greater good fortune. Look into your heart, Christine, and consider well what awaits you if you take me: what I have is but little. Do not think of me, or of my position, but of your own welfare. You are bound to me by no promise, and if you have given me one in your heart, I release you from it. May joy pour out its treasures upon you, Christine! Heaven will no doubt console my heart.

“Ever your sincere friend,
“Ib.”

The letter was sent off, and Christine duly received it.

In the course of November the banns were published in the church on the heath, as well as in Copenhagen, where the bridegroom lived; and to Copenhagen Christine travelled, accompanied by her mother-in-law, because the bridegroom could not, on account of business, undertake the long journey into the interior of Jutland. Christine met her father in a village on the way, and here the two took leave of each other. A good deal was spoken about the matter on different occasions, but Ib made no remarks upon it, and his mother said he had been very thoughtful of late. Thoughtful he had indeed become, and therefore the three nuts came into his mind which he had received from the gipsy woman, and two of which he had given to Christine. They had been wishing-nuts, and in one of hers had lain a golden carriage and horses, and in the other the most beautiful clothes. It was right—all that splendour would now be hers in the capital. Her part had come true, while to him (Ib) the nut had offered black earth. “The best of all things” for him, the gipsy had said. Yes, it was right—that too had come true. The black earth was the best for him. Now he understood clearly what the woman had meant. The dark grave, in the black earth, was the best place for him.

•  •  •

Again years passed—not very many, but they seemed long ones to Ib. The old innkeeper and his wife died, one after another, and the whole of their property, many thousands of dollars, went to their son. Now Christine could indeed have the golden carriage and plenty of fine clothes.

During two long years that followed no letter came from Christine, and when her father at last received one, it was by no means written in prosperity and joy. Poor Christine! Neither she nor her husband had been able to keep the money together; there was no blessing in it—because they had sought none.

Again the wildflowers bloomed and faded, and again the ferns dried up. The snow had swept for many winters across the heath and over the ridge at the foot of which Ib dwelt, sheltered from the rough winds. The spring sun shone once more; and as Ib guided the plough across his field it cut into what he believed to be a fire-stone. A great black lump like a plane came out of the ground, and when Ib took it up he found it was metal, and the place where the plough had cut into it gleamed brightly. It was a great heavy golden armlet of antiquity. A grave-mound had been disturbed, and its precious treasure was laid bare. Ib showed it to the clergyman, who explained to him the value of what he had found; he then betook himself to the district judge, who reported the discovery to the director of the museum and advised Ib to deliver up the treasure in person.

“You have found in the earth the best thing you could find,” said the judge.

“The best thing!” thought Ib. “The very best thing for me, and in the earth! Well, if that is the best, the gipsy-woman was right in what she foretold me.”

So Ib went with the ferry-boat from Aarhuus to Copenhagen. To him, who had only once or twice crossed the river that rolled by his home, this seemed a journey across the ocean.

He arrived in Copenhagen. The value of the gold he had found was paid out to him; it was a large sum—six hundred dollars. And Ib from the heath walked about in the great city.

On the evening before the day he had arranged to return with the captain, Ib lost his way in the streets and took quite a different direction from the one he had intended to go. He had strayed into a poor little street in the suburb of Christianshafen. There was not a soul to be seen. At last a very little girl came out of one of the miserable dwellings. Ib asked the little one the way to the street he wanted; she looked at him shyly, and began to cry bitterly. He asked her what was the matter, but he could not understand her answer. As they walked along the street and passed beneath a lamp, the light fell right upon the child’s face, and a strange feeling came over him, for it was Christine that stood before him in the flesh, just as he remembered her in the days of their childhood.

He went with the little girl into the wretched house, and ascended the narrow, rickety staircase that led to a little attic high up under the roof. The air was close and almost suffocating; no light was burning, and from one corner came heavy sighs and groans. Ib struck a light with the help of a match. It was the child’s mother, who lay groaning on the miserable bed.

“Can I do anything for you?” asked Ib. “The little girl brought me up here, but I am a stranger in the city. Are there no neighbours or others whom I could fetch?” He lifted up the sick woman’s head and smoothed her pillow.

It was Christine from the heath!

For years her name had not been mentioned yonder, for that would have disturbed Ib’s peace of mind, and according to all reports there was nothing good to tell. The wealth her husband had inherited from his parents had made him arrogant and turned his brain. He had given up his appointment and had travelled about in foreign countries for six months; on his return he had run into debt and still gone on living in great style. The coach rode more and more heavily, till at last it toppled over altogether. His numerous friends and merry table-companions declared that it served him right, for he had kept house like a madman. One morning his body was found in a canal.

The hand of Death was already on Christine. Her youngest child, only a few weeks old, hoped for in prosperity and born in misery, was already in its grave, and now it had come to this with Christine herself; she lay deserted and sick unto death in a miserable room—in poverty which she might have borne in her younger years, but which she now felt the more keenly, being used to better things. It was her eldest child, also a little Christine, who suffered hunger and want with her, and who had led Ib to her.

“I am tormented by the thought that I am dying and am leaving my poor child behind,” she sighed. “Alas! what will become of her?” More she could not utter.

Ib took another match and lighted a piece of candle that he found in the room, and the flame lit up the miserable dwelling.

Then he looked at the little girl and thought of Christine when she was young; for her sake he could love this child who was a stranger to him. The dying woman looked at him and her eyes grew larger and larger: did she recognise him? He never knew, for no other word passed her lips.

•  •  •

It was in the forest by the river Gudenau, in the neighbourhood of the heath. The air was thick and dark, and there was no bloom on the heather; the storms of autumn drove the yellow leaves out of the wood into the stream and across the heath towards the boatman’s hut, now inhabited by strangers. But at the foot of the ridge, well sheltered by high trees, stood the little farm-house whitewashed and painted, and within it the turf blazed up in the chimney. There was sunlight there too, the bright light of a child’s eyes—and the notes of the spring birds rang out in the woods echoed from its smiling cherry lips. Life and joy reigned within; little Christine was there, sitting on Ib’s knee. Ib was her father and mother, for her own parents had gone from her as a dream passes from the mind of both man and child. Ib sat in the pretty neat house, a prosperous man, while the mother of the little girl lay in the churchyard at Copenhagen where she had died in poverty.

Ib was wealthy; he had laid by for a rainy day. He had won gold out of the black earth, and he had a Christine for his own, after all.

[ 1855 ]

The Old Bachelor’s Nightcap

—

There is a street in Copenhagen with a very strange name. It is called “Hysken” street. Where the name came from, and what it means is very uncertain. It is said to be German, but that is unjust to the Germans, for it would then be called “Häuschen,” not “Hysken.” “Häuschen,” means a little house; and for many years it consisted only of a few small houses, which were scarcely larger than the wooden booths we see in the market-places at fair time. They were perhaps a little higher, and had windows; but the panes consisted of horn or bladder-skins, for glass was then too dear to have glazed windows in every house. This was a long time ago, so long indeed that our grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers, would speak of those days as “olden times;” indeed, many centuries have passed since then.

The rich merchants in Bremen and Lübeck, who carried on trade in Copenhagen, did not reside in the town themselves, but sent their clerks, who dwelt in the wooden booths in the Little House street, and sold beer and spices. The German beer was very good, and there were many sorts—from Bremen, Prussia, and Brunswick—and quantities of all sorts of spices, saffron, aniseed, ginger, and especially pepper; indeed, pepper was almost the chief article sold here; so it happened at last that the German clerks in Denmark got their nickname of “pepper gentry.” It had been made a condition with these clerks that they should not marry; so that those who lived to be old had to take care of themselves, to attend to their own comforts, and even to light their own fires, when they had any to light. Many of them were very aged; lonely old boys, with strange thoughts and eccentric habits. From this, all unmarried men, who have attained a certain age, are called, in Denmark, “pepper gentry;” and this must be remembered by all those who wish to understand the story.

The “pepper gentleman,” or, as he is called in England, “old bachelor,” becomes a butt for ridicule, and is continually told that he ought to put on his nightcap, draw it over his eyes and go to sleep. The boys sing,

“Poor old bachelor, cut your wood,

Such a nightcap was never seen;

Who would think it was ever clean?

Go to sleep, it will do you good.”

So they sing about the “pepper gentleman;” so do they make sport of the poor old bachelor and his nightcap, and all because they really know nothing of either. It is a cap that no one need wish for, or laugh at. And why not? Well, we shall hear in the story.

In olden times, Little House Street was not paved, and pedestrians would stumble out of one hole into another, as they generally do in unfrequented byways; and the street was so narrow, and the booths leaning against each other were so close together, that in the summer time a sail would be stretched across the street from one booth to another opposite. At these times the odour of the pepper, saffron, and ginger became more powerful than ever. Behind the counter, as a rule, there were no young men. The clerks were almost all old boys; but they did not dress as we are accustomed to see old men represented, wearing wigs, caps, and knee-breeches, and with coat and waistcoat buttoned up to the chin. We have seen the portraits of our great-grandfathers dressed in this way; but the “pepper gentlemen” had no money to spare to have their portraits taken, though one of them would have made a very interesting picture for us now, if taken as he appeared standing behind his counter, or going to church, or on holidays. On these occasions, they wore high-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, and sometimes a younger clerk would stick a feather in his. The woollen shirt was concealed by a broad, linen collar; the close jacket was buttoned up to the chin, and the cloak hung loosely over it; the trousers were tucked into the square-toed shoes, for the clerks wore no stockings. Into their belt they generally stuck a table-knife and spoon, to use at meals, as well as a larger knife for self-defence; and such a weapon was often needed in those days.

After this fashion Anthony dressed on holidays and festivals, excepting that, instead of a high-crowned hat, he wore a kind of bonnet, and under it a knitted cap, a regular nightcap, to which he was so accustomed that it was always on his head; he had two, nightcaps I mean, not heads. Anthony was one of the oldest of the clerks, and just the subject for a painter. He was as thin as a lath, wrinkled round the mouth and eyes, had long, bony fingers, bushy, grey eyebrows, and over his left eye hung a thick tuft of hair, which did not look handsome, but made his appearance very remarkable. People knew that he came from Bremen; it was not exactly his home, although his master resided there. His ancestors were from Thuringia, and had lived in the town of Eisenach, close by Wartburg. Old Anthony seldom spoke of this place, but he thought of it all the more.

The old clerks of Little House Street very seldom met together; each one remained in his own booth, which was closed early enough in the evening, and then it looked dark and dismal out in the street. Only a faint glimmer of light struggled through the horn panes in the little window on the roof, while within sat the old clerk, generally on his bed, singing his evening hymn in a low voice; or he would be moving about in his booth till late in the night, busily employed in many things. It certainly was not a very lively existence. To be a stranger in a strange land is a bitter lot; no one notices you unless you happen to stand in their way. Often, when it was dark night outside, with rain or snow falling, the place looked quite deserted and gloomy. There were no lamps in the street, excepting a very small one, which hung at one end of the street, before a picture of the Virgin, which had been painted on the wall. The dashing of the water against the bulwarks of a neighbouring castle could plainly be heard.

Such evenings are long and dreary, unless people can find something to do; and so Anthony found it. There weren’t always things to be packed or unpacked, nor paper bags to be made, nor the scales to be polished. So Anthony invented employment; he mended his clothes and patched his boots, and when he at last went to bed, his nightcap, which he had worn from habit, still remained on his head; he had only to pull it down a little farther over his forehead. Very soon, however, it would be pushed up again to see if the light was properly put out; he would touch it, press the wick together, and at last pull his nightcap over his eyes and lie down again on the other side. But often there would arise in his mind a doubt as to whether every coal had been quite put out in the little fire-pan in the shop below. If even a tiny spark had remained it might set fire to something, and cause great damage. Then he would rise from his bed, creep down the ladder—for it could scarcely be called a flight of stairs—and when he reached the fire-pan not a spark could be seen; so he had just to go back again to bed. But often, when he had got half way back, he would fancy the iron shutters of the door were not properly fastened, and his thin legs would carry him down again. And when at last he crept into bed, he would be so cold that his teeth chattered in his head. He would draw the coverlet closer round him, pull his nightcap over his eyes, and try to turn his thoughts from trade, and from the labours of the day, to olden times.

But this was scarcely an agreeable entertainment; for thoughts of olden memories raise the curtains from the past, and sometimes pierce the heart with painful recollections till the agony brings tears to the waking eyes. And so it was with Anthony; often the scalding tears, like pearly drops, would fall from his eyes to the coverlet and roll on the floor with a sound as if one of his heartstrings had broken. Sometimes, with a lurid flame, memory would light up a picture of life which had never faded from his heart. If he dried his eyes with his nightcap, then the tear and the picture would be crushed; but the source of the tears remained and welled up again in his heart. The pictures did not follow one another in order, as the circumstances they represented had occurred; very often the most painful would come together, and when those came which were most full of joy, they had always the deepest shadow thrown upon them.

The beech woods of Denmark are acknowledged by everyone to be very beautiful, but more beautiful still in the eyes of old Anthony were the beech woods in the neighbourhood of Wartburg. More grand and venerable to him seemed the old oaks around the proud baronial castle, where the creeping plants hung over the stony summits of the rocks; sweeter was the perfume there of the apple-blossom than in all the land of Denmark. How vividly were represented to him, in a glittering tear that rolled down his cheek, two children at play—a boy and a girl. The boy had rosy cheeks, golden ringlets, and clear, blue eyes; he was the son of Anthony, a rich merchant; it was himself. The little girl had brown eyes and black hair, and was clever and courageous; she was the mayor’s daughter, Molly. The children were playing with an apple; they shook the apple, and heard the pips rattling in it. Then they cut it in two, and each of them took half. They also divided the pips and ate all but one, which the little girl proposed should be placed in the ground.

“You will see what will come out,” she said; “something you don’t expect. A whole apple tree will come out, but not directly.” Then they got a flower-pot, filled it with earth, and were soon both very busy and eager about it. The boy made a hole in the earth with his finger, and the little girl placed the pip in the hole, and then they both covered it over with earth.

“Now you must not take it out tomorrow to see if it has taken root,” said Molly; “no one ever should do that. I did so with my flowers, but only twice; I wanted to see if they were growing. I didn’t know any better then, and the flowers all died.”

Little Anthony kept the flower-pot, and every morning during the whole winter he looked at it, but there was nothing to be seen but black earth. At last, however, the spring came, and the sun shone warm again, and then two little green leaves sprouted forth in the pot.

“They are Molly and me,” said the boy. “How wonderful they are, and so beautiful!”

Very soon a third leaf made its appearance.

“Who does that stand for?” thought he, and then came another and another. Day after day, and week after week, till the plant became quite a tree. And all this about the two children was mirrored to old Anthony in a single tear, which could soon be wiped away and disappear, but might come again from its source in the heart of the old man.

In the neighbourhood of Eisenach stretches a ridge of stony mountains, one of which has a rounded outline, and shows itself above the rest without tree, bush, or grass on its barren summits. It is called the “Venus Mountain,” and the story goes that the “Lady Venus,” one of the heathen goddesses, keeps house there. She is also called “Lady Halle,” as every child round Eisenach well knows. She it was who enticed the noble knight, Tannhäuser, the minstrel, from the circle of singers at Wartburg into her mountain.

Little Molly and Anthony often stood by this mountain, and one day Molly said, “Do you dare to knock and say, ‘Lady Halle, Lady Halle, open the door: Tannhäuser is here!’” But Anthony did not dare. Molly, however, did, though she only said the words, “Lady Halle, Lady Halle,” loudly and distinctly; the rest she muttered so much under her breath that Anthony felt certain she had really said nothing; and yet she looked quite bold and saucy, just as she did sometimes when she was in the garden with a number of other little girls; they would all stand round him together, and want to kiss him, because he did not like to be kissed, and pushed them away. Then Molly was the only one who dared to resist him. “I may kiss him,” she would say proudly, as she threw her arms round his neck; she was vain of her power over Anthony, for he would submit quietly and think nothing of it. Molly was very charming, but rather bold; and how she did tease!

They said Lady Halle was beautiful, but her beauty was that of a tempting fiend. Saint Elizabeth, the patron saint of the land, the pious princess of Thuringia, whose good deeds have been immortalized in so many places through stories and legends, had greater beauty and more real grace. Her picture hung in the chapel, surrounded by silver lamps; but it did not in the least resemble Molly.

The apple tree, which the two children had planted, grew year after year, till it became so large that it had to be transplanted into the garden, where the dew fell and the sun shone warmly. And there it increased in strength so much as to be able to withstand the cold of winter; and after passing through the severe weather, it seemed to put forth its blossoms in spring for very joy that the cold season had gone. In autumn it produced two apples, one for Molly and one for Anthony; it could not well do less. The tree after this grew very rapidly, and Molly grew with the tree. She was as fresh as an apple-blossom, but Anthony was not to behold this flower for long. All things change: Molly’s father left his old home, and Molly went with him far away. In our time, it would be only a journey of a few hours, but then it took more than a day and a night to travel so far eastward from Eisenach to a town still called Weimar, on the borders of Thuringia. And Molly and Anthony both wept, but these tears all flowed together into one tear which had the rosy shimmer of joy. Molly had told him that she loved him—loved him more than all the splendours of Weimar.

One, two, three years went by, and during the whole time he received only two letters. One came by the carrier, and the other a traveller brought. The way was very long and difficult, with many turnings and windings through towns and villages. How often had Anthony and Molly heard the story of Tristan and Isolda, and Anthony had thought the story applied to him, although Tristan means born in sorrow, which Anthony certainly was not; nor was it likely he would ever say of Molly as Tristan said of Isolda, “She has forgotten me.” But in truth, Isolda had not forgotten him, her faithful friend; and when both were laid in their graves, one, on each side of the church, the linden trees that grew by each grave spread over the roof, and, bending towards each other, mingled their blossoms together. Anthony thought it a very beautiful but mournful story; yet he never feared anything so sad would happen to him and Molly, as he passed the spot, whistling the air of a song, composed by the minstrel Walter, called the “Willow bird,” beginning—

“Under the linden trees,

Out on the heath.”

One stanza pleased him exceedingly—

“Out in the wood, in the quiet dale,

Tandaradai!

Sang so sweetly the nightingale.”

This song was often in his mouth, and he sung or whistled it on a moonlight night, when he rode on horseback along the deep, hollow way, on his road to Weimar, to visit Molly. He wished to arrive unexpectedly, and so indeed he did. He was received with a hearty welcome, and introduced to plenty of grand and pleasant company, where overflowing wine cups were passed about. A pretty room and a good bed were provided for him, and yet his reception was not what he had expected and dreamed it would be. He understood neither himself nor his friends; but we can understand it easily! A person can be admitted into a house or a family without becoming one of them. We converse in company with those we meet, as we converse with our fellow-travellers on a journey; we know nothing of them, and perhaps all the while we are incommoding one another, and each is wishing himself or his neighbour away. Something of this kind Anthony felt when Molly talked to him of old times.

“I am a straightforward girl,” she said, “and I will tell you myself how it is. There have been great changes since we were children together; everything is different, both inwardly and outwardly. We cannot control our wills, nor the feelings of our hearts, by the force of custom. Anthony, I would not, for the world, make an enemy of you when I am far away. Believe me, I hold for you the kindest wishes in my heart; but to feel for you what I now know can be felt for another man, can never be. You must try and reconcile yourself to this. Farewell, Anthony.”

Anthony also said, “Farewell.” Not a tear came into his eye; he felt he was no longer Molly’s friend. Hot iron and cold iron alike take the skin from our lips, and we feel the same sensation if we kiss either; and Anthony’s kiss was now the kiss of hatred, as it had once been the kiss of love. Within four-and-twenty hours Anthony was back again to Eisenach, though the horse that he rode was entirely ruined.

“What does it matter?” said he; “I am ruined also. I will destroy everything that can remind me of her, or of Lady Halle, or Lady Venus, that heathen woman. I will break down the apple tree, and tear it up by the roots; never more shall it blossom or bear fruit.”

The apple tree was not broken down—Anthony himself broke down, and was confined to his bed with a fever. But something occurred to raise him up again. What was it? A medicine was offered to him, which he was obliged to take: a bitter remedy, at which the sick body and the oppressed spirit alike shuddered. Anthony’s father lost all his property, and, from being known as one of the richest merchants, he became very poor. Dark days, heavy trials, with poverty at the door, came rolling into the house upon them like the waves of the sea. Sorrow and suffering deprived Anthony’s father of his strength, so that he had something else to think of besides nursing his love-sorrows and his anger against Molly. He had to take his father’s place, to give orders, to act with energy, to help, and, at last, to go out into the world and earn his bread. Anthony went to Bremen, and there he learned what poverty and hard living really were. These things often harden the character, but sometimes soften the heart too much.

How different the world, and the people in it, appeared to Anthony now, to what he had thought in his childhood! What to him were the minstrel’s songs? An echo of the past, sounds long vanished. At times he would think in this way; yet again and again the songs would sound in his soul, and his heart become gentle again.

“God’s will is the best,” he would then say. “It was well that I was not allowed to keep my power over Molly’s heart, and that she did not remain true to me. What misery I should have felt now, when fortune has deserted me! She left me before she knew of the change in my circumstances, or had a thought of what was before me. That is a merciful providence for me. All has happened for the best. She was not to blame, and yet I have been so bitter, and in such enmity against her.”

Years passed by: Anthony’s father died, and strangers lived in the old house. He had seen it once again since then. His rich master sent him journeys on business, and on one occasion his way led him to his native town of Eisenach. The old Wartburg castle stood unchanged on the rock where the monk and the nun were hewn out of the stone. The great oaks formed an outline to the scene which he so well remembered in his childhood. The Venus mountain stood out grey and bare, overshadowing the valley beneath. He would have been glad to call out “Lady Halle, Lady Halle, unlock the mountain. I would fain remain here always in my native soil.”

That was a sinful thought, and he offered a prayer to drive it away. Then a little bird in the thicket sang out clearly, and old Anthony thought of the minstrel’s song.

“Out in the wood, in the quiet dale,

Tandaradai!

Sang so sweetly the nightingale.”

How much came back to his remembrance as he looked through the tears once more on his native town! The old house was still standing as in olden times, but the garden had been greatly altered; a pathway led through a portion of the ground, and outside the garden, and beyond the path, stood the old apple tree, which he had not broken down, although he talked of doing so in his trouble. The sun still threw its rays upon the tree, and the refreshing dew fell upon it as of old; and it was so overloaded with fruit that the branches bent towards the earth with the weight. “That flourishes still,” said he, as he gazed. One of the branches of the tree had, however, been broken: mischievous hands must have done this in passing, for the tree now stood in a public thoroughfare. “The blossoms are often plucked,” said Anthony; “the fruit is stolen and the branches broken without a thankful thought of their profusion and beauty. It might be said of a tree, as it has been said of some men—

At this tree’s cradle who could say

That such would be its fate one day?

How brightly began the history of this tree, and what is it now? Forsaken and forgotten, in a garden by a hedge in a field, and close to a public road. There it stands, unsheltered, plundered, and broken. It certainly has not yet withered; but every year the blossoms will be fewer, and of fruit there will soon be none—and then its history will be over.”

Such were Anthony’s thoughts as he stood under the tree, and during many a long night as he lay in his lonely chamber in the wooden house in Little House Street, Copenhagen, in the foreign land to which the rich merchant of Bremen, his employer, had sent him on condition that he should never marry. “Marry! ha, ha!” and he laughed bitterly to himself at the thought.

•  •  •

Winter one year set in early, and it was freezing hard. Without, a snowstorm made everyone remain at home who could do so. Thus it happened that Anthony’s neighbours, who lived opposite to him, did not notice that his house remained closed for two days, and that he had not showed himself during that time, for who would go out in such weather unless he were obliged to do so. They were grey, gloomy days, and in the house whose windows were not glass, twilight and dark nights reigned in turns. During these two days old Anthony had not left his bed, for he had not the strength to do so. The bitter weather had for some time affected his limbs. There lay the old bachelor, forsaken by all, and unable to help himself. He could scarcely reach the water jug that he had placed by his bed, and the last drop was gone. It was not fever, nor sickness, but old age, that had laid him low. In the little corner, where his bed lay, he was over-shadowed as it were by perpetual night. A little spider, unseen, unknown to him, busily and cheerfully spun its web above him, so that there should be a kind of little banner waving over the old man, when his eyes closed.

The time passed slowly and painfully. He had no tears to shed, and he felt no pain. No thought of Molly came into his mind. He felt as if the world was now nothing to him, as if he were lying beyond it, with no one to think of him. Now and then he felt slight sensations of hunger and thirst; but no one came to him, no one tended him. He thought of all those who had once suffered from starvation, of Saint Elizabeth, who once wandered on the earth, the saint of his home and his childhood, the noble Duchess of Thuringia, that highly esteemed lady who visited the poorest villages, bringing hope and relief to the sick inmates. The recollection of her pious deeds was as light to the soul of poor Anthony. He thought of her as she went about speaking words of comfort, binding up the wounds of the afflicted and feeding the hungry, although often blamed for it by her stern husband. He remembered a story told of her, that on one occasion, when she was carrying a basket full of wine and provisions, her husband, who had watched her footsteps, stepped forward and asked her angrily what she carried in her basket, whereupon, with fear and trembling, she answered, “Roses, which I have plucked from the garden.” Then he tore away the cloth which covered the basket, and what could equal the surprise of the pious woman, to find that by a miracle, everything in her basket—the wine, the bread—had all been changed into roses.

In this way the memory of the kind lady dwelt in the calm mind of Anthony. She was as a living reality in his little dwelling in the Danish land. He uncovered his face that he might look into her gentle eyes, while everything around him changed from its look of poverty and want, to a bright rose tint. The fragrance of roses spread through the room, mingled with the sweet smell of apples. He saw the branches of an apple tree spreading above him. It was the tree which he and Molly had planted together.

The fragrant leaves of the tree fell upon him and cooled his burning brow; upon his parched lips they seemed like refreshing bread and wine; and as they rested on his breast, a peaceful calm stole over him, and he felt inclined to sleep.

“I shall sleep now,” he whispered to himself. “Sleep will do me good. In the morning I shall be upon my feet again, strong and well. Glorious! wonderful! That apple tree, planted in love, now appears before me in heavenly beauty.” And he slept.

The following day, the third day during which his house had been closed, the snow-storm ceased. Then his opposite neighbour stepped over to the house in which old Anthony lived, for he had not yet showed himself. There he lay stretched on his bed, dead, with his old nightcap tightly clasped in his two hands. The nightcap, however, was not placed on his head in his coffin; he had a clean white one on then. Where now were the tears he had shed? What had become of those wonderful pearls? They were in the nightcap still. Such tears as these cannot be washed out, even when the nightcap is forgotten. The old thoughts and dreams of a bachelor’s nightcap still remain. Never wish for such a nightcap. It would make your forehead hot, cause your pulse to beat with agitation, and conjure up dreams which would appear realities.

The first who wore old Anthony’s cap felt the truth of this, though it was half a century afterwards. That man was the mayor himself, who had already made a comfortable home for his wife and eleven children, by his industry. The moment he put the cap on he dreamed of unfortunate love, of bankruptcy, and of dark days.

“Good heavens! how the nightcap burns!” he exclaimed, as he tore it from his bead. Then a pearl rolled out, and then another, and another, and they glittered and rattled as they fell.

“I must be suffering from gout,” said the burgomaster; “something glitters before my eyes!”

They were the tears which old Anthony had shed half a century before.

To everyone who afterwards put this cap on his head, came visions and dreams which agitated him not a little. His own history was changed into that of Anthony till it became quite a story, and many stories might be made by others, so we will leave them to relate their own. We have told the first; and our last word is, don’t wish for a “bachelor’s nightcap.”

[ 1858 ]

Under the Willow Tree

—

The country round the little town of Kjöge, in Zealand, is very bare. It is true that the town lies by the seashore, which is always beautiful, but still it might be more beautiful there than it really is: all around are flat fields, and it is a very long way to the forest. Still, when one is quite at home in a place, one can always find some attraction in it, for which one afterwards longs, even when in the most charming spot in the world. And we must freely confess that it looked very pretty in summer at the extreme edge of the little town, where a few humble gardens skirt the rivulet which flows into the sea there; this was also the opinion of two children who lived next to each other and played here, making their way through the gooseberry bushes to get to each other.

In one garden stood an elder tree, in the other an old willow, and it was especially under the latter that the children were very fond of playing; this they were allowed to do, although the willow stood near the rivulet and they might easily have fallen into the water. But the eye of God watches over the little ones——otherwise it would be a bad look-out for them. They were, however, very careful with regard to the water; in fact, the boy was so afraid of it that it was impossible in summertime to get him to go into the sea, in which the other children were very fond of splashing about. Accordingly, he was constantly being teased and laughed at, and had to bear it patiently. Once Johanna, the little girl who lived next door, dreamed that she was sailing in a boat and that Kanut waded out to her, so that the water first came up to his neck, then closed over his head, and that at last he disappeared altogether. From the moment when little Kanut heard of this dream, he would no longer bear the jeers of the other boys; for he was not afraid of going into the water now. Had not Johanna dreamed it? It is true that he never did it, but from that time the dream was his pride.

Their parents, who were poor people, often came together, and Kanut and Johanna played in the gardens and on the highroad, where, beside the ditch stood a row of willow trees, looking, it is true, far from beautiful with their polled tops, but then they were not there for ornament, but for use. The old willow in the garden was much finer, and under that the two children usually sat. In the little town itself there is a large market-place, and at the time of the annual fair this was covered with whole streets of tents and booths full of silk ribbons, boots, and all that one could wish for. There was a terrible crowd; and as it generally rained too, one could easily distinguish the odour of the peasants’ woollen jackets, mingled, however, with the more agreeable fragrance of honey-cakes and gingerbread, of which there was a booth full. The best of it all was that the man who sold the cakes always lived during fair-time with little Kanut’s parents, and there was generally a present of a piece of gingerbread now and then, of which Johanna, of course, got her share. But it was still more charming that the gingerbread dealer could tell tales about every possible thing, even about his gingerbread; indeed, one evening he told a story about it which made such a deep impression upon the children that they never forgot it, and therefore it is perhaps best that we should hear it too, especially as it is only a short one.

“On the counter,” he said, “lay two cakes of gingerbread, one in the shape of a man with a hat, the other in the shape of a young woman without a bonnet; both their faces were on the side that was turned uppermost, and they were to be looked at only on that side, and not on the other, for people should never be looked at from the wrong side. The man carried on his left side a bitter almond—that was his heart; the maiden, on the other hand, was all honey-cake. They both lay as samples on the counter, and lay there so long, that at last they fell in love with each other; but neither told the other, as they ought to have done, if they had wanted anything to come of it.

“‘He is a man—he ought to speak first,’ she thought, but would have been quite satisfied, if she had only known that her love was returned. His ideas were far more extravagant, as is always the case with men. He dreamed that he was a real street boy, that he possessed four pennies, and that he bought the young woman and ate her up.

“And so they lay for days and weeks upon the counter and got dry, the thoughts of the young woman growing more and more tender and womanly.

“‘It is enough for me that I have lain on the same counter with him,’ she thought, and—crack!—she broke right in two.

“‘If she had only known of my love, she would have held together a little longer,’ thought he.

“That is the story, and here they are both,” said the cake-seller. “They are remarkable for their history and for their silent love, which never led to anything. You may have them!” Then he gave Johanna the man, who was whole, and Kanut received the broken maiden; but the children were so affected by the story that they did not have the heart to eat the pair of lovers.

On the following day they took them into the churchyard, and sat down by the church wall, which is covered, summer and winter, with the most luxuriant ivy, as with a rich carpet. Here they stood the two gingerbread cakes between the green creepers in the sunshine, while they told a group of other children the story of the silent love which was so silly; that is to say, the love was silly, for of course the story was beautiful-—on that they were all agreed. But when they looked at the gingerbread pair again, a big boy, purely out of mischief, had eaten up the broken maiden. The children wept about it, and afterwards—probably in order that the poor lover should not remain in the world alone—they ate him up too; but they never forgot the story.

The two children were always together by the elder tree and under the willow, and the little girl sang the most beautiful songs with a voice as clear as a bell; Kanut, on the contrary, had not a note in him, but he knew the words, and that is at least something. The people of Kjöge, even to the wife of the fancy goods dealer, stood still and listened when Johanna sang. “What a very sweet voice the little girl has!” they would say.

Those were glorious days, but they did not last forever. The neighbours became separated. The little girl’s mother was dead, and her father intended to marry again—in the capital, too, where he had been promised a living somewhere as messenger, which post was said to be a very lucrative one. The neighbours parted in tears; that is to say, the children wept, but their parents promised to write to one another at least once a year.

Kanut was apprenticed to a shoemaker, for such a big boy could not be allowed to walk about idle any longer; and he was also confirmed.

Ah! how he would have liked to have been in Copenhagen with little Johanna on that joyous day, but he remained in Kjöge, and had never been to Copenhagen, although the capital is only five miles distant from the little town; but when the sky was clear Kanut had seen the towers of the city far away across the sea, and on his confirmation day he distinctly saw the golden cross on the church of the Virgin glittering in the sun.

How often his thoughts were with Johanna! Did she ever think of him? he wondered. Yes. Towards Christmas a letter came from her father to Kanut’s parents, saying that they were getting on very well in Copenhagen, and that Johanna might look forward to great fortune on account of her fine voice; she had been engaged to sing at the theatre, and was already earning a little money by that, out of which she sent her dear neighbours in Kjöge a whole dollar for a merry Christmas Eve; she had herself added in a postscript that they were to drink to her health, and in the same postscript was also written: “Kind regards to Kanut.”

The whole family wept, although the news was so pleasant; but they wept for joy. Johanna had occupied Kanut’s thoughts every day, and now he was convinced that she also thought of him, and the nearer the time came when he would finish his apprenticeship, the more clearly did it appear to him that he loved Johanna dearly and that she must be his wife. At these thoughts a smile would come over his face and he would draw the thread twice as fast and press his foot against the knee-strap; he ran the awl deep into his finger, but that was nothing. He certainly did not intend to play the silent lover, as the two gingerbread cakes had done; that story should be a good lesson for him.

Now he was a journeyman and his knapsack was packed; for the first time in his life, he was to go to Copenhagen, where he already had a master. How surprised and pleased Johanna would be! She was now seventeen years old—he nineteen.

He wanted to buy a gold ring for her before leaving Kjöge, but it occurred to him that much finer things of that kind could be bought in Copenhagen. So he took leave of his parents, and on a rainy day late in autumn he set out on foot from his native town; the leaves were falling from the trees, and he arrived in the great city at his new master’s, soaked through. He intended to pay his visit to Johanna’s father on the following Sunday. The new journeyman’s clothes were brought out and the new hat from Kjöge was put on; Kanut looked very well in it, having till that time always worn a cap. He found the house that he was looking for, and went up so many steps that it made him quite giddy to see how the people were piled on top of each other in the great city.

Everything in the room had a prosperous look, and Johanna’s father received him in a very friendly manner; to the wife he was of course a stranger, but she shook hands with him, and gave him some coffee.

“Johanna will be pleased to see you,” said the father; “you have indeed grown a very nice young man. Now you shall see her; she is a girl who causes me much pleasure, and with God’s help will do so still more. She has her own room, and pays us for it.” The father himself knocked politely at the door, as if he were a stranger, and then they went in.

And how pretty everything was in there! Such a little room was certainly not to be found in all Kjöge; the queen herself could not have a more charming one. There were carpets, there were window-curtains right down to the ground, and even a velvet chair, and all around flowers and pictures, and a mirror into which there was almost danger of stepping, for it was as large as a door. Kanut saw all this at a glance, and yet he saw only Johanna; she was a grown-up girl, and quite different from what Kanut had imagined her, but much more beautiful. In all Kjöge there was not a single maiden like her. How elegant she was, and how very strangely she looked at Kanut, but only for a moment, for the next she rushed towards him, as though she were about to kiss him! She certainly did not do so, but she was very near it.

Yes, she certainly rejoiced at the sight of her old playmate. There were actually tears in her eyes, and then she had much to ask and much to talk about, from Kanut’s parents down to the elder tree and the willow, which she called elder-mother and willow-father, as if they had been people too; there was indeed no reason why they should not pass off as such, as well as the gingerbread cakes. Of these she also spoke, and of their silent love, as they lay upon the counter and broke in two, and at that she laughed quite heartily; but the blood mounted up into Kanut’s cheeks and his heart beat quicker than ever. No, she was not proud at all. It was through her too—he saw that very well—that her parents invited him to spend the whole evening there; she poured out the tea and gave him a cup herself. Presently she took a book and read aloud, and it seemed to Kanut that the piece that she read was all about his love, so well did it fit in with his thoughts; then she sang a simple song, but it came from her lips like a story, and her own heart seemed to be overflowing with it. Yes, she was certainly fond of Kanut. The tears rolled down his cheeks—he could not help it, and he was unable to utter a single word; he appeared to himself as if he were struck dumb, and yet she pressed his hand and said: “You have a good heart, Kanut—always remain as you are.”

That was an evening without its like; to sleep after it was impossible—nor did Kanut do so.

At parting, Johanna’s father said: “Now, I hope you will not forget us altogether. You will not allow the whole winter to pass before coming to see us?” So he could very well go again on the following Sunday, and he intended to do so. But every evening, after working hours—and they worked by candle-light too—Kanut went into the town; he walked through the street in which Johanna lived, and looked up at her windows, which were almost always lit up. Once he plainly saw the shadow of her face on the curtain—that was a grand evening. His master’s wife did not like his roaming about every evening, as she called it, and she shook her head; but the master smiled, saying, “He is a young man.”

“We shall see each other on Sunday, and I will tell her how she fills my heart and thoughts, and that she must be my little wife. It is true I am only a poor journeyman shoemaker, but I may become a master. I will work and strive-yes, I will tell her so. Nothing comes of silent love; that I learned from the gingerbread cakes.” So thought Kanut.

Sunday came, and Kanut came, but how unfortunate it was! they were obliged to tell him that they were all invited out for that evening. Johanna pressed his hand and asked, “Have you been to the theatre? You must go there. I sing on Wednesday, and if you can get out on that day, I will send you a ticket. My father knows where your master lives.”

How kind it was of her! And on Wednesday afternoon he received a sealed envelope, without a word inside it, except the ticket; and in the evening Kanut went to the theatre for the first time in his life. And what did he see? Johanna, so beautiful and charming, married, it is true, to a strange man, but that was all play-acting—something that they pretended; that Kanut knew, otherwise she would not have had the heart to send him a ticket so that he might see it; and all the people clapped their hands and shouted, and Kanut also shouted “Hurrah!”

Even the King smiled at Johanna, as if he were pleased with her. Heavens! how small Kanut felt; but he loved her very tenderly, and she was also fond of him—that he knew; but the man must say the first word—even the gingerbread maiden had been of that opinion. Indeed there was a great deal in that story.

As soon as Sunday came he went again, feeling as though he were going to take the sacrament; Johanna was alone, and received him. So it could not have chanced more luckily.

“I am glad that you have come,” she said. “I was already thinking of sending my father to you, but I had an idea that you would come tonight; for I must tell you that I am going to France on Friday. I must, if I wish to do anything in the future.”

But it seemed to Kanut as if the room were turning round and round; he felt as though his heart was going to burst. It is true no tears came into his eyes, but one could plainly see how grieved he was. “Dear honest, faithful soul!” she said; and with that Kanut’s tongue was loosed, and he told her how dear she was to him, and that she must be his wife. While he uttered these words, he saw Johanna turn pale; she let go his hand and replied earnestly and sadly: “Do not make yourself and me unhappy, Kanut. I will always be a kind sister to you, upon whom you can rely; but no more than that.” And she passed her soft hand over his hot brow. “God gives us strength to bear much, if we but will it.”

At that moment her step-mother entered the room.

“Kanut is quite beside himself at my going away,” said Johanna. “Be a man;” and with that she laid her hand upon his shoulder. One would have thought that they had spoken only of the journey and of nothing else. “You are a child,” she continued; “but now you must be good and reasonable, as under the willow tree, when we were both children.”

But it seemed to Kanut as though the world were out of joint; his thoughts were like a loose thread, fluttering to and fro in the wind. He stayed, not knowing whether they had asked him to stay; but they were kind and good, and Johanna poured him out some tea, and sang. The songs did not have the old ring, but were still so infinitely beautiful, almost heartbreaking. At last Kanut went; he did not offer her his hand, but she took it, saying, “I suppose you will give your sister your hand at parting, my old playmate.” She smiled through the tears which were running down her cheeks, and repeated the word “Brother.” Yes, that was indeed a beautiful consolation. Such was their parting.

She sailed to France; Kanut walked about in the dirty streets of Copenhagen. His shopmates asked him why he went about looking so miserable, and told him that he, a young fellow, ought to go out and enjoy himself with them.

They went together to a dancing salon; there were many pretty girls, but none at all like Johanna, and here, where he had thought to forget her, she was most of all in his thoughts. “God gives us strength to bear much, if we but will it,” she had said, and a kind of devotion came over him. He folded his hands; the violins struck up, and the girls danced around in a circle. Suddenly he started; it seemed to him as if he were in a place where he ought not to have taken Johanna, for after all she was with him there in his heart. So he went out, walked about the streets, and went past the house where she had lived; all was dark there—it was dark, empty, and lonesome everywhere. The world went its way, and Kanut went his.

Winter came and the waters froze over; it seemed as if everything were preparing itself for burial.

But when spring returned, and the first steamer went out, a longing seized Kanut to go far out into the world, but not to France.

He buckled on his knapsack and wandered far into Germany, from town to town, knowing neither rest nor peace; only when he reached the beautiful old town of Nüremberg did he seem to become master again of his feet. He controlled himself sufficiently to stay there.

Nuremberg is a wonderful old town, looking as though it were cut out of an old picture-book. The streets run just as they them selves please, and the houses do not care about standing evenly in rows. Bow-windows and small turrets, scroll-work and statues project over the pavement, and high up from the roofs, gutters, in the form of dragons and long-legged dogs, run out into the middle of the street.

Here on the market-place Kanut stood with his knapsack on his back; he was standing near one of the old fountains with the beautiful biblical and historical figures which are to be seen between the sparkling jets of water. A pretty servant-maid was just getting some water, and gave Kanut a draught; having a handful of roses, she also gave him one, and this seemed to him to be a good omen.

From the neighbouring church the sound of the organ came out towards him; it sounded so homelike, that it seemed to come from the church at Kjöge, and he went into the great cathedral. The sun shone in between the tall slender pillars through the stained-glass windows; Kanut’s thoughts were filled with devotion, and a peaceful calm came over his soul.

He sought out a good master in Nüremberg, and stayed with him and learned the German language.

The old ditches round the town have been turned into small kitchen-gardens, but the high walls with their heavy towers are still standing. The ropemaker twists his rope on the wooden galleries along the inner side of the city wall, and here all around the elder grows up out of holes and crevices. It stretches its branches over the small lowly houses lying beneath, and in one of these lived the master with whom Kanut worked; the elder tree hung its branches over the little attic window at which the young man sat.

Here he passed a summer and a winter; but when spring came it was no longer to be borne. The elder blossomed, and its fragrance reminded him so of home that it seemed as if he were again in the gardens of Kjöge: so Kanut left his master for another who lived farther in the town, where no elder tree grew.

His workshop was near an old walled bridge, opposite an ever-splashing low water-mill; the rushing stream flowed past, hemmed in by houses which were all provided with old crumbling balconies. It looked as if the houses wanted to shake them all down into the water. Here no elder grew; here there was not even a flower-pot with a little green. But just opposite the workshop there stood a large old willow, which seemed to hold fast to the house for fear of being carried away by the water. It stretched its boughs out over the water, like the willow tree in the garden at Kjöge.

Yes, he had indeed removed from elder tree mother to willow-father; the tree here, especially on moonlight evenings, had something about it that went to his heart; it was, however, by no means the moonlight, but the old tree itself.

Anyhow, he could not bear it. Why not? Ask the willow tree, ask the blossoming elder. And so he bade his Nüremberg master good-bye and went farther.

He never spoke to anyone of Johanna, hiding his grief within him, and laying a deep significance upon the story of the two gingerbread cakes. Now he understood why the little man had had a bitter almond on his left side, for he himself had also a bitter taste there; and Johanna, who had always been so kind and friendly, she was honey-cake all over. It seemed as though the strap of his knapsack was so tight that he could hardly breathe; he loosened it, but it was no better than before. He saw only half the world around him; the other half he carried within him. That was how the matter stood.

It was only when he caught sight of the high mountains that his heart became lighter. Tears came into his eyes, and his thoughts turned towards the things about him.

The Alps seemed to him to be the folded wings of the earth; what if they should unfold themselves, these great pinions with their variegated pictures of dark forests, rushing torrents, clouds and masses of snow? On the last day the earth will lift up its great wings, soar up to heaven, and burst like a soap-bubble in the light that streams from the Throne. “Oh! would that it were the last day!” sighed Kanut.

Silently he wandered through the land that seemed to him like a grass-grown orchard. Pretty young lacemakers nodded to him from the wooden balconies of the houses, the mountain-tops glowed in the red sunset, and when he saw the green lakes, over shadowed by the dark trees, he thought of the coast in the bay of Kjöge, and his heart was filled with sadness, but not with pain.

And farther on he saw the Rhine rolling along like a great wave, dashing itself into foam, and, with the rainbow fluttering overhead like a loose ribbon, transforming itself into snow-white masses of clouds; it seemed to him as though this was the place where the clouds were made, and he thought of the water-mill at Kjöge, where the waters rush and foam.

He would gladly have remained here in the quiet town on the Rhine, but there were far too many elder and willow trees. He therefore proceeded farther, across the great lofty mountains, through the clefts in the precipices, and along paths which hung upon the sides of the rocks like swallows’ nests. The waters rushed along far beneath him, and the clouds lay at his feet; he marched along in the warm summer sun, over thistles, alpine roses and snow, saying farewell to the lands of the North, and entering the region of blossoming chestnut trees, vineyards, and fields of corn. The mountains formed a wall between him and all his recollections; and this was as it should be.

Before him lay a great magnificent city, called Milan, and here he found a German master, who gave him employment. The master and his wife were an old, pious couple, and they grew very fond of the quiet young journeyman, who spoke little, but worked the more, and who lived in such a pious and Christian way. It also seemed to him as though Heaven had taken the heavy burden from his heart.

His greatest pleasure was to occasionally ascend the mighty marble cathedral which seemed to him to be built of snow from his home, and shaped into images, tapering spires, and open halls adorned in many colours; from every corner, every spire and every niche the white statues smiled down upon him. Above him was the blue sky, beneath him lay the city and the far stretching green plains of Lombardy, and towards the north were the high mountains with their eternal snows. At such moments he would think of the church at Kjöge, with its red ivy-clad walls, but he did not wish himself away; here, behind the mountains, he would die and be buried.

He had lived in Milan a year, and three years had passed since he had left home. One day his master took him into the town, not to the circus to see the riding, but to the grand opera, and it was a building, too, worth seeing. The finest silken curtains hung down from seven balconies, and from the floor to the dizzy heights of the roof sat the grandest ladies with bouquets in their hands, as if they were going to a ball; the gentlemen were all in full dress, and many of them adorned with gold and silver. It was as light as in the brightest sunshine; the music was beautiful, and everything was much grander than in the theatre at Copenhagen, although Johanna was there. But surely it was magic! The curtain went up, and here she was too! Here was Johanna, all dressed in gold and silk, with a golden crown on her head. She sang as only an angel can sing, coming down to the footlights as far as she could.

She smiled as only Johanna could smile, and looked straight at Kanut.

The poor fellow seized his master’s hand and shouted “Johanna”; but no one else heard him, the music drowning everything. His master nodded, saying, “Yes, her name is Johanna;” and with that he took out a printed paper and showed Kanut her name, written out at length.

No, it was not a dream. Everyone applauded and threw flowers and wreaths to her, and every time that she went off, she was called back; she was continually going off and coming on.

In the street the people crowded round her carriage and drew it along; Kanut was among the foremost and shouted the most lustily. When they had reached her house, which was beautifully illuminated, he stood at the carriage door, which sprang open, and Johanna got out. The light fell upon her sweet face, and she, though deeply moved, smilingly returned her thanks in a kind, friendly way. Kanut looked her straight in the face, and she looked full into his, but she did not know him. A man, on whose breast sparkled a star, gave her his arm—they were betrothed, people said.

Then Kanut went home and packed his knapsack; he felt that he must get back to his native place, to the elder and the willow tree. Under that dear old willow tree!—A man may live a whole life in one single hour.

The old couple begged him to stay, but no words could keep him back. It was all in vain that they reminded him of the coming winter, and told him that snow had already fallen on the mountains; he would be able, he said, to get along, with his knapsack on his back and supported by his staff, in the track of the slow rolling wagons, for which a way would have to be made.

He marched along towards the mountains, and crossing them descended into the valley; though wearied, he saw neither village nor house, and continued his march northwards. The stars gleamed overhead, his knees gave way, and his head became dizzy; down in the valley stars shone forth too, and it seemed as if the sky were also beneath him. He felt ill; the stars below became more numerous, and grew brighter and brighter, moving to and fro. It was a little town in which lights were flickering, and when he comprehended this he exerted his failing strength and reached a miserable inn.

He remained there for the night and for the whole of the following day, for his body required rest and nourishment; it was thawing, and rain was falling in the valley. But early on the next morning a minstrel came into the village playing an air from Kanut’s home, and then it was impossible for him to tarry any longer. He continued his journey towards the north, marching for days and days with such haste as if he were anxious to get home before all were dead there; but to no one did he speak of his longing; no one would have believed in the sorrow of his heart, the deepest sorrow that can exist. Such grief is not for the world, it is not entertaining—not even for friends; and he had no friends—he was a stranger in the strange lands through which he was passing to his home in the north.

It was evening; he was walking along the public highroad. The frost was beginning to make itself felt, and the country was becoming more and more flat, with more fields and meadows. By the road stood a large willow tree; everything looked so very home-like that he sat down under it. He felt very tired, his head began to nod, and his eyes closed in slumber, but still he knew that the willow tree stretched its hanging branches out over him; the tree seemed to him to be an old mighty man. It seemed to be old willow-father himself, who took him up in his arms, and carried him, his tired son, back to the old homeland, to the open bleak shore of Kjöge, to the garden of his childhood’s days. It was indeed the willow tree itself, from Kjöge, which had wandered out in the world to seek him; now it had found him, and had led him back to the little garden by the brook, and here stood Johanna in her splendour, as he had last seen her, and crying out “Welcome” to him.

Before him stood two peculiar forms, although they seemed much more human than when he had seen them in his childhood, for they too had altered; they were the two gingerbread cakes, the man and the woman, turning their right side towards him and looking very well.

“Many thanks,” said they to Kanut. “You have loosened our tongues to freely express our thoughts, otherwise nothing would come of them, and now something has come of them: we are engaged.”

Then they went hand in hand through the streets of Kjöge and looked very respectable even on their wrong side—there was no fault to be found with them. They walked straight towards the church, Kanut and Johanna following; the latter also went hand in hand, and the church stood there just as ever, with its red walls, clad with green ivy. Both the great doors of the church flew open, the organ pealed forth, and they walked up the broad aisle.

“Our master first,” said the gingerbread bridal pair, making way for Kanut and Johanna, who knelt down at the altar; she bent her head over his face and icy-cold tears fell from her eyes. It was the ice round her heart melting by his strong love; the tears fell upon his burning cheeks and—awoke him, and he found himself sitting under the old willow tree, in a strange land, on a cold wintry evening. From the clouds fell icy hail and beat upon his face.

“That was the most beautiful hour of my life,” said he, “and it was—a dream. Oh God! let me dream again!” He closed his eyes once more; he slept and dreamed.

Towards morning snow fell. The wind blew it in drifts over him, but he slept on. The villagers going to church found a working lad sitting by the roadside. He was dead, frozen to death—under the willow tree.

[ 1853 ]

Golden Treasure

—

The drummer’s wife went into the church. She saw the new altar with the painted pictures and the carved angels. Those upon the canvas and in the glory over the altar were just as beautiful as the carved ones; and they were painted and gilt into the bargain. Their hair gleamed golden in the sunshine, lovely to behold; but the real sunshine was more beautiful still. It shone redder, clearer through the dark trees, when the sun went down. It was lovely thus to look at the sunshine of heaven. And she looked at the red sun, and she thought about it so deeply, and thought of the little one whom the stork was to bring, and the wife of the drummer was very cheerful, and looked and looked, and wished that the child might have a gleam of sunshine given to it, so that it might at least become like one of the shining angels over the altar.

And when she really had the little child in her arms, and held it up to its father, then it was like one of the angels in the church to behold, with hair like gold—the gleam of the setting sun was upon it.

“My golden treasure, my riches, my sunshine!” said the mother; and she kissed the shining locks, and it sounded like music and song in the room of the drummer; and there was joy, and life, and movement. The drummer beat a roll—a roll of joy. And the Drum said (the Fire-drum, that was beaten when there was a fire in the town):

“Red hair! the little fellow has red hair! Believe the drum, and not what your mother says! Rub-a dub, rub-a dub!”

And the town repeated what the Fire-drum had said.

•  •  •

The boy was taken to church, the boy was christened. There was nothing much to be said about his name; he was called Peter. The whole town, and the Drum too, called him “Peter, the drummer’s red-haired boy;” but his mother kissed his red hair, and called him her golden treasure.

In the hollow way in the clayey bank, many had scratched their names as a remembrance.

“Celebrity is always something!” said the drummer; and so he scratched his own name there, and his little son’s name likewise.

And the swallows came. They had, on their long journey, seen more durable characters engraved on rocks, and on the walls of the temples in India, mighty deeds of great kings, immortal names, so old that no one now could read or speak them. Remarkable celebrity!

In the clayey bank the martens built their nest. They bored holes in the deep slope; and the splashing rain and the thin mist came and crumbled and washed the names away, and the drummer’s name also, and that of his little son.

“At any rate, Peter’s name-was there for a year and a half,” said the father.

“Fool!” thought the Fire-drum; but it only said, “Dub, dub, dub, rub-a-dub!”

He was a boy full of life and gladness, this drummer’s son with the red hair. He had a lovely voice. He could sing, and he sang like a bird in the woodland. There was melody, and yet no melody.

“He must become a choir-boy,” said his mother. “He shall sing in the church, and stand among the beautiful gilded angels who are like him!”

“Choir-boy?” repeated the wits of the town. “Say rather fire-boy;” and the drum heard it.

“Don’t go home, Peter,” cried the street boys. “If you sleep in the garret, there’ll be a fire in the house, and the fire-drum will have to be beaten.”

“Look out for the drumsticks,” replied Peter; and, small as he was, he ran up boldly, and gave the foremost such a punch in the body with his fist, that the fellow lost his legs and tumbled over, and the others took their legs off with themselves very rapidly.

The town musician was very genteel and fine. He was the son of the royal plate-washer. He was very fond of Peter, and would sometimes take him to his home; and he gave him a violin, and taught him to play it. It seemed as if the whole art lay in the boy’s fingers; and he wanted to be more than a drummer—he wanted to become musician to the town.

“I’ll be a soldier,” said Peter; for he was still quite a little lad, and it seemed to him the finest thing in the world to carry a gun, and to be able to march one, two—one, two, and to wear a uniform and a sword.

“Ah, you learn to long for the drum-skin, drum, dum, dum!” said the Drum.

“Yes, if he could only march his way up to be a general!” observed his father; “but before he can do that, there must be war.”

“Heaven forbid!” said his mother.

“We have nothing to lose,” remarked the father.

“Yes, we have my boy to lose,” she retorted.

“But suppose he came back a general!” said the father.

“Without arms and legs!” cried the mother. “No, I would rather keep my golden treasure entire.”

“Drum, dum, dum!” The Fire-drum and all the other drums were beating, for war had come. The soldiers all set out, and the son of the drummer with them. “Red-head. Golden treasure!”

The mother wept; the father in imagination saw him “famous;” the town musician was of opinion that he ought not to go to war, but should stay at home and learn music.

•  •  •

“Red-tuft,” said the soldiers, and little Peter laughed; but when one of them sometimes said to another, “Foxey,” he would bite his teeth together and look another way—into the wide world. He did not care for the nickname.

The boy was active, pleasant of speech, and good-humoured; that is the best canteen, said his old comrades. Many a night he had to sleep under the open sky, wet through with the driving rain or the falling mist; but his good humour never failed him. The drum-sticks sounded, “Rub-a-dub, all up, all up!” Yes, he was certainly born to be a drummer.

The day of battle dawned. The sun had not yet risen, but the morning was come. The air was cold, the battle was hot; there was mist in the air, but still more gunpowder-smoke. The bullets and shells flew over the soldiers’ heads, and into their heads—into their bodies and limbs; but still they pressed forward. Here or there one or other of them would sink on his knees, with bleeding temples and a face as white as chalk. The little drummer still kept his healthy colour; he had suffered no damage; he looked cheerfully at the dog of the regiment, which was jumping along as merrily as if the whole thing had been got up for his amusement, and as if the bullets were only flying about that he might have a game of play with them.

“March! Forward! March!” This, was the word of command for the drum. The word had not yet been given to fall back, though they might have done so, and perhaps there would have been more sense in it; and now at last the word “Retreat” was given; but our little drummer beat “Forward! march!” for he had understood the command thus, and the soldiers obeyed the sound of the drum. That was a good roll, and proved the summons to victory for the men, who had already begun to give way.

Life and limb were lost in the battle. Bombshells tore away the flesh in red strips; bombshells lit up into a terrible glow the strawheaps to which the wounded had dragged themselves, to lie untended for many hours, perhaps for all the hours they had to live.

These are ill things to think upon. It’s no use thinking of them; and yet one cannot help thinking of them, even far away in the peaceful town. The drummer and his wife also thought of them, for Peter was in the war.

“Now, I’m tired of these complaints,” said the Fire-drum.

Again the day of battle dawned; the sun had not yet risen, but it was morning. The drummer and his wife were asleep. They had been talking about their son, as, indeed, they did almost every night, for he was out yonder in God’s hand. And the father dreamed that the war was over, that the soldiers had returned home, and that Peter wore a silver cross on his breast. But the mother dreamed that she had gone into the church, and had seen the painted pictures and the carved angels with the gilded hair, and her own dear boy, the golden treasure of her heart, who was standing among the angels in white robes, singing so sweetly, as surely only the angels can sing; and that he had soared up with them into the sunshine, and nodded so kindly at his mother.

“My golden treasure!” she cried out; and she awoke. “Now the good God has taken him to Himself!” She folded her hands, and hid her face in the cotton curtains of the bed, and wept. “Where does he rest now? among the many in the big grave that they have dug for the dead? Perhaps he’s in the water in the marsh! Nobody knows his grave; no holy words have been read over it!” And the Lord’s Prayer passed mutely through her mind, her head drooped in weariness, and she fell asleep.

•  •  •

Days slip away, now in waking hours, now in dreams.

It was evening. Over the battle-field a rainbow spread, which touched the forest and the deep marsh. It has been said, and is preserved in popular belief, that “where the rainbow touches the earth a treasure lies buried, a golden treasure;” and here there was one. No one thought of the little drummer-boy as his mother thought, and therefore she dreamed of him so. Not a hair of his head had been hurt, not a golden hair.

“Drum-a-drum—drum! see him come, see him come!” the Drum might have said, and his mother might have sung, if she had seen or dreamed it.

With hurrah and song, adorned with green wreaths of victory, they came home: the war was at an end, and peace had been signed. The dog of the regiment sprang on in front with large bounds, and made the way three times as long for himself as it really was.

And days and weeks went by, and Peter came into his parents’ room. He was as brown as a wild man of the woods, and his eyes were bright, and his face beamed like sunshine. And his mother held him in her arms; she kissed his lips, his forehead, and his red hair. She had her boy back again; he had not a silver cross on his breast, as his father had dreamed, but he had sound limbs, a thing the mother had not dreamed. And what a rejoicing was there! They laughed and they wept; and Peter embraced the old Fire-drum.

“There stands the old skeleton still!” he said.

And the father beat a roll upon it.

“One would think that a great fire had broken out here,” said the Fire-drum. “Bright day! fire in the heart! golden treasure! skrat! skr-r-at! skr-r-r-r-at!”

•  •  •

And what then? What then! Ask the town musician.

“Peter’s far outgrowing the drum,” he said. “Peter will be greater than I.”

And yet he was the son of a royal plate-washer; but all that he had learned in half a lifetime, Peter learned in half a year.

There was something so merry about him, something so truly kind-hearted. His eyes gleamed, and his hair gleamed too—there was no denying that!

“He ought to have his hair dyed,” said the neighbour’s wife. “That answered well for the policeman’s daughter, she was betrothed immediately.”

“But her hair turned as green as duckweed afterward, and she has had to dye it again, ever so many times.”

“She knows how to manage for herself,” said the neighbours, “and so can Peter. He comes to the most genteel houses, even to the burgomaster’s, where he gives Miss Charlotte piano lessons.”

He could play! He could play, fresh out of his heart, the most charming pieces, that had never been put upon music-paper. He played in the bright nights, and in the dark nights, too. The neighbours declared it was unbearable, and the Fire-drum was of the same opinion.

He played until his thoughts soared up, and burst forth in great plans for the future:

“To be famous!”

And burgomaster’s Charlotte sat at the piano. Her delicate fingers danced over the keys, and made them ring into Peter’s heart. It seemed too much for him to bear; and this happened not once, but many times; and at last one day he seized the delicate fingers and the white hand, and kissed it, and looked into her great brown eyes. Heaven knows what he said; but we may be allowed to guess at it. Charlotte blushed to guess at it. She reddened from brow to neck, and answered not a single word; and then strangers came into the room, and one of them was the state councillor’s son. He had a lofty white forehead, and carried it so high that it seemed to reach back to his neck. And Peter sat by her a long time, and she looked at him with gentle eyes.

At home that evening he spoke of travel in the wide world, and of the golden treasure that lay hidden for him in his violin.

“To be famous!”

“Tum-me-lum, tum-me-lum, tum-me-lum!” said the old Fire-drum in the corner. “So Peter has gone mad; the house is on fire, methinks.”

Next day the mother went to market.

“Shall I tell you news, Peter?” she asked when she came home. “A capital piece of news. Burgomaster’s Charlotte has engaged herself to the state councillor’s son; the betrothal took place yesterday evening.”

“No!” cried Peter, and he sprang up from his chair. But his mother persisted in saying “Yes.” She had heard it from the baker’s wife, whose husband had it from the burgomaster’s own mouth.

And Peter became as pale as death, and sat down again.

“Good Heaven! what’s the matter with you?” asked his mother.

“Nothing, nothing; only leave me to myself,” he answered but the tears were running down his cheeks.

“My sweet child, my golden treasure!” cried the mother, and she wept; but the Fire-drum sang, not out loud, but inwardly.

“Charlotte’s gone! Charlotte’s gone! and now the song is done.”

•  •  •

But the song was not done; there were many more verses in it, long verses, the most beautiful verses, the golden treasures of a life.

“She behaves like a madwoman,” said the neighbour’s wife. “All the world must see the letters she gets from her golden treasure, and to read the words that are written in the papers about his violin playing. And he sends her money too, and that’s very useful to her now she has become a widow.”

“He plays before emperors and kings,” said the town musician. “I never had that fortune, but he’s my pupil, and he will not forget his old master.”

And his mother said, “His father dreamed that Peter came home from the war with a silver cross. He did not gain one in the war, but it is still more difficult to gain one in this way. Now he has the cross of honour. If his father had only lived to see it!”

“He’s grown famous!” said the old Fire-drum, and all his native town said the same thing, for the drummer’s son, Peter with the red hair—Peter whom they had known as a little boy, running about in wooden shoes, and then as a drummer, playing for the dancers—had become famous!

“He played at our house before he played in the presence of kings,” said the burgomaster’s wife. “At that time he was quite smitten with Charlotte. He was always of an aspiring turn. At that time he was saucy and an enthusiast. My husband laughed when he heard of the foolish affair, and now our Charlotte is a state councillor’s wife.”

A golden treasure had been hidden in the heart and soul of the poor child, who had beaten the roll as a drummer—a roll of victory for those who had been ready to retreat. There was a golden treasure in his bosom, the power of music; it burst forth on his violin as if the instrument had been a complete organ, and as if all the elves of a midsummer night were dancing across the strings. In its sounds were heard the piping of the thrush and the full clear note of the human voice; the sound brought rapture to every heart, and carried his name triumphant through the land. That was a great firebrand—the firebrand of inspiration.

“And then he looks so splendid!” said the young ladies and the old ladies too; and the oldest of all procured an album for famous locks of hair, wholly and solely that she might beg a lock of his rich splendid hair, that treasure, that golden treasure.

And the son came into the poor room of the drummer, elegant as a prince, happier than a king. His eyes were as clear and his face was as radiant as sunshine; and he held his mother in his arms, and she kissed him, and wept as blissfully as anyone can weep for joy; and he he greeted as old friends every piece of furniture in the room, at the cupboard with the tea-cups, and at the flower-vase. He nodded to the sleeping-bench, where he had slept as a little boy; but the old Fire-drum he brought out, and dragged it into the middle of the room, and said to it and to his mother:

“My father would have beaten a famous roll this evening. Now I must do it!”

And he beat a thundering roll-call on the instrument, and the Drum felt so highly honoured that the parchment burst with exultation.

“Well! he has a fist!” quoth the old Drum to itself. “Now I shall always keep a souvenir of him! I expect that mother, too, will burst for joy over her Golden Treasure!”

And this is the story of the Golden Treasure.

[ 1865 ]

The Porter’s Son

—

The General’s family lived on the drawing-room floor, the Porter’s lived in the cellar. There was a great distance between the two families—the whole ground-floor, and the difference in rank—but both lived under the same roof, and their windows looked out upon the street and the same yard. In this yard there was a blooming acacia—whenever it did bloom; and the smartly-dressed nurse used to sit under it with the still more smartly-dressed child, the General’s “Little Emily.” The Porter’s little boy, with his large brown eyes and dark hair, used to dance barefoot before them; and the child would laugh at him, and stretch her tiny hands to him; and if the General saw this from his window, he would nod down at them, and say, “Charmant!” The General’s lady, who was so young that she might almost have been her husband’s daughter by an early marriage, never herself looked out of the window into the yard; but she had given orders that the cellar-people’s boy might play and amuse her child, but never touch her. The nurse kept strictly to her ladyship’s orders.

And the sun shone in upon those on the drawing-room floor, and upon those in the cellar. The acacia put forth its blossoms; they fell off, and new ones came again next year. The tree bloomed, and the Porter’s little boy bloomed; he looked quite like a fresh tulip.

The General’s little daughter grew a delicate child, like the faint rosy petal of the acacia blossom. She seldom came now under the tree; she took her fresh air in a carriage. She went with mamma for her drives, and she always nodded to the Porter’s George; aye, and kissed her fingers at him, till her mother told her that she was now grown too big for that.

One forenoon he had to go up to the General’s floor with the letters and newspapers which had been left at the Porter’s lodge in the morning. When he had mounted the staircase, and was passing the door of the sand-bin, he heard something wailing inside it. He thought it was a stray chick peeping to get out; and lo! it was the General’s little daughter, decked out in muslin and lace!

“Don’t tell papa, and mamma; they will be so angry!”

“What is the matter, little lady?” asked George.

“It’s burning all over!” said she; “it’s burning and blazing!”

George opened the door to the little nursery; the window curtain was nearly burned: the curtain-rod had caught fire, and stood in flames. George sprang up, pulled it down, and called for help; without him there would have been a house on fire.

The General and her ladyship examined little Emily.

“I only just took one match,” said she, “and that lighted up, and then the curtain lighted up. I spit all I could, but it was no good, and so I came out and hid myself, for papa and mamma would be so angry.”

“Spit!” said the General; “what sort of word is that? When did you ever hear papa or mamma talk of spitting? That you have learned downstairs.”

But little George got a penny-piece. It did not go to the bun-shop, but into the savings-box; and there were soon so many pennies that he could buy himself a paint-box, and put colour to his drawings; and of these he had many: they seemed to come out of his pencil and his finger-ends. The first coloured pictures were presented to little Emily.

“Charmant!” said the General. Her ladyship herself admitted that one could see clearly enough what the little one meant in his pictures. “There’s genius in him!”

Such were the words which the Porter’s wife brought down into the cellar.

The General and his lady were people of rank: they had two coats of arms on their carriage, one for each of them. Her ladyship had hers worked on every bit of clothing inside and out, on her nightcap, and on her night-bag. This, her own shield, was a costly one, bought by her father for shining dollars; for he had not been born with it, no, nor she either—she had come into the world prematurely, seven years before the coat of arms; a fact that was remembered by most people, though not by the family. The General’s shield was old and large; one’s back might well creak with the dignity of this alone, to say nothing of two shields; and there was a creaking in the back of her ladyship, when, stiff and stately, she drove to the court-ball.

The General was old and grey, but sat well on horseback; he was quite aware of it, and rode out every day, with a groom at a respectful distance behind him. When he came to a party, it was just as if he came riding in on his high horse, and he wore medals enough to bewilder one; but that was not by any means his fault. As a very young man he had performed military duties, by taking a part in the great autumnal reviews, which used to be held in the piping days of peace. Of that time he had an anecdote to tell, the only one he had. His subaltern cut off and took one of the princes prisoner; and the Prince with his little troop of soldiers, prisoners like himself, had to ride back to town behind the General. It was an event never to be forgotten, and the General told and retold it, year after year, always ending with the remarkable words which he had spoken when he returned the Prince’s sabre to him: “Only my subaltern could have made your Royal Highness a prisoner, I myself—never!” and the Prince had answered: “Monsieur, you are incomparable!”

The General had never been in active service; for when the war went through his native land, he went on the diplomatic road, through three foreign countries. He talked the French language till he almost forgot his own; he danced well, he rode well, orders grew on his coat in indescribable profusion, the sentinels presented arms to him, one of the prettiest of girls presented herself to him—and she became the General’s lady; and they had a pretty babe that seemed to have fallen from the sky, she was so pretty; and the Porter’s son danced in the yard before her as soon as she could take notice, and gave her all his coloured drawings; and she looked at them, and was delighted with them, and tore them to pieces. She was such a dear sweet little thing!

“My rose-petal!” said the General’s lady, “you are born to be a prince’s bride!”

The Prince was already standing outside the door, though nobody knew of it. People cannot see much further than the doorstep.

“T’other day our George shared his bread and butter with her, that he did!” said the Porter’s wife. “There was no cheese, nor yet meat with it; yet she relished it every bit as well as roast beef. There’d have been a fine to-do if certain folks had seen the little feast; but they didn’t see it.”

George had shared bread and butter with little Emily; gladly would he have shared his heart with her. He was a a good boy, clever and sprightly; and he now went to the evening school at the Academy in order to learn drawing thoroughly. Little Emily, too, made some progress in learning: she talked French with her nurse, and had a dancing-master.

•  •  •

“George is to be confirmed at Easter,” said the Porter’s wife. So far advanced George was now.

“It wouldn’t be amiss either to have him apprenticed,” said the father, “to something tidy, of course; and so we shall get him out in the world.”

“He would come home, though, to sleep at nights,” said he mother. “It wouldn’t be easy to find a master with a spare room. Clothes, too, we should have to give him: the bit of food he now eats is easily come at, he can make himself happy with a couple of baked potatoes; and he has his teaching free. Just let him go his own way, and he’ll turn out a blessing to us, you may be sure! Didn’t the Professor say so?”

The confirmation clothes were ready. Mother herself did the sewing, but they had been cut out by the jobbing tailor, and he knew how to cut well: if he’d only been better placed, and could have opened a shop and taken apprentices, said the Porter’s wife, the man might have become court-tailor.

The clothes were ready, and the candidate was ready. On the confirmation day George received a large pinchbeck watch from his godfather, the flax-dealer’s old shopman, the richest of George’s godfathers. The watch was old and well-tried: it always went too fast, but that is better than going too slow. This was a splendid present; and from the General’s came a hymn-book bound in morocco leather, sent by the little lady to whom George had presented his pictures. On the fly-leaf stood his name and her name, and “his gracious well-wisher.” This was written after the dictation of the General’s lady, and the General had read it through, and said, “Charmant!”

“That was really a great attention from such grand gentlefolk,” said the Porter’s wife; and George had to go upstairs in his confirmation clothes, and with his hymn-book, to show himself and return thanks.

Her ladyship sat in a number of wrappings, and she had one of her bad headaches, which always came when she felt tired of things. She looked kindly at George, and wished him everything that was good, and none of her headache. The General was in his dressing-gown, and wore a tasselled cap, and Russian boots with red tops. He paced up and down the floor three times, in thoughts and remembrances of his own, stopped still, and said:

“Little George, then, is now a Christian man! Let him be likewise an honest man, and pay due respect to his superiors! Someday, when you are old, you can say that the General taught you this precept.”

This was a longer speech than the General was accustomed to make; and he fell back into meditation, and looked imposing. But of all that George heard or saw up there, nothing remained fixed in his memory so clearly as little Miss Emily. How winning she looked, how soft, how fluttering, how fragile! If her portrait was to be painted, it must be in a soap-bubble. There was a fragrance about her clothes and her curly yellow hair as if she were a fresh-blossomed rose-tree. And with her he had once shared bread and butter; and she had eaten it with a sharp appetite, and nodded to him at every mouthful. Could she possibly recollect it still? Surely yes; it was “in remembrance” of this that she had given him the handsome hymn-book. And so, next year, as soon as the New Year’s new moon was shining, he went out of doors with a loaf of bread and a penny in his hand, and opened the book to see what hymn he should turn up. It was a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. Then he opened it again to see what would turn up for little Emily. He was mightily careful not to dip into one part of the book—the place of the funeral hymns; and yet, for all his care, he did dip in between death and the grave. This was not the sort of thing to believe in; not a bit of it! and yet frightened he was, when soon afterwards the dainty little girl was laid up in bed, and when the hall door was visited daily by the doctor’s carriage.

“They’ll not keep her,” said the Porter’s wife; “our Lord knows right well whom He will take to himself.”

But they did keep her, and George drew pictures to send her. He drew the castle of the Czar, the old Kremlin at Moscow, exactly as it stood, with turrets and cupolas: they looked like gigantic green and gilt cucumbers—at least, they looked so in George’s drawing. It pleased little Emily so much, that in the course of the week George sent some more pictures, all of them buildings; for then she would have plenty to think about, wondering what was inside the door and the windows.

He drew a Chinese house, with bells hanging from each of the sixteen storeys. He drew two Greek temples, with slender marble pillars and steps all round them. He drew a Norwegian church; one could see it was entirely built of timbers, deeply carved and quaintly set up; every story looked as if it had cradle-rockers. But most beautiful of all was one design, a castle, which he called “Little Emily’s.” This was to be her dwelling-place, and so George had imagined it all himself, and picked out for it whatever seemed prettiest in each of the other buildings. It had carved beams, like the Norwegian church; marble pillars, like the Greek temples; a peal of bells on every story; and at the top of all, cupolas, green and gilded, like those upon the Kremlin of the Czar. It was a true child’s palace! And under every window was written what the hall or chamber was intended for: “Here Emily sleeps:” “Here Emily dances:” and “Here she is to play at ‘visitors coming.’” It was amusing to look at, and looked at it was, you may be sure.

“Charmant!” said the General.

But the old Count—for there was an old Count, who was even grander than the General, and had a castle and mansion of his own—said nothing. He had been told that this had been imagined and drawn by the Porter’s little son. Not that the boy was so very little now; indeed, he was confirmed. The old Count looked at the pictures, and had his own quiet thoughts about them.

One morning, when the weather was downright grey, damp and dismal, it proved one of the brightest and best of days for little George. The Professor at the Art Academy called him into his private room.

“Listen, my lad,” said he; “let us have a little talk together. Our Lord has favoured you with good abilities; he is now favouring you with good friends. The old Count at the corner house has spoken to me about you. I have seen your pictures also; between ourselves, we may cross them out, they require so much correction. But henceforward you may come twice a week to my drawing-school, and so learn in time to do better. I believe there is more stuff in you to make an architect than a painter. This you will have time to consider; but go up at once to the old Count at the corner house, and give thanks to our Lord for such a friend.

It was a fine mansion, that corner house: round the windows were carved elephants and dromedaries, all from olden times; but the old Count was fondest of the modern time, and whatever good it brought, whether out of drawing-room, or the cellar, or the garret.

“I do think,” said the Porter’s wife, “that the more folks are really grand, the less they are stuck up. You should see the old Count, ever so sweet and affable! and he can talk, bless you, just like you and me—you won’t find that at the General’s. There was George yesterday, clean upside down with delight, the Count treated him so graciously; and I am much the same today, after getting a talk with the great man. Wasn’t it lucky now, that we didn’t ’prentice George to a trade? The boy has good parts in him.”

“But they must have help from outside,” said the father.

“Well, and now he has got help,” said the mother. “The Count spoke out, plain and straightforward, that he did.”

“It was at the General’s though, that it was all set going,” said the father: “they must have their turn of thanks, too.”

“They may have it, and welcome,” said the mother; “yet there’s not overmuch to thank them for, I reckon. I’ll thank our Lord above all, and thank Him all the more, now that little Emily is coming round again.”

Emily kept getting on, and George kept getting on; in the course of the year he won, first the small silver medal, and then the great one.

•  •  •

“It would have been better, after all, to have ’prenticed him!” said the Porter’s wife, in tears; “we should have kept him here, then. What does he want in Rome? Never more shall I set eyes on him, even if he ever comes home again; and that he won’t do, poor dear child!”

“But it’s for his own good and glory,” said the father.

“Ah! it’s all very fine talking, my good man,” said the mother, “but you don’t mean what you say. You are just as downhearted as I am.”

And it was all true, both as to the grief and the going away. It was a grand piece of luck for the young man, said the neighbours.

And there was a round of leave-taking, including the General’s. Her ladyship did not appear; she had her bad headache. The General at parting related his only anecdote—what he had said to the Prince, and how the Prince had said to him, “Monsieur, you are incomparable!” and then he gave George his hand—his slack old hand.

Emily, too, gave George her hand, and looked almost dismal; but there was no one so dismal as George.

Time goes on. Whether one is busy or idle, Time is equally long, though not equally profitable. To George it was profitable, and never seemed long, except when he thought of those at home: how were they getting on, upstairs and downstairs? Well, tidings were sent of them: and so much may be wrapped up in a letter—both the bright sunshine and the gloomy shade. The shade of death lay in the letter, that told him his mother was left a lonesome widow. Emily had been an angel of comfort: “she had come down below, she had,” wrote mother. As for herself, she added, she had got leave to take father’s post at the Porter’s lodge.

•  •  •

The General’s lady kept a diary: every ball was entered in it, every party she had been to, and every visit she had received. The volume was illustrated with cards of diplomatists, and other grandees. She was proud of her diary; it increased in growth, season after season, during many great headaches, but also during many bright nights—that is to say, court balls.

•  •  •

Emily had now been to her first court-ball. The mother was in pink, with black lace—Spanish! The daughter was in white, so clear, so fine! green ribbons fluttered, like bulrush leaves, in her curly yellow locks, and she was crowned with a wreath of white water-lilies. With her sparkling blue eyes, and soft, rosy lips, she resembled a little mermaid, as beautiful as one could imagine. Three princes danced with her, one after another. Her ladyship had no headache for a whole week.

But the first ball was not the last. It was getting too much for Emily; and so it was well that summer came, with rest and change of air. The family was invited to the castle of the old Count.

This castle had a garden worth seeing. One part of it was quite in the old style, with stiff, green alleys, where one seemed to be walking between tall green screens, pierced with peep-holes; box trees and yew trees stood clipped into stars and pyramids; water sprang from great grottoes, set with cockleshells; stone figures stood all round about, of the very heaviest stone, as one could plainly perceive by the faces and draperies; every flower-bed had its own device—such as a fish, a heraldic shield, or a monogram: this was the French part of the garden. From this part one came out, as it were, into the fresh wild-wood, where the trees could grow as they pleased, and were therefore great and splendid. There was a green turf, inviting one’s feet to tread on it, well-mown, well rolled, and well-kept altogether. This was the English part of the garden.

“Olden times and modern times!” said the Count: “here they meet with loving embraces. In about two years that house itself will assume its proper importance. It will undergo a perfect change into something handsomer and better. I will show you the plans, and I will show you the architect—he is coming here to dinner.”

“Charmant!” said the general.

“This garden is paradisical!” said her ladyship; “and yonder you have a baronial castle.”

“That is my hen-house,” said the Count; “the pigeons live in the tower, the turkeys on the first floor, but on the ground floor old Dame Else reigns. She has spare rooms on all sides: this for the sitting hen, that for the hen and chickens, while the ducks have their own outlet to the water.”

“Charmant!” repeated the General, and they all went to see the fine show.

Old Else stood in the middle of the parlour, and beside her stood the architect—George! He and little Emily met—after so many years—met in the hen-house.

Aye, there he stood a comely figure to look at: his countenance open and determined, his hair black and glossy, and his mouth with a smile that said, “There is a little rogue behind my ear, that knows you outside and inside!” Old Else had taken off her wooden shoes and stood in her stockings out of respect for her illustrious visitors. The hens clucked, the cock crowed, and the ducks waddled along, rap, rap. But the pale slender girl, the friend of his childhood, the General’s daughter, stood before him; her pale cheeks flushing like the rose, her eyes opening eagerly, and her mouth speaking without uttering a syllable. Such was the greeting he received; the prettiest that any young man could desire from a young lady; unless, indeed, they were of the same family, or had often danced together; but these two had never danced together.

The Count grasped his hand and presented him, saying, “Not a complete stranger, our young friend, Mr. George.”

Her ladyship curtseyed; her daughter was about to give him her hand, but she did not give it him.

“Our little Mr. George!” said the General. “Old house-friends: Charmant! ”

“You have grown to be quite an Italian,” said her ladyship, “and you speak the language, no doubt, like a native.”

Her ladyship could sing Italian, but not speak it, added the General.

At the dinner-table George sat at Emily’s right hand. The General had led her in; and the Count had led in her ladyship.

George talked, and told anecdotes, and he could tell them well. He was the life and soul of the party; though the old Count could have been so too, if it had suited him. Emily sat silent; her ears listened, her eyes shone, but she said nothing,

They stood, she and George, among the flowers in the veranda behind a screen of roses. It was left to George again to begin speaking.

“Thanks for your kindness to my mother,” said he; “I know that, on the night of my father’s death, you went down and stayed with her, till his eyes were closed. Thanks!” He raised Emily’s hand, and kissed it; he might fairly do so on that occasion. She blushed rosy-red; but pressed his hand in return, and looked at him with her tender blue eyes.

“Your mother was a loving soul; how fond she was of you! All your letters she brought me to read, so I seem almost to know you. I remember too, when I was little, how kind you were to me. You gave me pictures—”

“Which you tore in pieces,” said George.

“Nay, I have still my own castle left—that drawing of it.’

“And now I must build it in reality!” said George, and grew quite hot himself as he said it.

The General and his lady, in their own rooms, talked about the Porter’s son. Why, he could express himself with knowledge, with refinement! “He is fit to be engaged as a tutor,” said the General.

“Genius!” said her ladyship; and that was all she said.

•  •  •

Again and again, in those fine summer days, George came to the castle of the Count. He was missed when he did not come.

“How much more God has given to you than to us ordinary mortals!” said Emily to him. “Are you grateful for that now?”

It flattered George, that this fair young girl should look up to him, and he thought she had rare powers of appreciation.

And the General felt more and more convinced that Mr. George could hardly be a genuine child of the cellar. “However, the mother was a right honest woman,” said he; “I owe that to her memory.”

Summer went; winter came; and there was more to tell about Mr. George. He had received notice and favour in the highest of high places. The General had met him at a court ball.

And now there was to be a ball at home, for little Emily. Could Mr. George be invited?

“Whom the King invites, the General can invite,” said the General, and drew himself up a good inch higher.

Mr. George was invited, and he came. And princes and counts came, and each danced better than the other. But Emily danced only the first dance, for in the course of it she sprained her ankle, not badly, but enough to give her pain; and so she had to be prudent, and stop dancing, and watch the others. And there she sat, looking on, while the architect stood by her side.

“You are giving her the whole of St. Peter’s at Rome,” said the General, as he passed, smiling like benevolence itself.

With the same smile of benevolence he received Mr. George a few days afterward. The young man came to thank him for the ball, of course. Was there anything else to say? Yes, indeed, astounding—amazing—raving madness, that was all! The General could scarcely believe his own ears. A “pyramidal declamation!” an unheard-of proposition! Mr. George asked for little Emily as his wife!

“Man!” said the General, and he began to boil, “I cannot understand you! What is it you say? What is it you want? I don’t know you. Sir! Fellow! you choose to come and break into my house! am I to stay here, or am I not?” And he backed out into his bedroom, and locked the door. George stood alone for a few moments, and then turned on his heel. In the corridor he met Emily.

“My father answered—?” she asked, with a trembling voice.

George pressed her hand. “He ran away from me—a better time will come.”

There were tears in Emily’s eyes; in those of the young man were courage and confidence; and the sun shone in upon them both and blessed them.

In his bedroom sat the General boiling more and more, boiling over, and sputtering out “Lunacy! Porter-madness!”

Before an hour was past, the General’s lady learned it all from the General’s own mouth, and she called for Emily, and sat alone with her.

“Poor girl,” she said; “to think of his insulting you so, insulting us all! You have tears in your eyes, I see: they are quite becoming to you. You look charming in tears. You remind me of myself on my wedding-day. Weep on, little Emily.”

“That I must, indeed!” said Emily, “unless you and papa say ‘Yes!’”

“Child,” cried her ladyship, “you are ill! you are delirious! and I am getting my dreadful headache! Oh, the miseries that are coming down upon our house! Do not be the death of your mother, Emily; then you will have no mother.”

And her ladyship’s eyes were wet: she could not bear to think of her own death.

•  •  •

Among other announcements in the Gazette might be seen: “Mr. George, appointed Professor, 5th class, No. 8.”

“What a pity his father and mother are in the grave, and can’t read it!” said the new porter folks, who now lived in the cellar under the General. They knew that the Professor had been born and bred within the four walls.

“Now he’ll come in for the title-tax!” said the man.

“Well, it’s no such mighty matter for a poor child!” said the wife.

“Eighteen dollars a year!” said the man. “I call it a good round sum.”

“No, no; it’s the title I’m talking of!’ said the wife, “You don’t suppose he’ll be bothered by having the tax to pay? He can earn as much over and over again, and a rich wife into the bargain. If we had little ones, husband, a child of ours, too, would someday be architect and professor.”

Thus George was well-mentioned in the cellar, and he was well-mentioned on the drawing-room floor: the old Count took good care of that.

It was the old set of childish picture-drawings that introduced his name. But how came these to be mentioned? Why, the talk turned upon Russia, upon Moscow: and thus one was led right up to the Kremlin, of which our friend George made a drawing once, when he was little, for the little Miss Emily. What a number of pictures he used to draw! One the Count especially remembered—“Little Emily’s Castle,” with scrolls showing where she slept, where she danced, and where she played at “Visitors coming.” The Professor had great ability. He might live to be an old veteran privy counsellor—that was not at all improbable: aye, and build a real castle for the young lady before he died—why not?

“That was a strange flight of fancy,” remarked the General’s lady, when the Count was gone. The General nodded his head thoughtfully, and went out riding, with his groom at a respectful distance behind him, and he sat prouder than ever on his high horse.

Little Emily’s birthday came, bringing cards and notes, books and flowers. The General kissed her on the brow, and her ladyship kissed her on the lips. They were models of parental affection; and they were all three honoured with high visitors—two of the princes. Then there was talk about balls and theatres, about diplomatic embassies, and the government of kingdoms and empires. There was talk about rising men, about native talent; and this brought up the name of the young professor, Mr. George, the architect.

“He is building for immortality!” it was said; “meanwhile he is building himself into one of the first families.”

“One of the first families!’: repeated the General, when he was left alone with her ladyship: “which one of our first families?’

“I can guess which was alluded to,” said her ladyship; “but I will not speak, nor even think of it. God may ordain it so, but I shall be quite astounded!’:

“Astounded!” echoed the General. “Look at me; I haven’t a single idea in my head!” and he sank into a reverie, waiting for thoughts to come.

There is an unspeakable power bestowed on a man by a few dew-drops of grace—grace from above—whether the grace of kings, or the grace of God; and both of these combined in favour of little George.

But we are forgetting the birthday.

Emily’s chamber was fragrant with flowers, sent by her friends and playmates: on her table lay fine presents, tokens of greeting and remembrance; but not one from George. Gifts from him would not have reached her, but they were not needed; the whole house was a remembrance of him. From the very sand-bin under the stairs peeped a memorial flower, even as Emily had peeped, when the curtain was in flames, and George rushed up as first fireman. One glance out of the window, and the acacia tree reminded her of the days of childhood. Blossoms and leaves were gone, but the tree stood in hoar-frost, like a vast branch of coral; and full and clear between the branches shone the moon, unchanged though ever changing, the same as when boy George shared his bread and butter with baby Emily.

She opened a drawer and took out the pictures—the Kremlin of the Czar, and her own castle—keepsakes from George. They were looked on and mused upon, and thought after thought kept rising. She remembered the day when, unmarked by father or mother, she stole down to where the Porter’s wife lay breathing her last; she sat by her side, held her hand, and heard her dying words, “Blessing—George!” The mother was thinking of her son. But now, to Emily, the words seemed to bear a deeper meaning. In good truth, George was with her on her birthday.

The next day, as it happened, was another birthday, the General’s own, for he had been born the day after his daughter—naturally earlier, many years earlier. Again there came presents; and among the rest a saddle of fine workmanship, and comfortable and costly; there was only one of the princes who had its equal. From whom could it have come? The General was in ecstasy. It bore a little ticket. Now, if this had said, “Thanks for yesterday,” any of us could have guessed whom it came from, but the ticket said, “From one whom the General does not know.”

“Who in the world is there I do not know?” said the General. “I know everybody,” and his thoughts went paying visits in the great world. He knew them all there, one and all. “It comes from my wife:” he said, at last. “She is teasing me! Charmant!”

But she was not teasing him; that time was gone by.

•  •  •

Once more there was a feast; but not at the General’s. It was a costume ball given by one of the princes: masking was allowed there.

The General went as Rubens, in a Spanish costume with a small ruff, upright as his rapier. Her ladyship was Madame Rubens, in black velvet, a high bodice, terribly warm, and her neck in a millstone, that is to say, in a large ruff. She looked the image of a Dutch painting of the General’s, the hands in which were especially admired, and were thought exactly like those of her ladyship.

Emily was Psyche, in muslin and lace. She was a floating tuft of swan’s-down; she was in no need of wings, and only wore them as an emblem of Psyche.

It was a scene of pomp and splendour, lights and flowers, magnificence and taste. One had hardly time to pay attention to Madame Rubens and her beautiful hands.

A black Domino, with an acacia flower in his hood, danced with Psyche.

“Who is he?” asked the General’s lady.

“His Royal Highness,” said the General. “I am quite sure of that. I knew him at once by his handshake.”

Her ladyship doubted.

General Rubens did not doubt. He drew near the black Domino, and wrote royal initials on the palm of his hand. They were not acknowledged; but a certain hint was given in return: the motto of the saddle!—“One whom the General does not know!’

“Yet something I do know of you,” said the General; “it was you who sent me the saddle.”

The Domino waved his hand, and disappeared among the others.

“Who is the black Domino you have been dancing with, Emily?” asked her mother.

“I did not ask his name,” she answered.

“Because you knew it! It is the Professor. Count, Your protégé is there,” she continued, turning to the Count, who stood close by; “the black Domino with the acacia flower.”

“Very possibly, your ladyship,” he replied; “but still, there is one of the princes in the same costume.”

“I know that handshake,” said the General. “From the Prince I received the saddle! I feel so certain, that I shall ask him to dinner.”

“Do so,” said the Count; “if it’s the Prince he will be sure to come.”

“And if it is the other he will not come,” said the General and made his way to the black Domino, who stood talking with the King. The General offered him a most respectful invitation, together with hopes of better acquaintance. The Guneral smiled in full confidence, he knew so well whom he was inviting, and he spoke loudly and distinctly.

The Domino lifted his mask: it was George!

“Does the General repeat his invitation?” he asked.

The General drew himself an inch higher, assumed a stiffer bearing, took two steps backward, and one step forward, as if dancing a minuet; and all the gravity and expression he could muster—all of the General, in short—stood in his fine features.

“I never retract my offers—the Professor is invited!” and he bowed, with a sidelong glance at the King, who must certainly have heard the whole of it.

•  •  •

And thus the General gave a dinner, at which his only guests were the old Count and his protégé.

“My foot under the table!” thought George; “the foundation-stone is laid.” And so it was indeed; and it was laid with great solemnity by the General and her ladyship.

The man had come and gone; and, as the General was quite ready to confess, had behaved like a member of good society, and had been vastly agreeable; the General had often found himself repeating his “Charmant.” Her ladyship also talked of her dinner; talked of it to one of the highest and most highly gifted of the court ladies, and the latter begged an invitation for herself, next time the Professor came. So he must needs be re-invited. And invited he was, and came, and again he was “Charmant; he could even play chess.

“He is not from the cellar,” said the General. “Most undoubtedly he is some scion of nobility—there are many such noble scions—and that is not any fault of the young man’s!”

The Professor could enter the King’s house, and so might very well enter the General’s; but take root there—no! Who could talk of such a thing?—Why, the whole town, that was all.

He did take root, and he grew and grew. The dew of favour fell from above, so no one was surprised after all that he should become a Privy Councillor, and Emily a Privy Councillor’s lady.

“Life is tragedy or comedy,” said the General: “in tragedy they die; in comedy they win each other.”

Here they won each other. And they won three sturdy boys, though not all at once.

The sweet children rode on their hobby-horses from room to room, whenever they came to see grandfather and grandmother. And the General rode on his stick behind them, as groom to the small Privy Councillors!

Her ladyship sat on the sofa and smiled, even when she had her bad headache.

So far did George get on in the world, and much farther too; or else it would not have been worth my while to tell story of the Porter’s Son.

[ 1866 ]

Peiter, Peter, and Peer

—

What children know nowadays is past belief: it is hard to say what they do not know. That the stork came and fetched them out of the well or the mill-dam, when they were tiny little things, and brought them to father and mother, is such an old story now that they no longer believe it, and yet it is the real truth.

But how comes it that the little ones are down in the mill-dam or the well? Ah! not everyone knows that, but there are some few who do know it. Have you ever looked well at the sky, on a clear, starlight night, and watched the many shooting-stars? It is as if they were stars that fell from the sky and disappeared in the darkness.

Even the most learned cannot explain what they do not know themselves; nevertheless, when one knows it, one can explain it. It is like a little candle from a Christmas-tree, that drops from the deep blue sky, and is blown out by the evening wind. It is a soul spark from our Lord, that flies down towards the earth, and when it comes into our thick, heavy air, loses its brilliancy, and there only remains of it something that our eyes cannot see, for it is something much finer and more delicate than our air—a little child from heaven; a little angel, but without wings, for it has to become a human child, and then what would it do with wings, if it had them?

Softly it glides through the air, and the wind wafts it into a flower—a dandelion maybe, or a rose, or cowslip—and there it lies and waits. It is so light and airy that a fly could carry it off, and a bee could do that very easily; but when these come to hunt for the sweetness in the flower, and find the little air-child lying there in the way, they do not whisk it out. Oh no! they would never do that; they take it and carry it to a water-lily leaf, where they lay it down in the warm sunshine, and from the leaf the air-child creeps and scrambles into the water, where it remains, sleeping and growing till it is big enough for the stork to see it; and then he picks it up and carries it to some kind family where they very much wish for such a sweet little one. But how sweet or not it becomes, that depends on whether the little one has drunk pure, clear water, or whether it has swallowed mud and duck-weed the wrong way: that makes one so earthy!

The stork never chooses, but takes the first one he happens to see. One comes into a pleasant house to kind and loving parents. Another comes to poor people in great sorrow and misery—it would have been much better to remain in the mill-dam!

The little ones never can remember afterwards what they dreamed while they lay in the water under the water-lily leaf, where, when evening came, they heard the frogs sing “coax, coax, gwax;” and that means, in human language, “make haste to go to sleep and dream.” Nor can they remember in what flower they lay at first, nor how it smelt; and yet there is always something within them, when they are grown men and women, which makes them feel, “This flower I like best;” that is because it is the one they were laid in by the wind, when they were air-children.

The stork lives to a good old age, and always takes an interest in the little ones whom he has brought out into the world, and takes note of how they get on, and if they behave well. To be sure, he cannot do much for them, or in any way change anything in their lives, for he has his own large family to attend to, but at least he never lets them quite out of his thoughts. I know an old and very worthy, honest Stork, who has had much experience, and has fetched many little ones out of the water, and knows their histories—in which there always is to be found a little mud and duck-weed from the mill-dam. I begged him to tell me the history of one of them and he said I should have three instead of one, out of the Peitersens’ house.

That was a remarkably nice family, the Peitersens; the father was a member of the common council, and that was a great distinction. To this home the Stork brought a little fellow who was called Peiter; and the year after he brought another, and him they called Peter; and when the third one came he got the name of Peer; because the names of Peiter, Peter, Peer, are all contained in that of Peitersen. Here then were three brothers—three shooting-stars—each rocked in a flower, then laid under the water-lily leaf in the mill-dam, and fetched from there by the Stork and brought to the Peitersen family, who live in the corner house that you have so often seen.

They grew in body and in mind, and wanted to be something more than common councilmen. Peiter said he wanted to be a robber; he had seen the play of “Fra Diavolo,” and after that decided upon the robber business, as the most delightful in the world. Peter said he would be a soap-fat man, and carry a rattle that makes a dreadful noise—such an one as he had heard that soap-fat men in other countries have; and Peer, who was such a good, sweet boy, round and plump, but who used to bite his nails—that was his only fault—Peer wanted to be “Papa.” And this was what each said he wanted to be in the world, when people asked them about it.

And then they were sent to school, and the one was first and the other last of his class, and one came just in between; but for all that they might be just as good and as clever, each one as the other—and so they were—at least so said their fond and very clear-sighted parents. They went to children’s parties, and they smoked cigars when nobody was looking, and they made great progress in knowledge and insight.

Peiter, from the time he was quite small, was quarrelsome and fierce, just as a robber ought to be; he was a very naughty boy, but that came, his mother said, from worms—naughty children always have something the matter with them—that is mud in the stomach from the mill-dam. But one day his mother’s new silk gown was the worse for his obstinacy and naughtiness.

“Don’t push the tea-table, my sweet lamb,” said his mother. “You might upset the cream pitcher, and then I should get spots on my silk gown;” and the “sweet lamb,” with a firm hand, took the cream pitcher, and with a firm hand poured all the cream into mama’s lap—and mama could not help saying “Oh, lamb, lamb, that was careless of you, lamb!” But he had a will of his own—that she could not deny—and a strong will shows character, and that is so pleasant for a mother to see. He might undoubtedly have become a robber, but he didn’t, after all; he only came to look like one—wore a slouched hat, bare throat, and long, lank hair; he was to have been an artist, but only got as far as the clothes, and looked like a hollyhock, and all the people he drew looked like hollyhocks—they were so lanky. He was very fond of that flower, and the stork said he had lain in it when he was an air-child.

Peter must have lain in a buttercup: he looked so buttery about the corners of his mouth, and had such a yellow skin, that one could not but fancy that if he were cut in the skin, butter would come out. He ought to have been a butter-dealer, and might have been his own sign; but the inner man, in him, was a soap-fat man with a rattle. He was the musical member of the Peitersen family—“musical enough for all of them,” said the neighbours. He composed seventeen new polkas in one week, and then put them all together and made an opera of them, with accompaniment of drum and rattle. Oh! how fine that was!

Peer was small, red, and white, and quite ordinary; he had lain in a daisy. He never defended himself when the other boys tried to fight him: he said he was the most reasonable, and the most reasonable always gives way. He made collections; first of slate pencils, and after that of the seals of letters; and then he got a little cabinet for Natural History curiosities, in which was the skeleton of a stickleback, three blind young rats in alcohol, and a stuffed mole. Peer had great taste for science and an eye for the beauties of nature—and that was very satisfactory for his parents, and for Peer too.

His brothers were both engaged to be married, while he still thought of nothing but completing his collection of waterfowl’s eggs. He knew a great deal more about animals than about human beings; he even thought that we never could be as great as the animals in the feeling which we consider as the highest of all, and that is—love. He saw that when Mrs. Nightingale was on her nest, setting, Mr. Nightingale sat on a branch close by and sang all night to his little wife, “Kluck-kluck-zi-zi-lo-lo-li!” Peer felt that he never could do that, and that it would be impossible for him to sacrifice his night’s rest in that way. When Madam Stork had the baby-storks in the nest, Mr. Stork stood all night on one leg on the edge of the roof, to watch. Peer could not have stood so for an hour!

And when one day he closely inspected a spider’s web, and saw what it contained, he utterly renounced all ideas of marriage. Mr. Spider weaves his web that he may catch thoughtless flies, no matter if old or young, fat or lean; he only lives for the support of his family. But Mrs. Spider lives only for him. She eats him up out of sheer love; she eats his heart, his head, his stomach, and nothing but his long, thin legs remain in the web, in the place where he sat with a heart full of anxiety for the welfare of his family. And this is the real, pure truth—right straight out of the natural history book. Peer saw all this and grew thoughtful: to be so dearly loved by one’s wife, that she eats one up out of love! No, that is too much—no human being could do as much as that, and would it be desirable?

And then Peer resolved never to marry, never to give nor to take a kiss; that might look like the first step towards marriage. But he got a kiss, notwithstanding—the same kiss that we must all get someday—the great kiss that Death gives. When we have lived long enough, then Death is ordered to “kiss him away,” and away we go; there comes a ray of sunshine, straight from our Lord, so bright and dazzling as almost to blind us, and then the soul which came from heaven as a shooting-star, goes back like a shooting-star, but not to sleep in a flower, or to dream under the leaf of the water-lily. Oh, no! it has much more important things to do; it goes into the great land of eternity and there it stays, but what that land is like, no one can say and no one knows. No one has peeped into it, not even the Stork, although he knows and has seen more than almost anyone else. But he knew nothing more of Peer after he had gone to that strange land than what I have told you, though about Peiter and Peter he said he could tell much more; but I thought I had heard enough of them, and I suppose you have too, and so I thanked him and bade him good-bye for this once. But now he wants payment for this commonplace little story—three frogs and a little snake—he takes his pay in creature-comforts, you see. Will you pay him? I will not: I have neither frogs nor snakes!

[ 1868 ]

She Was Good for Nothing

—

The mayor stood at the open window. He wore very fine shirt and cuffs, with a breast-pin stuck in his frill, and was uncommonly well shaved—a piece of his own work. Still, he had given himself a slight cut, and had stuck piece of newspaper upon it.

“Here! You boy,” he cried.

The boy was no other than the poor washerwoman’s son, who was just passing the house and was respectfully taking off his cap; the peak was broken in the middle, and the cap was evidently used to being rolled up and put in its owner’s pocket. In his poor but clean and well-patched clothes, with heavy wooden shoes on his feet, the boy stood there as respectfully as if he were standing opposite the king himself.

“You’re a good boy,” said the mayor; “you’re a civil boy. I suppose your mother is at her washing down by the river, and that’s no doubt, where you are taking what you’ve got in your pocket. That’s a sad habit of your mother’s. How much have you there?”

“Only half a quartern,” stammered the boy in a low voice.

“And this morning she had the same,” continued the mayor.

“No, it was yesterday,” answered the boy.

“Two halves make a whole. She is good for nothing. It’s very sad that there are such people. Tell your mother that she ought to be ashamed of herself, and mind you don’t grow up a drunkard—but I suppose you will. Poor child! Run on!”

And the boy ran on; he kept his cap in his hand, and the wind played among his yellow hair so that great locks of it stood up on end. When he got to the corner he turned down the lane that led to the river, where his mother was standing in the water by her washing bench and beating the heavy linen with a beater. There was a strong current, for the mill-sluices had been opened, and the
sheets were floating along with the stream and on the point of overturning the bench. The washerwoman had to place herself against it to keep it up.

“I was very nearly sailing away,” she said; “it’s a good thing that you came, for I need something to keep my strength up a bit. It’s cold here in the water, and I’ve been standing here six hours already. Have you got anything for me?”

The boy brought out the bottle, and his mother put it to her lips and drank a little.

“Oh! that does me good! How it warms me! It’s just as good as a hot meal, and not so dear. Drink, my boy. You look quite pale, and you’re freezing in your thin clothes. One can feel it’s autumn. Ugh! how cold the water is! I hope I shall not be ill. No, that will not happen to me. Give me another mouthful and drink some yourself, but only a little drop; you mustn’t get used to it, my poor dear child!”

And she went round the plank on which the boy stood, and came ashore. The water dripped down from the straw mat that she had bound round her waist, and from her petticoat.

“I work and toil till the blood runs out at my finger’s ends, but I am only too glad to do it if I can bring you up honestly and well, my dear boy.”

At that moment an elderly woman came along, a miserable-looking object, lame in one leg and with a big false curl hanging down over one eye; this eye was a blind one, and the curl was intended to cover it, but it only made the defect more conspicuous. She was a friend of the washerwoman’s, and was called by the neighbours “lame Martha with the curl.”

“Poor thing, how you work and stand in the cold water! You really want something to warm you a little, and yet the gossips will cry out about the few drops you drink.” And in a few minutes’ time all that the mayor had said was laid before the washerwoman, for Martha had heard all, and it had made her angry to hear him talk in that way to the child of its own mother, and of the few drops that she took; and just on that day, too, when he himself was giving a large dinner-party at which there would be wine by the bottle. “Good strong wine! A good many will drink more than they want; but that’s not called drinking. They are good, but they call you good for nothing,” said Martha.

“Ah, so he spoke to you, my child?” said the washerwoman, and her lips trembled as she spoke. “He says you have a mother who is good for nothing. Perhaps he’s right; still he ought not to have told my child so. But a great deal of my misfortune comes from that house.”

“Yes, you were in service there when the mayor’s parents were alive and lived in that house. That’s many years ago. Many bushels of salt have been eaten since then, and one may well be thirsty,” said Martha, smiling. “The mayor gives a big dinner today; the guests ought to have been put off, but it was too late, and the dinner was already cooked. I heard so from the foot man. A letter came a little while ago, saying that the mayor’s younger brother had died in Copenhagen.”

“Died!” cried the washerwoman, turning deathly pale.

“Yes, died!” said Martha. “Do you take that so much to heart? It is true, you knew him many years ago when you were in service there.”

“Is he dead? He was such a good, kind man! There are not many like him.” And the tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, great heavens, everything is going round—that’s because I emptied the bottle—I couldn’t stand so much—I feel quite ill.” And she leaned against the plank.

“Good heavens! You are indeed ill,” cried the other woman. “Come, try to get over it. No, you are really seriously ill. It will be best for me to take you home.”

“But the washing there!”

“I’ll look after the washing. Come, give me your arm. The boy can stop and take care of the linen, and I’ll come back and finish the few pieces that are left.”

The washerwoman’s legs gave way beneath her. “I stood too long in the cold water, and I have eaten and drunk nothing since this morning. The fever has hold of me. Oh! heavens, help me to get home! My poor child!” She wept. The boy wept too and soon he was sitting alone by the river beside the damp washing. The two women walked along very slowly, the washerwoman dragging her tottering limbs through the lane, and then turning the corner of the street passed the house of the mayor, just opposite to which she sank down on the stones. A crowd collected, and lame Martha ran into the house for help, while the mayor and his guests came to the window.

“It’s the washerwoman!” he said; “she has had a drop too much. She’s good for nothing. It’s a pity for the pretty boy she has. I really like the boy, but his mother’s good for nothing.”

The washerwoman came to herself again, and they took her into her humble dwelling where she was put to bed. The kind-hearted Martha made her a jug of spiced ale with some butter and sugar; she thought this was the best medicine. Then she went to the river, and though she meant well she finished the washing very badly—in fact she only pulled the wet things out of the water and put them into a basket.

Towards evening she was sitting in the poor little room with the washerwoman. The mayor’s cook had given her some baked potatoes and a fine fat piece of ham for the sick woman; with those Martha and the boy had a good feast whilst the patient enjoyed the smell which she thought was very nourishing.

The boy was put to bed, in the same one, too, in which his mother lay; but his place was crosswise at her feet, and his blanket consisted of an old carpet made of blue and white patchwork.

The washerwoman now began to feel a little better; the spiced ale had strengthened her, and the smell of the good fare had done her good.

“Thank you, you good soul,” she said to Martha. “I want to tell you something when the boy is asleep. I think he sleeps already. How good and sweet he looks as he lies there with his eyes closed! He doesn’t know what his mother has gone through, and God grant that he may never hear it. I was in service at the councillor’s, the mayor’s father, and it happened that the youngest of the sons, who was a student, came home. I was young then, and a wild girl, but honest—that I can say before Heaven. The student was very merry and kind, and a brave-hearted fellow. Every drop of blood in his veins was honest and true, and there was not a better man on earth. He was a son of the house and I was only a servant, but we loved each other truly and honourably; a kiss is no sin after all if people really love each other. And he told his mother all about it, for he worshipped her like a goddess. She was so wise and gentle! He started off on a journey, but before he went he put his gold ring on my finger, and scarcely had he left the house when my mistress sent for me. Her words were earnest but kind, and it seemed as if an angel were speaking to me; she showed me clearly the difference there was between him and me, both mentally and materially.

“‘Now he is attracted by your good looks,’ said she, ‘but they will fade in time. You have not been educated as he has; you are not each other’s equals in mind, and that is the misfortune. I respect the poor; in the sight of God they may occupy a higher place than many of the rich. But here on earth we must take care not to get into a false track as we go onwards, lest our wagon be upset and we get thrown out. I hear that an honest man, a workman, has asked you to marry him—I mean Erick, the glove-maker. He is a widower, has no children, and is well to do; think it over.’

“Every word that she said went to my heart like a knife, but the lady was right, and that weighed heavily upon me. I kissed her hand and wept bitter tears, and wept still more when I got to my room and threw myself on the bed. The night that followed was a weary one for me, and God knows what I endured. On the following Sunday I took the communion, so that light might come to me. It seemed just like the act of Providence: as I went out of church, Erick came towards me. There was now no longer any doubt in my soul. we were suited to each other both in rank and in means, indeed he was even a well-to-do man. So I went up to him, took his hand and said: ‘Do you still think of me?’

“‘Yes, ever and always,’ he said.

“‘Will you marry a girl who respects and honours, but who does not love you, though that may come later?’

“‘That will come,’ said he, and upon that I gave him my hand.

I went home to my mistress; the gold ring which her son had given me I used to wear next my heart, for I could not put it on my finger during the day but only at night when I went to bed. I kissed it till my lips bled, and then I gave it to my mistress, telling her that the banns for the glove-maker and myself would be put up the following week. Then my mistress put her arms round me and kissed me. She did not say that I was good for nothing, but at that time I was perhaps better than I am now, although I had not yet been visited by the misfortunes of this world. We were married at Candlemas; for the first year all went well. We had one workman and one apprentice, and you, Martha, were our servant.”

“Oh, you were a dear, good mistress,” said Martha, “I shall never forget how kind you and your husband were.”

“Yes, those were my happy years when you were with us. We had no children then. The student I never saw. Yes, I did though—once! but he did not see me. He was here for his mother’s funeral. I saw him standing by the grave, looking as pale as death and very sad, but that was on account of his mother. Later, when his father died, he went to foreign countries and never came here again. He never married, I know that; I believe he became a lawyer. He had forgotten me, and even if he had seen me, he would certainly not have known me again, so miserable do I look now. So it’s all for the best.”

Then she spoke of her days of trial, and related how misfortune had, as it were, rushed upon them.

“We possessed,” she said, “five hundred dollars, and there being a house in the street to be sold for two hundred, we thought it would pay to pull it down and build a new one, and so it was bought. The builder and carpenter estimated the new house to cost a thousand and twenty dollars. Erick had credit, and borrowed the money in the chief town, but the captain who was to have brought it was shipwrecked, and the money went down with him.

“About that time my dear sweet boy, who is sleeping there, came into the world, and my husband was seized with a long and severe illness; for nine months I had to dress and undress him every day. We were continually going backwards, and got into debt. Everything that we had went, and then my husband died. I have worked and toiled and striven for the sake of my child; I have scrubbed steps and washed linen, done coarse work and fine, but I was not to be better off—it was God’s will. But He will soon take me to Himself, and will not forsake my boy.” Then she fell asleep.

Towards morning she felt refreshed and strong enough, she believed, to go back to her work. She had just got into the cold water again when she was seized with a fit of trembling and fainted. And clutching the air convulsively with her hand, she took one step forward and fell down. Her head lay upon the bank, but her feet were in the water; the wooden shoes that she had worn—with a handful of straw in each—floated along with the stream, and so Martha found her when she brought her some coffee.

In the meantime a messenger had been sent to her house by the mayor to say she was to come to him at once, as he had something to tell her. It was too late. A surgeon had been sent for to open a vein, but the washerwoman was dead.

“She has drunk herself to death,” said the mayor.

In the letter which brought the tidings of his brother’s death, the contents of the will had been given, and according to this, six hundred dollars had been left to the glove-maker’s widow, who had once been in service with his parents. The money was to be paid at discretion in large or small sums to her or her child.

“There was some love-nonsense between my brother and her,” said the mayor. “It’s a good thing she’s gone. Now the boy will get all, and I’ll place him with some honest people; he may become a good workman.”

And Heaven laid its blessing upon these words.

The mayor sent for the boy, promised to look after him, and added how fortunate it was that his mother had died, for she was good for nothing.

She was buried in the paupers’ churchyard. Maren planted a little rose-tree over the grave; the boy stood by her side the while.

“My darling mother!” he sighed, as the tears streamed down from his eyes. “It was not true that she was good-for-nothing!”

“She was good for a great deal,” said the old servant, looking up to heaven. “I have known it for many years, but most of all since the evening before her death. I tell you she was good for a great deal, and God in heaven will say so too, though the world may say: ‘She was good for nothing.’”

[ 1853 ]

The Cripple

—

There was an old manor house which belonged to young noble people. They enjoyed wealth and happiness; their wish was to be happy, and they did good. They wanted all people to be as happy as they were themselves.

On Christmas Eve a beautifully decorated Christmas-tree stood in the old hall; a fire blazed on the hearth, and fir branches were hung round the old pictures. Here were gathered the family and their guests, and there was dancing and singing.

Earlier in the evening there had been Christmas merry-making in the servants’ hall. Here also was a great fir tree with red and white candles, small Danish flags, swans and fishing-nets cut out of coloured paper, and filled with goodies. The poor children from the village were invited, everyone had his mother with him. The mothers did not look much at the Christmas-tree, but at the Christmas table, where there lay linen and woollen cloth—stuff for gowns and stuff for trousers. That was what the mothers and older children looked at. Only the very little ones stretched out their hands to the candles and the tinsel and flags.

The whole party came early in the afternoon and got Christmas cake and roast goose with red cabbage. Then when the Christmas-tree was seen and the gifts distributed, each got a little glass of punch with apple fritters. Then they went back to their own poor homes and talked of the good living, that is to say, the good things to eat; and the gifts were once more inspected.

There were among them Garden-Kirstin and Garden-Ole. They were married, and had their house and daily food in return for weeding and digging in the manor garden. Every Christmas festival they got a good share of the gifts; they had five children, and all five were clothed by the gentlefolk.

“They are generous people, our master and mistress!” said they, “but they have the means to be so, and they have pleasure in doing it.”

“Here are good clothes for the four other children to wear,” said Ole; “but why is there nothing for the Cripple? They used to think about him too, although he does not go to the festival.”

It was the eldest of the children they called the Cripple, he was called Hans otherwise.

As a little boy, he was the smartest and liveliest child, but he became all at once “loose in the legs”, as they call it, he could neither walk nor stand, and now he had been lying in bed for five years.

“Yes, I got something for him too,” said the mother, “but it is nothing much, it is only a book to read.”

“He won’t get fat on that,” said the father.

But Hans was pleased with it. He was a very clever boy who liked to read, but used his time also for working, so far as one who must always lie in bed could be useful. He was very handy, and knitted woollen stockings, and even bedcovers. The lady at the manor house had praised and bought them.

It was a storybook Hans had got: in it there was much to read and much to think about.

“It is not of any kind of use here in the house,” said his parents, “but let him read, it passes the time, he cannot always be knitting stockings!”

The spring came; flowers and green leaves began to sprout—the weeds also, as we suppose one must call the nettles, although the hymn speaks so nicely of them:

Though kings in all their power and might

Came forth in splendid row,

They could not make the smallest leaf

Upon a nettle grow.

There was much to do in the manor garden, not only for the gardener and his men, but also for Garden-Kirstin and Garden-Ole.

“It is perfect drudgery,” said they. “We have no sooner raked the paths and made them nice, than they are trampled down again. There is such a run of visitors up at the house. How much it must cost! But the family are rich people!”

“Things are badly divided,” said Ole. “We are all God’s children, says the priest. But why such a difference?”

“It comes from the Fall!” said Kirstin.

They talked about it again in the evening, where Cripple Hans lay with his storybook.

Hard times and hard work had made the parents hard in their hands, hard in their judgment and thoughts. They could not grasp it, could not explain it, and made themselves more peevish and angry as they talked.

“Some people get prosperity and happiness, others only poverty! Why should our first parents’ disobedience and curiosity be visited upon us? We would not have behaved ourselves as those two did!”

“Yes, we would!” said Cripple Hans, all at once. “It is all here in the book.”

“What is in the book?” asked the parents.

And Hans read to them the old story about “The Woodcutter and his Wife.”

They, too, were grumbling about Adam and Eve’s curiosity: which was the cause of their misfortune.

Just then, the king of the country came by. “Follow me home,” said he, “and you shall have everything the same as I: seven courses for dinner and one course for show. That is in a closed tureen, which you must not touch, or else it is all over with your grand living.”

“What can there be in the tureen?” said the woman.

“That is nothing to us,” said the husband.

“Well, I am not inquisitive,” said the wife. “I should only like to know why we may not lift the lid; it must certainly be something dainty.”

“Take care there is not some mechanism in it,” said the man. “Perhaps a pistol, which will bang off and rouse the whole house.”

“Oh!” said the woman, and she did not touch the tureen.

“But at night she dreamed that the lid lifted itself up, and there came forth a scent of the most delightful punch, such as one gets at weddings and funerals. And there was a large silver coin, with the inscription, “Drink ye of this punch, and so will ye become the richest on the earth, and all other people become beggars.” And then the woman woke, and immediately related the dream to her husband.

“You think too much about the thing,” said he.

“We could just lift it gently,” said the woman.

“Gently,” said the man.

So the woman lifted the lid quite gently. Out sprang two lively little mice, and away they ran into a mouse’s hole.

“Good-bye,” said the king. “Now you can go back and lie in your own bed. Grumble no more about Adam and Eve: you yourselves have been just as inquisitive and ungrateful.”

“From where did that story get into that book?” said Garden-Ole. “It is just as if it were for us. It is very much to the point.”

Next day they went to work again; they were roasted by the sun, and soaked to the skin with rain; in them were fretful thoughts, and they pondered on them.

It was still quite light in the evening at home after they had eaten their milk porridge.

“Read the story of the wood-cutter to us again,” said Ole.

“There are so many other nice stories in the book,” said Hans, “so many you don’t know.”

“Yes, but I don’t care about them,” said Ole, “I want to hear the one I know.”

And he and his wife listened to it again.

More than one evening they returned to the story.

“Yet it does not make the whole quite clear to me,” said Ole. “It is with people as with sweet milk when it sours; some become fine cheese, and others become the thin, watery whey; some people have luck in everything, sit at great tables every day, and know neither sorrow nor want.”

Cripple Hans heard that. He was feeble in the legs, but clever in the head. He read to them from his storybook, read about “The Man Without Sorrow or Want.”

Where was he to be found, for found he must be!

The king lay sick, and could not be healed unless he were clad in a shirt which had been worn on the back of a man who could truthfully say that he had never known sorrow or want.

Messages were sent to all the countries in the world, to all castles and estates, to all prosperous and happy men, but when it was properly investigated, every one of them had experienced sorrow and want.

“But indeed I have not,” said a swineherd who sat in a ditch laughing and singing: “I am that most fortunate man.”

“Then give us your shirt,” said the king’s messengers. “You shall be paid for it with the half of the kingdom.”

But he had no shirt, and yet he called himself the happiest man.

“That was a fine fellow,” cried Garden-Ole; and he and his wife laughed as they had not laughed for a year and a day.

Just then the schoolmaster came by.

“How merry you are!” said he; “that is rare news in this house. Have you won a prize in the lottery?”

“No, it is nothing of that sort,” said Garden-Ole. “It is Hans who has been reading his storybook to us, about ‘The man without Sorrow or Want;’ and the fellow had no shirt. It makes your eyes moist when you hear such a thing, and out of a printed book at that. However, everyone has his load to bear; no one is alone in that! That is always a comfort.”

“Where did you get that book?” asked the schoolmaster.

“Our Hans got it more than a year ago at Christmas-time. The master and mistress gave it to him. They know that he likes reading so much, and he is a cripple. We would rather have seen him get two linen shirts at the time. But that book is wonderful, it can almost answer one’s thoughts.”

The schoolmaster took the book and opened it.

“Let us have the same story again,” said Garden-Ole; “I have not taken it in properly yet.” And the other one, too, about the wood-cutter, had to be read.

These two stories were enough for Ole. They were like two sunbeams coming into the poor room, into the stunted thought which made him so cross and ill-natured.

Hans had read the whole book, read it many times. The stories carried him out into the world, to where he could not go, because his legs would not carry him.

The schoolmaster sat by his bedside; they talked together, and it was a pleasure for both of them.

From that day the schoolmaster often came to visit Hans when his parents were at work. It was like a holiday for the boy every time he came. How he listened to what the old man told him about the earth’s greatness, and many countries; and yet how the sun was almost half a million times greater than the earth, and so far away, that a cannon-ball in its course would, take five and twenty years to get from the sun to the earth, whilst the rays of light could arrive at the earth in eight minutes.

Nowadays, every industrious schoolboy knows all that, but for Hans it was all new, and still more wonderful than what was in the storybook.

The schoolmaster dined with the squire’s family two or three times a year, and he told how much importance the storybook had in the poor house, where two stories in it alone had been the means of spiritual awakening and blessing. The weak, clever little boy had with his reading brought reflection and joy into the house.

As the schoolmaster was going home from the manor house, the lady put into his hand a few shining silver dollars for little Hans. “Father and mother must have these,” said the boy, when the schoolmaster brought him the money.

And Garden-Ole and Garden-Kirstin said, “Cripple Hans after all is a gift and a blessing.”

A few days after, whilst the parents were away at work in the manor garden, the carriage stopped at the door: it was the kind-hearted lady, who came full of joy that her Christmas gift had become such a comfort and delight to the boy and his parents. She brought some fine bread, fruit, and a flask of sweet jelly; but what was still more delightful, she brought, in a gilt cage, a little blackbird, which could whistle quite prettily. The cage and the bird were set up on the old chest of drawers, a little way from the boy’s bed, so that he could see the bird and hear it sing; even people right out on the road could hear its song.

Garden-Ole and Garden-Kirstin came home just after the lady had driven away; they understood how Hans was pleased; but yet it seemed that there was only inconvenience in the gift that was given.

“Rich people don’t have much foresight!” said they. “Now we shall have that to look after too. Cripple Hans certainly can’t do it. The end will be that the cat will get it.”

A week went by, and still another; the cat had in that time been often in the room without frightening the bird, to say nothing of hurting it.

Then a great event happened. It was afternoon. The parents and the other children were at work, Hans was quite alone. He had the storybook in his hand, and was reading about the fisherman’s wife, who had all her wishes fulfilled.

She wished to be a king; and she was so: she wished to be an emperor; and she was: but then she would be the good God—whereupon she was sitting again in the muddy ditch she had come from.

The story had nothing to do with the bird or the cat, but it was just the story he was reading when the incident happened: he always remembered that afterwards.

The cage stood on the chest, the cat stood on the floor and stared at the bird with his greeny-gold eyes. There was something in the cat’s face which seemed to say, “How lovely you are! How I should like to eat you!”

Hans could understand that; he read it in the cat’s face.

“Be off, cat!” he shouted, “will you go out of the room?” It seemed as if it were just about to spring. Hans could not get at him, and he had nothing else to throw at him but his dearest treasure, the storybook. He threw that, but the binding was loose, and it flew to one side, and the book itself with all its leaves flew to the other. The cat went with slow steps a little back into the room, and looked at Hans as much as to say, “Don’t mix yourself up in this affair, little Hans! I can walk, and I can spring, and you can do neither.”

Hans kept his eye on the cat and was greatly distressed; the bird was also anxious. There was no one there to call, and it seemed as if the cat knew it: it prepared itself again to spring. Hans flapped the counterpane at it; but the cat paid no attention to the counterpane; and when that was also thrown to no avail, it sprang upon the chair and into the windowsill, where it was nearer to the bird.

Hans could feel his blood tingling within him, but he did not think of that, he thought only about the cat and the bird. The boy could not help himself out of bed, could not stand on his legs, still less walk. It seemed as if his heart turned inside him when he saw the cat spring from the window, right onto the chest and push the cage so that it was upset. The bird fluttered wildly about inside.

Hans gave a shriek, there was a wrench within him, and, without thinking about it, he sprang out of the bed, tore the cat down, and held the cage fast, while the bird fluttered in great terror, He kept the cage in his hand, and ran with it out the door into the road.

Then the tears streamed out of his eyes; he shouted with joy, “I can walk! I can walk!”

He had got the power of his limbs again—such a thing may happen, and it did happen to him.

The schoolmaster lived close by. Hans ran in to him with his bare feet, with only his shirt and jacket on, and with the bird in the cage.

“I can walk!” he shouted. “O Lord my God!” and he sobbed and wept with joy.

And there was joy in the house of Garden-Ole and Garden-Kirstin. “A more joyful day we cannot live to see,” said both of them.

Hans was called up to the manor house; he had not gone that way for many years; it seemed as if the trees and the nutbushes, which he knew so well, nodded to him and said, “Good day, Hans, welcome back here!” The sun shone on his face as well as in his heart. The master and mistress let him sit with them, and looked as glad as if he were one of their own family.

Gladdest though was the noble lady, who had given him the storybook, and given him the little songbird. That was now, sure enough, dead—dead of fright; but it had been the means of his recovery; and the book had brought the awakening of the parents. That book he had still; and would keep and read if he became ever so old. Now he, too, could be of use at home. He wished to learn a trade; especially to be a bookbinder. “For,” said he, “then I can always get new books to read.”

In the afternoon the lady called both parents up to her. She and her husband had talked together about Hans; he was a wise and clever boy: had pleasure in reading, and ability.

In the evening the parents came home from the manor house quite happy, especially Kirstin; but the next week she cried, for then little Hans set off. He had good clothes on; he was a good boy: but now he must cross the salt water, far away; be put in a school, where Latin was taught, and many years would go before they saw him again.

He did not take the storybook with him: his parents would keep that for remembrance. And father sometimes read in it, but nothing except the two stories, for those he knew.

And they had letters from Hans, each one happier than the last. He was with fine people, and in good circumstances; and most delightful of all was it to go to school: there was so much to learn and know. He only wished now to remain a hundred years, and so one day be a schoolmaster.

“If we should live to see that!” said the parents, and they pressed each other’s hands as they did when going to communion.

“To think of what has happened to Hans!” said Ole. “Our Father thinks also of the poor man’s child! And that this should happen to the Cripple! Isn’t it like something Hans would read for us out of the storybook?”

[ 1872 ]

Chicken Greta’s Family

—

Chicken Greta was the only person who lived in the handsome new house that had been built for the chickens and ducks at the Manor. It stood where the old mansion of the feudal days had stood, with its tower, its crow-stepped gables, its moat and drawbridge. Close by it was a wilderness of trees and bushes. The garden had been there, and had extended down to a large lake which now was but a swamp. Rooks, crows, and jackdaws flew screaming and cawing over the old trees, a swarming multitude of birds. They didn’t get any fewer if a shot was fired among them, they only flew the faster. You could hear them even in the hen-house where Chicken Greta sat and the ducklings ran about over her wooden shoes. She knew every hen and duck from the moment it crept out of the egg, and was proud of her hens and ducks, proud too of the handsome house that had been built for them. Clean and neat was her little room: the lady of the house (to whom the hen-house belonged) insisted on that. She often came there with smart genteel visitors, and showed off what she called the Hens’ and Ducks’ Barracks.

There was a wardrobe and an armchair there, and there was a chest of drawers on which stood a brightly polished plate of copper: and on it was engraved the word “Grubbe”; which was no other than the name of the ancient and noble family that had lived here at the Manor house. This copper plate had been found in digging there, and the Parish Clerk had said that it was of no value except as a monument of old times. The Parish Clerk knew a great deal about the place and about old times; he was book-learned, and a great deal of writing was laid up in his table drawer. He had to be sure a deal of information about the old days, and yet the eldest of the crows perhaps knew more, and screamed about it in his own language—however, that was crow-talk, and the Parish Clerk didn’t understand that, clever as he might be.

After a hot summer day the marsh would steam with vapour, so that it spread like a great lake out beyond the old trees where the rooks and crows and jackdaws flew about. It had looked like that in the days when Squire Grubbe lived there, and the old Manor with its thick red walls was still standing. The watchdog’s chain used to reach right across the gateway. Through the tower you entered the stone-paved passage to the rooms. The windows were narrow and the windowpanes small, even in the great hall where the dancing went on. But in the last Grubbe’s days there had been no dancing within living memory. All the same, an old kettle-drum still lay there, which had served for the band. Here too stood a richly carved cupboard in which rare bulbs were kept, for Lady Grubbe was fond of gardening and used to nurse trees and plants. Her husband liked better to ride out and shoot wolves and wild boars, and his little daughter Marie always accompanied him. When she was but five years old she sat her horse proudly and stared boldly about her with her great black eyes. She enjoyed slashing at the hounds with her whip; her father would sooner she had slashed at the peasant boys who came to look at the gentry.

The peasant in the mud hut close by the Manor had a son, Sören, of the same age as her little ladyship. He was a good climber, and always had to go up and take birds’ nests for her. The birds screamed as loud as they could scream, and one of the biggest gave him a peck just over his eye, so that the blood flowed, and it was thought the eye was gone; but there was no harm done.

Marie Grubbe called him her Sören. This was a great favour, and turned out very lucky for his father, poor John. John once committed some offence and was to be punished; he was to ride the wooden horse. It stood in the court, with four stakes for legs and a single narrow plank for a back; on this John was to ride astride and have some heavy bricks tied to his legs so as not to sit too light. His face was ghastly to see, and Sören cried and implored little Marie; and she gave orders at once that Sören’s father was to be taken down: and when they paid no attention to her, she stamped on the pavement and pulled at her father’s coat sleeve till it tore. She would have her way, and she got it, and Sören’s father was let down.

Lady Grubbe, who was by, stroked her little daughter’s hair and looked kindly on her, Marie couldn’t think why. She was going to the kennels and not with her mother, who walked over to the garden and down to the lake where water-lilies and water-daisies were in flower, and bulrushes and scented rushes swayed to and fro among the reeds. She gazed at all the luxuriance and freshness of it. “How pleasant it is!” said she. In the garden there stood a tree, rare in those days, which she had planted herself; a copper beech it was called—a kind of blackamoor among the other trees, so dark brown were its leaves. It needed strong sunlight, otherwise its leaves, if it stood always in shadow, would become green like the rest, and it would lose its characteristic. In the tall chestnut trees were numbers of birds’ nests, and more in the bushes and the green sward. It seemed as if the birds knew they were in sanctuary, for no one could go popping their guns off here.

Little Marie came that way with Sören. He could climb, as we know, and many an egg and callow young one was brought down. The birds flew about in anxiety and fright; big and little, they all flew. The plover out on the open field, the rooks, the crows, and the jackdaws in the tall trees screamed and screamed again; just such a screaming there was as the tribe keeps up still in these days.

“Why, what are you doing, children?” cried the gentle lady. “That is the devil’s work.”

Sören stood abashed, and her little ladyship too looked somewhat askance, but then she said—shortly and sulkily: “Father lets me do it.”

“Get away, get away!” screamed the big black birds, and off they flew, but they came back next day, for they were at home there.

The quiet gentle lady, however, did not stay at home there long. God called her to Himself; and indeed she was more at home with Him than there at the Manor, and the bells tolled solemnly when her body was taken to the church, and the poor men’s eyes were full of tears, for she had been kind to them.

When she was gone nobody took care of her plants, and the garden fell into neglect.

Herr Grubbe was a hard man, people said, but his daughter, young as she was, could stand up to him. He had to laugh it off, and she got her way. She was twelve years old by this time, and strong-built and well grown. She looked through and through people with her black eyes; she rode her horse like a man and fired off her gun like a practised sportsman.

Great visitors came to these parts, visitors of the highest degree, the young King and his half-brother and companion, Herr Ulrik Frederick Gyldenlöve. They came to shoot wild boars and spend a day at Herr Grubbe’s Manor.

Gyldenlöve sat next to Marie Grubbe at table: he seized her by the neck and gave her a kiss, as if he were one of the family, but she gave him a slap in the mouth and said she couldn’t abide him, and there was great laughter at this as if it had been the best of jokes. Perhaps, indeed, it was; for five years later, when Marie was full seventeen years old, there came a messenger with a letter. Herr Gyldenlöve asked for the noble maiden’s hand. That was something.

“He’s the noblest and gallantest lord in the realm,” said Herr Grubbe. “He’s not one to be turned off.”

“I don’t care much about him,” said Marie Grubbe: all the same, she did not turn away the noblest in the land, who sat next to the King. Silver plate, woollen and linen stuffs were shipped over to Copenhagen. She made the journey by land and took ten days. The trousseau had the wind against it, or else no wind at all, for months passed before it arrived, and by the time it did Lady Gyldenlöve was gone.

“I’d sooner lie on sacking than in his silken bed,” said she. “I’d rather trudge barefoot than drive in a coach with him.”

Late one evening in November two women came riding into Aarhus town—Gyldenlöve’s wife, Marie Grubbe, and her maid. They came from Veile and thither they had come by ship from Copenhagen. They rode up to Herr Grubbe’s stone-walled Manor. He was by no means pleased with the visit. She got hard words, but a room to lie in, and her breakfast next day, but no breakfast talk. Her father’s wicked temper showed itself in a way she was not wont to hear. She was of no gentle nature, and as one is called, so one answers. She had her answers ready, and spoke with malice and hate of her lawful husband; with him she would not live, she was too decent and honourable for that.

Thus a year went by, and not pleasantly. Ill words were bandied between father and daughter, such as should not be. Ill words bear ill fruit. What would be the end of it?

“We two can’t live under one roof,” said her father one day. “Move out of here to our old house: but bite your tongue off sooner than let lies get abroad.”

So they parted! She and her maid went off to the old house where she had been born and bred, where the quiet godly lady, her mother, lay in the vault at the church. An old cowman lived at the Manor, and that was the whole population of it. Cobwebs hung in the rooms, black and heavy with dust; the garden grew as it lived; hop-vines and bryony wove nets over trees and bushes, hemlock and nettles grew rank and large. The copper beech was overgrown and hidden in shade, and its leaves were as green as those of the other common trees; its beauty was past and gone. Rooks, crows and jackdaws flew in swarming multitudes over the tall chestnut trees; there was a squalling and screaming as if they had important news to tell each other. “Here she was again, the little girl that had had their eggs and young ones stolen.” The actual thief who had taken them was climbing a tree without any leaves; he was sitting on a tall mast and getting his fair share of the rope’s end when he didn’t behave himself.

All this story the Parish Clerk told in our own days; he had gathered it and put it together from books and notes, and along with much else it lay written and kept safe in his table drawer.

“Up and down goes the world,” said he, “it’s a strange thing to hear tell of.” And we will hear tell how it went with Marie Grubbe; but for all that we won’t forget Chicken Greta sitting in her smart hen-house in our time. Marie Grubbe sat too in her time, but her temper was not like Chicken Greta’s.

Winter went by, spring and summer went by, and the windy autumn came again with its wet cold sea fogs. It was a lonely life and a wearisome life there at the Manor.

Well, Marie Grubbe took her fowling-piece and went out on the heath and shot hares and foxes, and what birds she could hit. Out there she met, more than once, the noble lord, Palle Dyre of Norrebaek. He was out too with his gun and his dogs. He was big and strong, and bragged of it when they talked together. He might have measured his strength with the late Herr Brockenhaus of Egeskov in Fünen, of whom men still talked as a strong man. In imitation of him Palle Dyre had hung up at his own gate an iron chain with a hunting horn, and when he came riding home he would grasp the chain and lift himself and his horse from the ground and blow the horn.

“Come and see it for yourself, Lady Marie,” said he. “There’s a fine fresh air at Norrebaek.”

When she came to his home is not recorded; but on the chandeliers of Norrebaek church you may read that they were given by Palle Dyre and Marie Grubbe of Norrebaek Manor.

Body and strength had Palle Dyre. He drank like a sponge, he was like a barrel that could never be filled, he snored like a whole sty of pigs; he was red and bloated in the face.

“He’s sly and he’s a bully,” said Lady Palle Dyre, Grubbe’s daughter. She quickly tired of living with him, and it grew no better as it went on.

One day the table was spread, and the dinner grew cold. Palle Dyre was out fox-hunting, and his lady was not to be found. Palle Dyre came home towards midnight, Lady Dyre neither at midnight nor at dawn; she had turned her back on Norrebaek and had gone off without a word of farewell.

The weather was grey and damp, and the wind blew cold, and a flock of black screaming birds flew over her; they were not so homeless as she.

First she turned southward, far on the way towards Germany. Solid gold rings set with precious stones she pledged for money, and then she went eastward, and then again turned westward. She had no goal before her, and she was angry with everyone, even with God, so miserable was she in mind; and soon her body too shared her misery, and she could hardly drag one foot after the other.

A plover flew up from its grass-tuft when she stumbled over it, and cried, as they always do: “Stop, thief! Stop, thief!” Never had she stolen her neighbours’ goods, but birds’ eggs and young birds she had as a little girl had brought to her from tuft and tree, and that came to her mind now.

From where she lay she could see the sand-hills by the shore. Fishermen lived there, but she could not get so far, she was too ill. The great white seagulls came flying over her and screaming, as the rooks and crows and jackdaws screamed at her home in the Manor garden. The birds flew quite close to her, and at last she thought they had turned coal black; and then everything was dark before her eyes. When she opened them again she was being lifted and carried; a big tall fellow had picked her up in his arms. She looked straight into his bearded face. He had a scar above his eye, cutting the eyebrow clean into two halves. He carried her, weak as she was, to his ship, where he got harsh words from the skipper for his good deed.

Next day the ship sailed. Marie Grubbe was no longer ashore, she went with the ship. But she came back? Yes, but when and where?

This too the Parish Clerk was able to tell, and it wasn’t a tale he had made up himself. He had the whole extraordinary course of it from a trustworthy old book, a book which we can take down and read for ourselves. Ludwig Holberg, [109]  the Danish historian, who wrote so many books worth reading, and also those amusing comedies, from which we learn to know his age and the people who lived in it—he tells in his letters of Marie Grubbe and where and how he met with her. It is worth hearing, but for all that we won’t forget Chicken Greta, sitting cheerful and happy in her splendid hen-house.

The ship set sail with Marie Grubbe aboard; that was where we left off.

A year went by, and yet more years.

The plague was raging in Copenhagen; it was the year 1711. The Queen of Denmark moved to her German home, the King left his capital, everybody who was able hurried away. The students, even those who were lodged and boarded free, went out of the town. One of them, the last who had stayed at what was called Borch’s Collegium, near the Regent’s palace, was now setting off. It was two o’clock in the morning; he started with his knapsack, which was fuller of books and manuscript than merely clothes. A wet cold mist hung low over the town; not a soul was to be seen in all the street he was passing through. About him on doors and gateways crosses were drawn; either the sickness was there or the people had died. No more life was to be seen in the broader, winding Fleshmonger street, as that one was called which leads from the Round Tower down to the King’s palace. Just then a great ammunition cart came rumbling by. The driver was plying his whip, and the horses were at a gallop. The wagon was full of corpses. The young student held his hand to his face and inhaled a strong spirit which he carried in a sponge in a copper vinaigrette. From a pot-house in one of the alleys came the sound of the shrieked-out song and dismal laughter of people who were drinking out the night and trying to forget that the pestilence was waiting at the door and meant to have them into the wagon with the rest of the dead. The student made for the palace bridge, where a few small craft lay. One was weighing anchor to get away from the beleaguered town.

“If God spares us, and we get a wind, we’re bound for Grönsund on Falster,” said the skipper; and asked the student who wanted to come with him, what his name was.

“Ludwig Holberg,” said the student. The name sounded just like any other, but now we hear in it one of the proudest names of Denmark; at that time he was only a young and unknown student. The ship glided on past the palace. It was not yet full day when she got into open water. Then came a light breeze, the sail filled, and the young student lay down with his face towards the fresh wind and fell asleep; not exactly the wisest thing he could have done.

By the dawn of the third day the ship lay off Falster.

“Do you know anyone here with whom I could lodge cheaply?” Holberg asked the Captain.

“I think you’d do well to go to the ferry-woman at the Borrehus,” said he. “If you want to be very polite, her name’s Mother Sören Sörensen Möller, but it may very well be she’ll turn nasty if you’re too finicky with her. Her husband was arrested for some crime, and she works the ferry-boat herself; she’s got a fist of her own.”

The student took his knapsack and went to the ferry-house. The door was not locked, the latch lifted, and he entered into a room with a tiled floor, where the most important piece of furniture was a bedstead with a large leather coverlet. A white hen, with a brood of chicks, was tethered to the bedstead, and had upset the water-bowl so that the water was running over the floor. There was nobody either there or in the next room, only a cradle with a child in it. He looked out of the window: the ferry-boat came back with only one person in it. Whether it was man or woman, was hard to tell. The person was wrapped in a big coat, with a hood drawn over its head.

It was a woman who came walking into the room. She looked quite imposing when she stood up straight. Two proud eyes looked out from under black eyebrows. This was Mother Sören, the ferry-woman. The rooks and crows and jackdaws would scream out a different name, one which we know better.

She had a sullen look, and did not care to talk much, but this much was said and settled, that the student struck a bargain for his keep for an uncertain time, as long as things were so bad at Copenhagen.

Often there came to the ferry-house, from the market town hard by, one or more worthy citizens. Frands the Cutler, and Siverts the Searcher, [88] would come and drink a jug of ale in the ferry-house and have a discussion with the student. He was an able young fellow, who knew his Practica, as it was called, well, he could read Greek and Latin, and knew about learned matters.

“Well, the less you know, the less it worries you,” Mother Sören would say.

“You’re hard worked,” said Holberg one day when she was soaking the linen in the sharp lye, and then had to chop up wood herself for fuel.

“Let me get through it,” she answered.

“Have you always had to drudge and work since you were a child?”

“You can read that for yourself in my fists,” said she, and showed him her two hands—small, to be sure, but hard and strong, with the nails bitten close. “You’re scholar enough to read.”

Towards Christmas the big snowfalls began. The cold got a grip and the wind blew keen as if it had vitriol in it to wash people’s faces with. Mother Sören wasn’t daunted, she wrapped her great coat about her and pulled the hood down on her head. It got dark in the house early in the afternoon. She piled wood and peat on the fireplace, sat herself down and new-footed her stockings, there was nobody else to do it. Towards evening she talked to the student, more than she usually did; she spoke of her husband.

“He happened to kill a skipper from Dragör by accident, and for that he’s got to work in irons on the Holm for three years. He’s only a common sailor, so the law must take its course.”

“The law’s the same for the upper classes too,” said Holberg. “Think so?” said Mother Sören, gazing into the fire. Then she began to speak again. “Did you ever hear of Kai Lykke, who had one of his churches pulled down, and when Parson Mads thundered at him from the pulpit he had Herr Mads laid in bolts and irons and brought an action and condemned him to lose his head himself; and it was cut off too. That wasn’t an accident, yet Kai Lykke got off scot-free that time.”

“Well, he was within his rights according to those days,” said Holberg. “We’ve got past that now.”

“You can tell that to the idiots,” said Mother Sören, and got up and went into the room where “baby”, the little child, lay. She tended it and put it to bed, and then tidied the student’s bed. He had the leather coverlet, he felt the cold more than she, and yet he was born in Norway.

New Year’s morning was a real bright sunny day. There had been a frost, and there was one still, so strong that the drifted snow lay frozen hard enough to be walked on. The bells in the town were ringing for church, and student Holberg wrapped his woollen cloak about him and set off to the town.

High over the Borrehus flew the rooks, the crows and the jackdaws with scream and squall; you could hardly hear the church bells for them. Mother Sören was out of doors filling a copper kettle with snow to set on the fire and get drinking water; she looked up at the swarm of birds and had thoughts of her own about it.

Student Holberg went to church. Both going and coming he passed Sivert the Searcher’s house door. He was asked in to take a cup of hot beer with syrup and ginger. The talk turned on Mother Sören, but the Searcher didn’t know much about her; indeed, few did. “She didn’t come from Falster,” he said. “At one time she must have had some little means; her husband was a common sailor, a hot-tempered man; he had killed a skipper from Dragör. The fellow beats her, but yet she takes his part.”

“I wouldn’t stand such usage,” said the Searcher’s wife. “Besides, I come of a better stock; my father was stocking-weaver to the King.

“And for that reason you have a royal official for a husband,” said Holberg, making his bow to her and the Searcher.

It was Twelfth Night. [89]  Mother Sören lighted a Three-King’s candle for Holberg—that is to say, three tallow dips she had made herself. “A light for each man,” said Holberg.

“Each man?” said the woman, looking sharply at him.

“Each of the wise men from the East,” said Holberg.

“Oh, you mean it that way,” said she, and was silent for a long time. But on that Twelfth Night he got to know more than he had known before.

“You’re fond of the man you’re married to,” said Holberg, “but people say that he keeps on ill treating you.”

“That don’t concern anybody but me,” she answered. “The beatings would have done me good when I was a child. I suppose I get them now for the wrong I’ve done. How good he has been to me, I know.” And she stood up. “When I was lying ill on the open heath and nobody cared to touch me, except maybe rooks and crows to peck me, he carried me in his arms and got hard words for the game he brought to the ship. I wasn’t the kind to lie ill, so I got better. Everyone has his own ways, and Sören has his, but one mustn’t judge the horse by the bridle. On the whole, I’ve lived more happily with him than with the one they called the gallantest and noblest of all the King’s subjects. I was married once to Governor Gyldenlöve, the King’s half-brother. Then I took Palle Dyre. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. Every man to his taste and I to mine. It’s a long story—but now you know all about it.” And she left the room.

It was Marie Grubbe! So strange had been the ups and downs of her fortune. She didn’t live out many more Twelfth Nights. Holberg has recorded that she died in June, 1716, but he has not recorded, for he did not know it, that when Mother Sören, as she was called, lay dead in the house, a swarm of great black birds flew over the place. They made no sound, they seemed to know that there must be quietness about a burial. As soon as she was laid in the grave the birds were seen no more. But the same evening there was seen in Jutland—near the old Manor house—an immense flock of rooks, crows and jackdaws, shrieking into each other’s beaks, as if they had some news to tell; perhaps of the man who when he was little had taken their eggs and their callow young; the peasant’s son who was wearing iron garters on the King’s Holm, and of the noble maiden, who ended her life as ferry-woman at Grönsund. “Bra, Bra!” [90] they screamed, and the whole tribe of them screamed “Bra, Bra!” when the old Manor house was pulled down. “They scream it out still, now there’s nothing to scream about,” said the Parish Clerk when he told the story. “The family’s died out, the Manor house is pulled down, and, where it used to stand, the smart hen-house stands now with its gilded vanes and old Chicken Greta in it. She’s very happy in her pretty dwelling-place; if she hadn’t had that, she’d have been in the poor-house.”

The pigeons cooed above her, the turkeys gobbled and the ducks quacked all round her.

“Nobody knew her,” they said. “Family she has none. It’s an act of charity that she’s here. She’s got no drake-father or hen-mother, and no young ones.”

Family she had, for all that. She didn’t know it, nor did the Parish Clerk, however much he had got recorded in his table drawer, but one of the old crows knew about it, and told about it. She had heard tell from her mother and her grandmother about Chicken Greta’s mother and her grandmother, whom we too know about, from the days when as a child she rode over the drawbridge looking proudly about her, as if the whole world and all the birds’ nests in it were hers. We saw her lying on the heath by the sand-hills, and last we saw her at the Borrehus. Her grandchild, the last of all the race, was come home again to where the old Manor house had stood, where the wild black birds screamed—only she sat among the tame birds, known of them and knowing them all. Chicken Greta had nothing more to wish for. She was glad to die, and old enough to die.

“A grave, a grave!” shrieked the crows.

Chicken Greta was laid in a good grave; nobody knows where it is but the old crow—if she isn’t dead too.

So now we know the story of the old Manor house, and the old time, and all Chicken Greta’s family.

[ 1869 ]

The Story Old Johanna Told

—

The wind pipes in the old willow tree. It is just as if one heard a song: the wind sings it; the tree repeats it. If you do not understand it, then ask old Johanna in the almshouse; she knows all about it; she was born and bred in the parish.

Years ago, when the king’s highway still lay along here, the tree was already large and noticeable. It stood, as it still stands, out in front of the tailor’s whitewashed timber house, at the edge of the fen-water, which was so wide that the cattle were watered there; and there, too, the little peasant boys used to run about naked and paddle in the water. Close beneath the tree was set a milestone of hewn stone; now it is overturned, and brambles grow over it.

On the other side of the grand manor house the new highway was made; the old one became a footpath; the water became a puddle overgrown with duckweed; if a frog tumbled down into it, the green stuff was broken, and one saw the black water; round about there grew, and still grow, flags and yellow iris.

The tailor’s house was old and tumbledown; the roof was a hotbed for moss and house-leek: the dovecote had fallen in, and the starlings built within it; the swallows hung nest after nest on the house gable and all along beneath the roof; just as if good luck found a dwelling here.

And once it was so; but now it had become lonely and silent. All alone dwelt therein “Poor Rasmus,” as they called him. There he was born, there he had played and leaped across meadow and over hedge, and splashed, as a child, in the open water, or clambered up the ancient tree.

The tree used to raise its big branches with pride and beauty, just as it raises them yet, but storms had already bent the trunk a little, and time had given it a crack. Now rain and wind have lodged earth in the crevice, and there grow grass and green-stuff; yes, even a little sorb-apple tree has planted itself there.

When in spring the swallows came, they flew round the tree and about the roof, and plastered and patched their old nests; but Poor Rasmus let his nest stand or fall as it liked. “What good will it do?” was his motto; and it had been his father’s too.

He stayed in his home; the swallows flew away; but they came back, the faithful creatures! The starling flew away, but came back and whistled his note; once Rasmus had known how to whistle in rivalry with it, but now he neither whistled nor sang.

The wind piped in the old willow tree; it pipes still, just as if one heard a song: the wind sings it; the tree repeats it. If you do not understand it, then ask old Johanna in the almshouse; she knows all about it; she is wise in all old-world doings; she’s like a book of chronicles, with inscriptions and tokens of the olden time.

When the house was new and good, there had come into it the country tailor, Ivar Ölse, and his wife Maren; industrious honest folk both of them. Old Johanna was at that time a child; she was the daughter of a wooden-shoemaker—one of the poorest men in the parish. Many a good piece of bread and butter did she get from Maren, who was in no want of food. Maren was liked by the ladies among the gentlefolk; she was always laughing and merry, and did not let herself be downhearted. She used her tongue, but her hands also. She had an eye, too, as nimble as her tongue, as her house and children bore witness: there were nearly a dozen of the latter—eleven complete, the twelfth never made its appearance.

“Poor folk always have a nest full of youngsters,” growled the squire. “If one could drown them like kittens, and keep only one or two of the strongest, it would be all the better.”

“Heaven have mercy!” said the tailor’s wife. “But indeed children are a blessing from God; they are a comfort in the house. Every child is one more prayer to God. If things are cramped, and one has many mouths to feed, why then a man nerves himself to work all the better and finds out honest ways and means: God fails not if we do not fail.”

The lady of the manor house agreed; she nodded kindly, and patted Maren’s cheek: she had done so often, and, indeed, had kissed her; but at that time the lady was a little child, and Maren her nurse-maid. The two were fond of one another, and this sympathy did not cool.

Each year at Christmas-time there arrived at the tailor’s house a store of winter provisions from the manor house: a barrel of meal, a pig, two geese, a tub of butter, cheese and apples. That was a help to the larder. Ivar Ölse looked quite pleased, too, but soon came out again with his old motto, “What good will it do?”

The house was clean and tidy inside, with curtains in the windows, and flowers too, both pinks and balsams. A sampler hung in a picture frame, and close by hung a love-letter in rhyme, which Maren Ölse had herself composed; she knew how rhymes fit themselves together. She was almost a little proud of the family name Ölse; it was the only word in the Danish language that rhymed with “pölse” (sausage). “That is always an advantage to have over other people,” said she, and laughed. She always kept her good-humour, and never said, like her husband, “What good will it do?” Her motto was, “Depend oh yourself and on God.” So she did, and that kept them all together. The children thrived, grew out of the nest, went out into the world, and prospered well.

Rasmus was the last; he was so pretty a child that one of the great painters in the capital borrowed him to paint from, and made a picture of him, naked as when he came into this, world. That picture is hanging now in the king’s palace. The lady of the manor house saw it, and recognised little Rasmus, notwithstanding that he had no clothes on.

But now comes the time of trouble. The tailor had palsy in both hands, on which great lumps appeared. Not a doctor could do him good—not even the wise Esther, who used to “physic.”

“One must not be downhearted,” said Maren. “It’s never any good to hang the head: now we can no longer have father’s two hands to help us, I must see to use mine all the more nimbly. Little Rasmus, too, can use the needle.” He sat already on the sewing table; and whistled and sang. He was a merry lad. “But he ought not to sit there the whole day long,” said the mother; “that would be a sin against the child. He ought to play and jump about too.”

The shoemaker’s Johanna was his favourite playmate; she belonged to still poorer people than Rasmus. She was not pretty, and she went about barefoot. Her clothes hung in rags, for she had no one to mend them, and to do it herself did not occur to her—she was a child, and as happy as a bird in our Lord’s sunshine.

By the stone milepost, under the willow tree, Rasmus and Johanna played.

He had ambitious thoughts; he would one day become a grand tailor, and live in the city, where there were masters who had ten workmen at the table—so he had heard from his father. There he would be an apprentice, and there would become a master tailor, and then Johanna should come to visit him; and if by that time she knew how to cook, she should prepare the meals for them all together, and have a large parlour of her own.

Johanna dared not trust that altogether, but Rasmus believed that it would happen all the same. So they sat beneath the old tree, and the wind whistled in the branches and leaves; it seemed as if the wind were singing and the tree talking.

In the autumn every single leaf fell off: rain dripped from the bare branches.

“They will get green again,” said mother Ölse.

“What good will it do?” said her husband. “New year, new cares for our livelihood.”

“The larder is full,” said the wife; “for that we can thank our good lady. I am healthy, and have plenty of strength. It is sinful for us to complain.”

The gentlefolk stayed over Christmas in their country-house, but the week after the new year they used to go to the city, where they spent the winter in festivity and amusement. They went to balls and fêtes at the house of the king himself. The lady had bought two rich dresses from France; they were of such material, and so cut out and made up, that the tailor’s Maren had never seen such magnificence. She asked the lady as a favour, if she might come up to the house with her husband, that he might see the dresses as well. Such things had never been seen by a country tailor, she said. He saw them, and had not a word to say till he came home, and what he did say was only, “What good will it do?” and on this occasion he spoke a true word.

Well, the grand people went to the city; the balls and merry-making began. But in the midst of all the fine doings the old lord died, and the lady, after all, did not wear her grand dresses. She was so sorrowful, and clad, too, from head to foot in black thick mourning. Not so much as a thread of white was to be seen. All the servants were in black; even the best coach was encased in fine black cloth.

It was a frosty winter’s night; the snow shone white and the stars twinkled; the gloomy hearse came with the body from the city to the country church, where it was to be laid in the family vault. The steward and the parish bailiff waited on horseback with torches in front of the cemetery gate. The church was lighted up, and the priest stood in the open church-door to meet the body. The coffin was borne up into the choir; the whole village followed. The priest read; a psalm was sung. The lady was present in the church; she was driven there in the black-draped coach: it was black within and black without; such a carriage had never before been seen in the parish.

People talked the whole winter about all this magnificence of grief; it was indeed a “lord’s burial.”

“Now one can see of what importance the man was,” said the village folk. “He was nobly born, and so he was nobly buried.”

“What good will it do him?’ said the tailor; “now he has neither life nor goods. We have one of them, at any rate.”

“Do not say such things,” said Maren: “he has everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven.”

“Who told you that, Maren?” said the tailor. “A dead man is good fertilizer, but this man here was much too grand even to do the soil good; he must lie in a church vault.”

“Don’t talk so wickedly,” said Maren. “I tell you again he has everlasting life.”

“Who told you that, Maren?’ replied the tailor. Thereupon Maren threw her apron over little Rasmus; he must not hear the conversation. She carried him off into the woodshed, and wept.

“The words you heard over there, little Rasmus, were not your father’s; it was the evil one who was passing through the room and took your father’s voice. Say your Lord’s Prayer: we’ll both say it.” She folded the child’s hands. “Now I am cheerful again,” she said: “trust in yourself and in God.”

The year of mourning came to an end. The widow lady went about clad in half-mourning; but she had whole-happiness in her heart. It was rumoured abroad that she had a suitor, and was already thinking of marriage. Maren knew something about it, and the pastor knew a little more.

On Palm Sunday, after the sermon, the banns of marriage for the widow-lady and her betrothed were to be published. He was a wood-carver or an image-carver—the name of his profession people did not exactly know, for at that time the sculptor Thorwaldsen and his art were not yet familiar in folks’ mouths. The future master of the manor was not a nobleman; but still he was a very grand man: he was one who was something that no one understood, they said; he cut out images, and was clever in his work, and young and handsome. “What’s the good of it?” said tailor Ölse.

On Palm Sunday the banns were read from the pulpit; then followed a psalm and Communion. The tailor, his wife, and little Rasmus were in church; the parents went to the altar while Rasmus sat in the pew, for he was not yet confirmed. At the last confirmation they had been short of clothes in the tailor’s house; the old ones had been turned and turned again, and stitched and patched. Now they were all three in new clothes, but of black stuff, as at a funeral. They were dressed in the drapery from off the mourning-coach. The man had a jacket and trousers of it; Maren, a high-necked dress; and Rasmus, a whole suit to grow in till confirmation time. Both the outside and inside cloth from the funeral carriage was used. No one need have known what it had been used for before, but, however, people soon got to know it.

The wise woman Esther and a few other equally wise women, who did not live on their wisdom, said that the clothes would bring sickness and disease into the household. “One cannot dress oneself from a funeral carriage without driving to the grave.” The wooden-shoemaker’s Johanna cried when she heard this talk. And when it happened that from that day the tailor sickened worse and worse, it seemed to show to whom it pointed.

And so it proved.

On the First Sunday after Trinity, tailor Ölse died. Now Maren alone was all there was to trust in—she did trust in herself and in God.

The following year, Rasmus went up for confirmation; now he must be off to the city as an apprentice to a master tailor—not, it is true, one with ten apprentices at the table, but with one—though little Rasmus might be reckoned as a half. He was glad; he looked delighted, but Johanna cried; she was fonder of him than she herself knew. The tailor’s widow remained in the old house and carried on the business.

It was at that time that the new highway was opened; the old one, that went by the willow tree and the tailor’s, became a field path; the marsh increased, duckweed grew over the water left in the ditch, the milepost fell down—it had nothing left to stand for; but the tree kept itself strong and beautiful; the wind piped in its branches and leaves.

The swallows flew away, the starling flew away, but they came again in the spring; and now when they came back the fourth time Rasmus, too, came to his home. He had served his apprenticeship, and was a handsome youth; now he would buckle up his knapsack and see foreign countries: that was his inclination. But his mother clung to him; home was always the best! All the other children were scattered about, he was the youngest, the house should be his. He could get work in abundance if he would go about the neighbourhood—be a journeyman tailor, and sew for a fortnight in this house and a fortnight in that. That would be travelling too. And Rasmus followed his mother’s counsel.

So he slept again beneath the roof of his birthplace, sat again under the old willow tree, and heard it sing.

He had a good look, and he could whistle like a bird, and sing new and old songs. He was liked in the big houses, especially in Klaus Hansen’s, the nearest farmer in the parish.

Else, the daughter, was like the loveliest flower to look at, and she was always laughing. There were, in fact, folk who were so unkind as to say that she laughed simply to show her pretty teeth. Merry was she, and always in the humour for playing tricks; everything suited her.

She was fond of Rasmus, and he was fond of her; but neither of them said so outright.

So he went about being gloomy; he had more of his father’s disposition than his mother’s. Good humour only came when Else came; then they both laughed, joked, and played tricks; but although there was good opportunity, he did not say a single word about his love. “What good will it do?” was his thought. “Her parents look for a good position for her, and that I have not; it were wisest to take myself off.” But he could not leave the house. It was just as if Else had a string fastened to him; he was like a trained bird with her; he sang and whistled for her pleasure, and according to her will.

Johanna, the shoemaker’s daughter, was a servant-maid in the house, employed for common work. She drove the milk-cart in the meadow, where she and the other girls milked the cows; she must even bring in manure when it had to be done. She did not go up into the sitting room, and saw little of Rasmus or Else; but she heard this, that the two were as good as lovers.

“Here is Rasmus getting into good circumstances,” said she; “I can’t grudge him that.” And her eyes became quite wet; yet surely there was nothing to cry about.

There was a market in the town. Klaus Hansen drove in, and Rasmus was with them; he sat by Else’s side both there and back. He was heels over ears in love, but never a word did he say about it.

“He might say something to me about the matter,” thought the girl, and there she was right. “If he will not speak, I shall just frighten him up.”

And soon it was told in the houses that the richest householder in the parish had made Else an offer; and so he had, but no one knew what answer she had given.

Thoughts buzzed about in Rasmus’s head.

One evening Else put a gold ring on her finger, and then asked Rasmus what that signified.

“Betrothal,” said he.

“And with whom do you think?” asked she.

“With the rich farmer,” he said.

“There, you have hit it,” said she, and nodded and slipped away.

But he slipped away too; went home to his mother’s house like a bewildered man, and fastened up his knapsack. Out into the wide world he would go; it was no good his mother’s weeping.

He cut himself a stick from the old willow, and whistled as if he were in a good humour; he must be off and see the beauty of the whole world.

“It is a great grief to me,” said the mother; “but if it is indeed best and wisest for you to go away, then I must approve of it. Trust in yourself and God, and so I shall have you back again merry and happy.”

He went along the new highway, and there he saw Johanna come driving with a load of rubbish; she had not noticed him, and he did not wish to be seen by her: he sat down behind a sunken hedge, where he was hidden—and Johanna drove by.

Out into the world he went, no one knew where; his mother thought he would surely come home again before a year was gone. “Now he has new things to see, new things to think about; but he will fall into the old folds; they cannot be ironed out with any iron. He has a little too much of his father’s disposition; I would rather he had mine, poor child. But he will come home again; he cannot say good-bye to me and the house.”

The mother would wait a year and a day. Else waited only a month, and then went secretly to the wise woman, Esther Madsdatter, who understood “physicking,” looked into cards and coffee, and knew more than her Lord’s Prayer. She knew, too, where Rasmus was; she read it in the coffee-grounds. He was in a foreign town, the name of which she could not read. In this town there were soldiers and charming young ladies. His thoughts were either to take the musket or one of the young ladies.

This Else could not bear to hear. She would willingly give her savings to buy him out, but no one must know that it was she.

And old Esther promised that he should come back; she knew of a charm, a dangerous charm for him, which was effectual, but it was a last resource. She would set the pot boiling for him, and then he must come away; wherever in all the world he was, he must come home where the pot was boiling and his darling waiting for him. Months might go before he came, but come he must if life was left in him. Without peace or rest, by night and day, he must away over sea and mountains, whether the season were mild or rough, though his foot were ever so tired. Home he should, and home he must.

The moon was in the first quarter. So it must be for the charm, said Esther. It was stormy weather; the old willow tree creaked. Esther cut a twig off it and tied it in a knot. That, sure enough, would help to draw Rasmus home to his mother’s house. Moss and house-leek were taken from the roof and put in the pot, which was set upon the fire. Else must tear a leaf out of the psalm-book; and she chanced to tear out the last one, with the list of “errata.”  “That does just as well,” said Esther, and threw it into the pot.

All sorts of things went into the stew, which must boil and boil steadily till Rasmus came home. The black cock in old Esther’s room must lose his red comb, which went into the pot. Else’s thick gold ring went in too, and that she would never get again, as old Esther told her beforehand. She was so wise, Esther. More things than we are unable to name went into the stewpan, which stood steadily over the flame, or on glowing embers or hot ashes. Only she and Else knew about it.

The moon was at new—the moon was on the wane. Each time Else came and asked, “Do you see him coming?”

“Much do I know,” said Esther, “and much do I see; but the length of way before him I cannot see. Now he is over the first mountain, now he is on the sea in bad weather. The road is long, through thick woods; he has sores on his feet and fever in his bones: but on he must go.”

“No, no,” said Else; “I am afraid for him.”

“He cannot stop now! for if we do that, he will drop down dead in the road.”

A year and a day had gone. The moon shone round and big; the wind sang in the old tree; in the heavens a rainbow appeared in the moonshine.

“That is a token to prove what I say,” said Esther. “Now Rasmus is coming.”

But still he did not come.

“The time of waiting is long,” said Esther.

“Now I am tired of it,” said ELse. She came less often to Esther, and brought her no more gifts. Her mind became easier, and one fine morning they all knew in the parish that Else had said “yes” to the rich farmer. She went over to look at the house and grounds, the cattle, and the property. All was in good order, and there was no reason to wait for the wedding.

It was celebrated with a great feast, for three days. There was dancing to the clarinet and violins. No one in the parish was forgotten in the invitations. Mother Ölse was there too, and when the fête was at an end, and the steward had returned thanks to the guests, and the trumpets had blown, she went home with the leavings from the feast.

She had only fastened the door with a pin; it was taken out, and the door stood open; and in the room sat Rasmus. He had come home—come that very hour. Good God! what a look he had; skin and bone only: and how pale and yellow he looked!

“Rasmus,” said his mother, “is it you I see? How badly you look! but I am glad from my heart that I have you back.”

And she gave him the good food she had brought home from the feast, a piece of roast meat, and of the wedding-cake.

He had lately, he said, often thought of his mother, his home, and the old willow tree: it was wonderful how often he had seen the tree in his dreams, and the little barefoot Johanna.

He did not mention Else at all; he was ill, and had to go to bed. But we do not believe that the stewpan was the cause of this, or that it had exercised any power over him. Only old Esther and Else. thought that; but they did not talk about it.

Rasmus lay in a fever—an infectious one. For that reason no one came to the tailor’s house, except Johanna, the shoemaker’s daughter. She cried when she saw how miserable Rasmus was.

The doctor wrote up a prescription from the dispensary; he would not take the medicine: “What good will it do?” he said.

“You will get well again,” said his mother. “Trust in yourself and in God! If I could only see you get flesh on your bones again, hear you whistle and sing; for that I would willingly lay down my life.”

And Rasmus was raised from sickness—but his mother caught it. Our Lord summoned her, and not him.

He was lonely in the house; he got poorer and poorer in it. “He is worn out,” they said in the parish; “Poor Rasmus.” A wild life he had led on his travels; that, and not the black stewpan that boiled, had sucked out his marrow and given him pains in the bones. His hair became thin and grey; he could not do anything properly.

“What good will it do?” said he. He was fonder of visiting the tavern than the church.

One autumn evening he was coming with difficulty through rain and wind along the muddy road from the tavern to his house: his mother was long since gone, laid in her grave. The swallows and starling were also gone, faithful creatures though they were. Johanna the shoemaker’s daughter was not gone: she overtook him on the road, and followed him a little way—

“Take care of yourself, Rasmus.”

“What good will it do?” said he.

“That is an ill saying that you have,” said she. “Remember your mother’s word: Trust in yourself and in God. You do not do that, Rasmus; but that you must and shall. Never say, ‘What good will it do?’ That is to pull up the root of all your doings.”

She followed him to his house-door, and there left him. He did not remain inside, he wandered out under the old willow tree and sat on a stone from the overturned milepost.

The wind whistled in the tree’s branches; it was like a song, a conversation. Rasmus answered it; he spoke out loud, but no one heard it except the tree and the whistling wind.

“It strikes so cold over me. It is quite time to go to bed—sleep! sleep!”

And he went, but not towards the house, but away to the marsh; there he tottered and fell. Rain poured down, the wind was icy cold; he perceived it not. But when the sun rose, and the rooks flew about over the marsh bulrushes, he woke half perished in his bones. Had he laid his head where his feet lay, then he would have never got up. The green duckweed would have been his burial shroud.

During the day Johanna came to his house; she was a help to him; she got him to the hospital.

“We have known one another from little ones,” she said; “your mother has given me both ale and meat; for that I can never repay her. You will get your health again; you will become a man with a will to live!”

And God willed that he should live. But it was up and down, both with health and humour.

The swallows and the starling came and flew away, and came again. Rasmus became old sooner than his years. He sat alone in his house, which fell to ruin more and more. He was poor; poorer now than Johanna.

“You have not faith,” said she; “and if we have not God, what have we? You ought to go to Communion,” she said; “you have not been, surely, since your confirmation?”

“No; what good will it do?” said he.

“If you say that and believe it, then let it be; the Master does not want an unwilling guest at His table. But think of your mother and your childhood. Once you were a good, pious boy. Let me read a psalm to you.”

“What good will it do?” said he.

“It always comforts me,” answered she.

“Johanna, you have surely become one of the saints;” and he looked at her with dull, weary eyes.

And Johanna read the psalm, but not out of a book, for she had none; she knew it by heart.

“Those were beautiful words,” he said; “but I could not follow them altogether. My head feels so heavy.”

Rasmus was become an old man. But Else, indeed, if we may mention her, was no longer young, either: Rasmus never mentioned her. She was a grandmother; her granddaughter was an impudent little maiden.

The little one was playing with the other children in the village; Rasmus came supporting himself on his stick; he stood still, watched the children’s play, and smiled at them. Old times shone into his thoughts. Else’s granddaughter pointed at him: “Poor Rasmus!” she called out. The other little girls followed her example: “Poor Rasmus!” they cried, and pursued the old man with shouts.

It was a grey, gloomy day, on which more followed; but after grey and gloomy days there comes, too, a sunshiny day.

It was a fine Whitsun-morning: the church was decked with green birch-boughs; there was a scent of the woods within it, and the sun shone over the pulpit. The large altar candles were lighted, for the Communion was going on. Johanna was amongst the kneelers, but Rasmus was not with them—that very morning the Lord had called him.

In God are grace and mercy.

•  •  •

Many years have passed since. The tailor’s house still stands, but no one lives there. It might fall the first stormy night. The water is overgrown with bulrush and flag. The wind whistles in the old tree; it is as if one heard a song: the wind sings it; the tree tells it; if you understand it not, ask old Johanna in the almshouse.

She lives there still, she sings her psalm that she sang for Rasmus; she thinks of him, prays to God for him—she, the faithful soul. She can tell of times that are gone, of memories that sigh in the old willow tree.

[ 1872 ]

Ole the Watchman

—

“Up and down! down and up! Such is the way of the world,” quoth Ole the watchman. “Now I can hardly get any higher; but up and down, down and up! such is the lot of most of us: it is a fine thing when one becomes a watchman in a tower, like me, able to look down upon life from an eminence.”

Such was the speech of Ole, my friend, the old tower-keeper, a strange, talkative old fellow, who seemed to speak out everything that came into his head, and who for all that had many a serious thought deep in his heart. Yes, he was the child of respectable people, and there were even some who said that he was the son of a privy councillor, or that he might have been. He had studied, too, and had been assistant teacher and deputy clerk; but of what service was all that to him? In those days he lived in the clerk’s house, and was to have use of everything in the house—to be at free quarters, as the saying is; but he was young and a bit of a dandy. He wanted to have his boots cleaned with patent blacking, and the clerk could only afford ordinary grease; and upon that point they split. One spoke of stinginess, the other of vanity, and the blacking became the black cause of enmity between them, and at last they parted.

This is what he demanded of the world in general, namely, patent blacking, and he got nothing but grease. Accordingly, he at last drew back from all men, and became a hermit; but the church tower is the only place in a great city where hermitage, office and bread can be found together. So he betook himself up there, and smoked his pipe as he made his solitary rounds. He looked upward and downward, and had his own thoughts, and told in his own way of what he read in books and in himself. I often loaned him books—good books; and his taste in these was a fair test of his character. “Only tell me what books thou readest, and I will tell thee what life thou leadest,” is no bad proverb. He loved neither the English governess novels nor the French ones, which he called a mixture of empty wind and raisin-stalks: he wanted biographies, and descriptions of the wonders of the world. I visited him at least once a year, generally directly after New Year’s day, and then he always spoke of this and that which the change of the year had put into his head.

I will tell the story of three of these visits, giving his own words as far as I can.

FIRST VISIT

Among the books which I had lately loaned Ole, was one which had greatly rejoiced and occupied him. It was a geological book, containing an account of the boulders.

“Yes, they’re rare old fellows, those boulders!” he said; “and to think that we should pass them without noticing them! And over the street pavement, the paving stones, those fragments of the oldest remains of antiquity, one walks without ever thinking about them. I have done the very thing myself. But now I look respectfully at every paving-stone. Many thanks for the book! It has filled me with thought, and has made me long to read more on the subject. The romance of the earth is, after all, the most wonderful of all romances. It’s a pity one can’t read the first volume of it, because it is written in a language that we don’t understand. One must read in the different strata, in the pebble-stones, for each separate period. Yes, it is a romance, a very wonderful romance, and we all have our place in it. We grope and ferret about, and yet remain where we are; but the globe keeps turning, without emptying the ocean over us; the clod on which we move about, holds, and does not let us through. And then it’s a story that has been acting for thousands upon thousands of years and is still going on. My best thanks for the book about the boulders. Those are fellows indeed! They could tell us something worth hearing, if they only knew how to talk. It’s really a pleasure now and then to become a mere nothing, especially when a man is as highly placed as I am. And then to think that we all, even with patent lacquer, are nothing more than insects of a moment on that ant-hill the earth, though we may be insects with stars and garters, places and offices! One feels quite a novice beside these venerable million-year-old boulders. On last New Year’s eve I was reading the book, and had lost myself in it so completely, that I forgot my usual New Year’s diversion, namely, the wild hunt to Amager. Ah, you don’t know what that is!

“The witches’ flight to Blocksberg on Midsummer Eve is famous enough, but our wild host speeds to Amager on New Year’s Eve. All the indifferent poets and poetesses, musicians, newspaper writers, and artistic notabilities—I mean those who are no good—ride on New Year’s Eve through the air to Amager. they sit astride their pencils or goose-quills—steel-pens are too stiff for the purpose. As I told you, I see them every New Year’s Eve, and could mention the majority of the riders by name, but I should not like to draw their enmity upon myself, for they don’t like people to talk about their ride to Amager on quill pens. I have a kind of cousin, who is a fishwife, and who, as she tells me, supplies three respectable newspapers with the terms of abuse and vituperation they use, and she has herself been at Amager as an invited guest; but she was carried out thither, for she cannot herself wield a pen, and therefore could not ride on one. She has told me all about it. Half of what she said is not true, no doubt, but the other half gives us information enough. When she was out there, the festivities began with a song; each of the guests had written his own song, and each one sang his own song, for he thought that the best; they were all much alike—it was regular cats’ chorus. Then those came marching up, in little bands, who are only busy with their mouths. There were ringing bells that rang alternately; and then came the little drummers that beat their tattoo in the family circle; and acquaintance was made with those who write without putting their names, which here means as much as using grease instead of patent blacking; and then there was the beadle with his boy, and the boy was worst off, for in general he gets no notice taken of him; then, too, there was the good street sweeper with his cart, who turns over the dust-bin, and calls it ‘good, very good, remarkably good.’ And in the midst of the pleasure that was afforded by the mere meeting of these folks, there shot up out of the great dirt-heap at Amager a stem, a tree, an immense flower, a great mushroom, a perfect roof, which formed a sort of warehouse for the worthy company, for in it hung everything they had given to the world during the Old Year. Out of the tree poured sparks like flames of fire; these were the borrowed ideas and thoughts which they had used, and which now got free and rushed away like so many fireworks. They played at games: ‘What are my thoughts like?’ and ‘Cross questions and crooked answers,’ and the witlings played off their jests, and the jests rolled away with a thundering sound, as if empty pots were being shattered against doors. ‘It was very amusing!’ my cousin said; in fact, she said many things that were very malicious but very amusing, but I won’t mention them, for a man must be good-natured, and not a carping critic. But you will easily perceive that when a man once knows the facts of the journey to Amager, as I know them, it’s quite natural that one should watch on New Year’s Eve to see the wild chase go by. If I miss certain persons who used to be there, I am sure to notice others who are new arrivals; but this year I forgot all about it.

“I was bowled away on the boulders, rolled back through millions of years, and saw the stones break loose high up in the north, saw them drifting along with the icebergs, long before Noah’s ark was constructed, saw them sink down to the bottom of the sea, and re-appear with a sand-reef—with that one that peered forth from the flood and said, ‘This shall be Zealand!’ I saw them become the dwelling-place of birds that are unknown to us, and then become the seat of wild chieftains of whom we know nothing, until the axe hewed out in Runic letters the names of a few who can thus be referred in our chronology.

“Well, I was still busied with these stones when three or four beautiful falling stars came down, which cleared the air, and gave my thoughts another direction. You know what a falling star is, do you not? The learned men are not at all clear about it. I have my own ideas about shooting stars, as the common people in many parts call them, and my idea is this: How often are silent thanksgivings offered up for one who has done a good and noble action! The thanks are often unuttered, but they are not lost for all that. I think these thanks are caught up, and the sunbeams shower the silent, hidden thankfulness over the head of the benefactor; and if it be a whole people that has been expressing its gratitude through a long lapse of time, the thankfulness appears like a bouquet, falling in the form of a shooting star over the good man’s grave.

“I am always very much pleased when I see a shooting star, especially on New Year’s Eve, and then find out for whom the gift of gratitude was intended. Lately there fell a radiant shooting-star in the southwest—whom could that be for?—it fell, I think, exactly over the bank by Flensborg Fiord, where the Danish banner with its white cross waves over the graves of Schleppegrell, Lassoe, and their comrades. And another fell in the heart of Zealand—it fell upon Sorö; I know that was a bouquet for Holberg’s grave, a thanksgiving from the multitude who during the past year have laughed over his delightful comedies.

“It would be a joy indeed, a triumph, to know that such a meteor would fall upon our own graves! One thing is certain, none will ever fall on mine, not a single sunbeam will bring me thanks, for I have done nothing I can be thanked for. I do not deserve, it seems, even blacking for my boots!’

SECOND VISIT

It was New Year’s day, and I went up on the tower. Ole spoke of the toasts that were drunk on the transition from the Old Year into the New—from one grave into the other, as he said. And he told me a story about the glasses, and this story had a very deep meaning. It was this:

“When on New Year’s Eve the clock strikes twelve, people rise from the table fresh filled, and drink a welcome to the New Year. Folk begin the year with the glass in their hands; that is a good beginning for drunkards. Folk begin the New Year by going to bed, and that’s a good beginning for sluggards. Sleep is sure to play a great part in the New Year, and the glass likewise. Do you know what dwells in the glass?” asked Ole. “I will tell you. There dwell in the glass, first, health, and then pleasure, then the most complete sensual delight; and misfortune and the bitterest woe dwell in the glass also. Now, suppose we count the glasses—of course I count the different degrees in the glasses for different people.

“You see, the first glass, that’s the glass of health, and in that the herb of health is found growing. Put it up on the beam in the ceiling, and at the end of the year you may be sitting in the arbour of health.

“If you take the second glass—from this a little bird soars upward, twittering in guileless cheerfulness, so that a man may listen to his song, and perhaps join in singing ‘Fair is life! no downcast looks! Take courage, and march onward!’

“Out of the third glass rises a little winged urchin, who certainly cannot be called an angel child, for there is goblin blood in his veins, and he has the spirit of a goblin—not wishing to hurt or harm you, indeed, but very ready to play tricks upon you. He’ll sit at your ear and whisper merry thoughts to you; he’ll creep into your heart and warm you, so that you grow very merry, and become a wit, so far as the wits of the others can judge.

“In the fourth glass is neither herb, bird, nor urchin. In that glass is the boundary line of reason, and one should never go beyond that boundary.

“Take the fifth glass, and you will weep at yourself, you will feel such a deep emotion; or it will affect you in a different way. Out of the glass there will spring with a bang Prince Carnival, extravagantly merry. He’ll draw you away with him; you’ll forget your dignity, if you have any, and you’ll forget more than you should or ought to forget. All is dance, song and sound: the masks will carry you away with them, and the daughters of vanity, clad in silk and satin, will come with loose hair and alluring charms; but tear yourself away if you can!

“The sixth glass! Ah, here comes a man with a lantern to guide you home—to what sort of home? and inhabited by what sort of spirits? There is an old legend about a saint who was allowed to choose one of the seven deadly sins, and who accordingly chose drunkenness, which appeared to him the least, but which led him to commit all the other six. The vile liquid in the sixth glass nourishes all evil seeds within us; each one of them sprouting forth with a force like that of the grain of mustard, which spreads into a mighty tree.

“That’s the history of the glasses,” said the tower-keeper Ole, “and it can be told with lacquer or only with grease; but I give it to you with both!”

THIRD VISIT

On this occasion I chose the general “moving-day” for my visit to Ole, for on that day it is anything but agreeable down in the streets in the town. The streets are so littered with heaps of rubbish, broken chairs, and crockery—not to speak of fusty old bed-straw which one has to go trampling under foot. Well, there I came; and, in the middle of these outpourings of the lumber-room and dustbin, I saw two children at play. They were playing at “going to bed,” it looked so inviting here for that game, they thought. Yes, they snuggled down in the live straw, and drew an old bit of ragged curtain over themselves by way of coverlet. ““That was beautiful,” they said. It was too beautiful for me; so I hurried off, and went up to Ole.

“It’s moving-day to day,” he said; “streets and alleys serve as dust-bins—dustbins on a grand style; but I’m content with a cartload. I may get something good out of that, and so I did, soon after Christmas. I was plodding down a street, all was damp and raw and puddly—just the place and weather to catch cold in. The dustman had drawn up his cart there, brimful; it looked like a sample of streets on moving-day. At the back of the cart stood a fir tree, quite green still, and with tinsel on its twigs; it had been used on Christmas Eve, and now it was thrown out into the street, and the dustman had stood it up at the back of his cart. It was a sight to laugh at or to weep over yes, one might go so far as that it all depends upon the turn of one’s thoughts. Now I fell a-thinking, and so did some of the odds and ends that lay in the cart; or at least they may have fallen a-thinking, which is nearly the same thing. There was a torn lady’s glove: I wonder what that was thinking of? Shall I tell you? The glove was lying there, pointing with its little finger at the tree. ‘I’m sorry for the tree,’ it thought; ‘and I was also at the feast, where the chandeliers glittered. My life was, so to speak, a ball night—a squeeze of the hand, and I burst! My memory keeps dwelling upon that, and I have really nothing else to live for!’ This is what the glove thought, or what it might have thought. ‘That’s a stupid affair with yonder fir tree,’ said the potsherds. You see, potsherds think everything is stupid. ‘When one is in the dust-cart,’ they said, ‘it is time to give up one’s fine airs and tinsels. I know that I have been useful in the world—far more useful than such a green stick.’ This was a view that might be taken, and I don’t think it quite a peculiar one; but for all that, the fir tree looked very well: it was a bit of poetry in the dust-heap; there are many such to be found in the streets on moving-day. But the roads down there were heavy and wearisome, and I longed to get away, back to my tower, and to remain up there; for here I sit, and look down from above and indulge my humour.

“Down below there the good folks are playing at Change Houses. [91] They work hard to pack up and pack off with their movables: and the household goblin sits on the cart-tail and moves along with them. Household squabbles, family broils, sorrows and cares move away from the old threshold to the new: and what gain is there for them or for us in the whole affair? Yes, there was written long ago the good old maxim:

‘Think on Death’s great Moving Day!’

“It is an awful thought, but one finds a certain strange pleasure in dwelling on it. Death ever has been, and ever will be, the trustiest of all officials, in spite of his many petty offices. Many they are indeed: have you ever thought them over?

“Death is an omnibus conductor; he is a passport writer; he sets his name to our testimonials; and he is the director of life’s great savings-bank. Can you understand this? All our earthly doings, great and small, are deposited in that savings-bank, Then, when Death comes up with his Moving Day omnibus, and we have to step in, and be driven to Eternity-land, he gives us our testimonials on the frontier as a passport. For our diet-money on the journey, he draws out of the savings-bank one or another of our doings—whichever of them most distinctly marks our conduct: this may look delightful to us, but it may look horrible.

“Nobody has yet escaped that omnibus. There is certainly talk about one who was not allowed to go—Jerusalem’s shoemaker (they call him the Wandering Jew): he has to run behind the omnibus. If he had been allowed to get in, he would have escaped the clutches of the poets.

“Take an imaginary peep into the great Moving Day omnibus. What a motley fellowship! There sit, side by side, king and beggar, genius and idiot. Away they must go, without goods or gold; with nothing but their testimonials and their diet-money out of life’s savings-bank. But of each man’s doings, which one has been drawn out and given him? Perchance a very small one, no bigger than a pea: yet a branching vine may shoot out of it.

“The poor bumpkin who sat on a low stool in the corner, and was jeered at and flouted, will perhaps have his worn-out stool given him as a provision; and the stool will become a car to bear him to the land of eternity; and there spread into a throne, glittering like gold and blooming like a bower.

“He who has always been tippling from the spicy cup of pleasure, and thus forgetting his other faults and follies, now receives a wooden keg as his portion; he is forced to drink out of it on his journey, and the draughts are pure and cleansing, so that his thoughts are cleared, his better and nobler sentiments are awakened, and he sees and feels what in life he could not or would not see; and thus he bears within himself his own punishment, the gnawing worm that never dies. If the motto of his wine-cup was Forgetfulness, the motto of his keg is Remembrance.

“Whenever I read a good book, an historical work, I cannot help picturing to myself the person of whom I am reading, at the last stage of all, when he begins to get into Death’s omnibus. I cannot help thinking which of his doings Death has given him out of the savings-bank, and what sort of diet-money he has received on his way to Eternity-land. There was once a French king—I forget his name; the good man’s name is sometimes forgotten by you and me, but will surely come to light again: it was a king who, in time of famine, became the benefactor of his people; and the people raised him a monument of snow, with the inscription “Quicker than this melts, thou didst help!” I think Death must have given him, with reference to the monument, one single snow-flake, that would never melt; and it flew like a white butterfly above his kingly head, onward into the deathless land. Again, there was Louis the Eleventh, his name now, I do remember; one always remembers what is bad, a sample of his doings often comes into my mind; I only wish one could say the story was a lie.

“He had his constable beheaded; that he might do, justly or unjustly; but the constable’s innocent children, the one eight, the other seven years old, he placed on the same scaffold so that the warm blood of their father spurted over them; and then they were led to the bastille and set in an iron cage, without so much as a blanket to cover them. And every eighth day, King Louis sent them the headsman to pull a tooth out of each of them, for fear they should get used to their misery. And the elder one said, “My mother would die of sorrow if she knew my little brother suffered so much; pray pull out two teeth of mine, and let him go free.” And the headsman had tears in his eyes at hearing this; but the king’s will was stronger than the tears; and every eighth day a silver dish was brought to the king, with two children’s teeth on it: and as he had demanded them, so he had them. Two teeth, I think, were what Death drew out of life’s savings-bank for King Louis the Eleventh, that he should take them with him on his journey to the deathless land. They flew like two fire-flies before him; they glowed, they burned, they stung him, those innocent children’s teeth.

“Yes, that’s a serious journey, the omnibus ride on the great moving-day! And when is it to be undertaken? That’s just the serious part of it. Any day, any hour, any minute, the omnibus may draw up. Which of our deeds will Death take out of the savings bank, and give to us as provision? Let us think of the Moving Day that is not marked in the calendar.”

[ 1859 ]

The Will-o’-the Wisp Is in the Town

—

There was a man who once knew many stories, but they had slipped away from him—so he said. The Story that used to visit him of its own accord no longer came and knocked at his door. And why did it come no longer? It is true enough that for days and years the man had not thought of it, had not expected it to come and knock; and if he had expected it, it would certainly not have come; for without there was war, and within was the care and sorrow that war brings with it.

The stork and the swallows came back from their long journey, for they thought of no danger; and, behold, when they arrived, the nest was burned, the habitations of men were burned, the hedges were all in disorder, and everything seemed gone, and the enemy’s horses were trampling over the old graves. Those were hard, gloomy times, but they came to an end.

And now they were past and gone—so people said; yet no Story came and knocked at the door, or gave any tidings of its presence.

“I suppose it must be dead, or gone away with many other things,” said the man.

But the story never dies. And more than a whole year went by, and he longed—oh, so very much!—for the Story.

“I wonder if the Story will ever come back again and knock?”

And he remembered it so well in all the various forms in which it had come to him, sometimes young and charming, like spring itself, sometimes as a beautiful maiden, with a wreath of thyme in her hair, and a beechen branch in her hand, and with eyes that gleamed like deep woodland lakes in the bright sunshine.

Sometimes it had come to him in the guise of a pedlar, and had opened its box and let silver ribbon come fluttering out, with verses and inscriptions of old remembrances.

But it was most charming of all when it came as “old Granny,” with silvery hair, and such large, sensible eyes. She knew so well how to tell about the oldest times, long before the princesses spun with the golden spindles, and the dragons lay outside the castles, guarding them. She told with such an air of truth, that black spots danced before the eyes of all who heard her, and the floor became black with human blood; terrible to see and to hear, and yet so fascinating, because such a long time had passed since it all happened.

“Will it ever knock at my door again?” said the man, and he gazed at the door, so that black spots came before his eyes and upon the floor; he did not know if it was blood, or mourning crape from the dark heavy days.

And as he sat there, the thought struck him whether the Story might not have hidden itself, like the princess in the old tale. And he would now go in search of it; if he found it, it would beam in new splendour, lovelier than ever.

“Who knows? Perhaps it has hidden itself in the straw that balances on the brink of the well. Carefully, carefully! Perhaps it lies hidden in a certain flower—that flower in one of the great books on the bookshelf.”

And the man went and opened one of the newest books, full of information and knowledge, but no flowers lay there. There he read about Holger Danske; and the man read that the tale had been invented and put together by a monk in France, that it was a romance, “translated into Danish and printed in that language;” that Holger Danske had never really lived, and consequently could never come again, as we have sung, and have been so glad to believe. And William Tell was treated just like Holger Danske. These were all only myths—nothing on which we could depend; and all this was set forth in the book with great wisdom.

“Well, I shall believe what I believe!” said the man. “No plantain grows where no foot has trod.”

And he closed the book and put it back in its place, and went to the fresh flowers at the window. Perhaps the Story might have hidden itself in the red tulips, with the golden yellow edges, or in the fresh rose, or in the beaming camellia. The sunshine lay among the flowers, but no Story.

The flowers which stood here in the time of sorrow had been much more beautiful; but they had been cut off, one after another, to be woven into wreaths and placed in the coffins, and the flag had waved over them. Perhaps the Story had been buried with the flowers; but then the flowers would have known of it, and the coffin would have heard it, and every little blade of grass that shot forth would have told of it. The Story never dies.

Perhaps it has been here once, and has knocked; but who had eyes or ears for it in those times? People looked darkly, gloomily, and almost angrily at the sunshine of spring, at the twittering birds, and all the cheerful green; the tongue could not even bear the old merry, popular songs, and they were laid in the coffin with so much that our heart held dear. The Story may have been here and knocked, but no one heard it; it was not welcomed, and so it may have gone away.

“I will go forth and seek it. Out in the country! out in the wood! and on the open sea beach!”

•  •  •

Out in the country lies an old manor house, with red walls, pointed gables, and a red flag that floats on the tower. The nightingale sings among the finely-fringed beech leaves, while he looks at the blooming apple trees of the garden and believes that they are bearing roses. Here the bees are mightily busy in the summertime, and hover round their queen with their humming song. The autumn has much to tell of the wild chase, of the leaves of the trees, and of the races of men that are passing away together. The wild swans sing at Christmas time on the open water, while in the old hall the guests by the fireside gladly listen to songs and to old legends.

Down into the old part of the garden, where the great avenue of wild chestnut trees lures the wanderer to tread its shades, went the man who was in search of the Story; for here the wind had once murmured something to him of “Waldemar Daae and his Daughters.” The Dryad in the tree, who was the Story-mother herself, had here told him the “Dream of the Old Oak Tree.” Here, in the time of the ancestral mother, had stood clipped hedges, but now only ferns and stinging nettles grew there, hiding the scattered fragments of old statues of stone; the moss is growing in their eyes, but they can see as well as ever, which was more than the man could do who was in search of the Story, for he could not find that. Where could it be?

The crows flew past him by hundreds above the old trees, and screamed, “Krah! da!—Krah! da!”

And he went out of the garden and over the grass-plot of the yard, into the alder grove; there stood a little six-sided house, with a poultry-yard and a duck-yard. In the middle of the room sat the old woman who looked after everything, and who knew all about every egg that was laid, and about every chicken that would creep out of an egg. But she was not the Story of which the man was in search; that she could prove with certificates of Christian baptism and of vaccination, which lay in her chest of drawers.

Some distance off, not far from the house, is a hill covered with red-thorn and broom. Here lies an old grave-stone, which was brought here many years ago from the churchyard of the provincial town, a remembrance of one of the most honoured councillors of the place; his wife and his five daughters, all with folded hands and stiff ruffs, stand round him, hewn in stone. One could look at them so long, that it had an effect upon the thoughts, and these seemed to influence the stone, so that it began telling stories about old times; at least, that is what happened to the man who was in search of the Story.

As he came nearer, he saw a living butterfly sitting on the forehead of the sculptured councillor. The butterfly flapped its wings, and flew a little bit farther, and then returned to sit upon the grave-stone, as if to point out what grew there. Four-leaved clovers grew there; there were seven of them, close to one another. When fortune comes, it comes in a heap. He plucked the clovers and put them in his pocket.

“Luck is as good as ready money, but a new charming story would be better still,” thought the man; but he could not find it here.

And the sun went down, round and large; in the meadow vapours were rising. The moor-woman was at her brewing.

•  •  •

It was evening. He stood alone in his room, and looked out upon the sea, over the meadow, over moor and coast. The moon shone bright, a mist was over the meadow, making it look like a great lake; and, indeed, it was once so, as the legend tells—and in the moonlight the eye realizes these myths.

Then the man thought of what he had been reading in the town, that William Tell and Holger Danske never really existed, but still they live in popular story, like the lake yonder, a living evidence for such legends. Yes, Holger Danske will return again!

As he stood thus and thought, something beat quite strongly against the window. Was it a bird, a bat, an owl? One doesn’t open windows for such visitors, even when they knock. The window flew open of itself, and an old woman looked in at the man.

“What’s your pleasure?” said he. “Who are you? You’re looking in at the second story window. Are you standing on a ladder?”

“You have a four-leaved clover in your pocket,” she replied. “In fact, you have seven, and one of them is a six-leaved one.”

“Who are you?” asked the man again.

“The Moor-woman,” she replied. “The Moor-woman who brews. I was busy brewing. The bung was in the barrel, but one of the little marsh-imps pulled it out for mischief, and flung it up into the yard, where it beat against the window; and now the beer’s running out of the barrel, and that won’t do good to anybody.”

“Pray tell me some more!” said the man.

“Yes, yes, only wait a little,” answered the Moor-woman. “I’ve something else to do just now.” And she was gone.

The man was going to shut the window, when the woman already stood before him again.

“Now it’s done,” she said; “but I shall have half the beer to brew over again tomorrow, if the weather is suitable. Well, what have you to ask me? I’ve come back, for I always keep my word, and you have seven four-leaved clovers in your pocket, and one of them is a six-leaved one. That commands respect, for that’s an order that grows by the roadside; but such cannot be found by everyone. What have you to ask me? Don’t stand there like a silly dolt, for I must go back again directly to my bung and my barrel.”

And the man asked about the Story, and inquired if the Moor-woman had met it in her journeyings.

“By the big brewing-vat!” exclaimed the woman, “haven’t you got stories enough? I really believe that most people have enough of them. There are other things to take notice of, other things to examine. Even the children have gone beyond that. Give the little boy a cigar, and the little girl a new petticoat; they like that much better. To listen to stories! No, indeed, there are more important things to be done here, and other things to notice!”

“What do you mean by that?” asked the man, “and what do you know of the world? You don’t see anything but frogs and Will-o’-the-Wisps!”

“Yes, beware of the Will-o’-the-Wisps,” said the Moor-woman, “for they’re out—they’re let loose—that’s what we must talk about! Come to me in the moor, where my presence is necessary, and I will tell you all about it; but you must make haste, and come while your seven four-leaved clovers, with the six-leaved one, are still fresh, and while the moon still stands high!”

And the Moor-woman was gone.

•  •  •

It struck twelve in the town, and before the last stroke had died away, the man was out in the yard, out in the garden, and stood in the meadow. The mist had vanished, and the Moor-woman had stopped her brewing.

“You’ve been a long time coming!” said the Moor-woman. “Witches get forward faster than men, and I’m glad that I belong to the witch folk!”

“What have you to say to me now?” asked the man. “Is it anything about the Story?”

“Can you never get beyond asking about that?” retorted the woman.

“Can you tell me anything about the poetry of the future?” resumed the man.

“Don’t get on your stilts,” said the crone, “and I’ll answer you. You think of nothing but poetry, and only ask about that Story, as if she were the lady of the whole troop. She’s the oldest of us all, but she is generally taken for the youngest. I know her well. I’ve been young, too, and she’s no chicken now. I was once quite a pretty elf-maiden, and have danced in my time with the others in the moonlight, and have heard the nightingale, and have gone into the forest and met the Story-maiden, who was always to be found out there, gadding about. Sometimes she took up her night’s lodging in a half-blown tulip, or in a field flower; sometimes she would slip into the church, and wrap herself in the mourning crape that hung down from the candles on the altar.”

“You are wonderfully well-informed,” said the man.

“I ought at least to know as much as you,” answered the Moor-woman. “Stories and poetry—yes, they’re like two yards of the same piece of cloth; they can go and lie down where they like. One can brew all their prattle over again, and have it all much better and cheaper. You shall have it from me for nothing. I have a whole cupboard-full of poetry in bottles. It is the essence, the best part of it—both bitter and sweet herbs. I have everything that people want of poetry, in bottles, so that I can put a little on my handkerchief, on holidays, to smell.”

“Why, these are wonderful things that you’re telling!” said the man. “You have poetry in bottles?”

“More than you can stand,” said the woman. “I suppose you know the history of ‘the Girl who Trod on the Loaf, so that she might not soil her shoes’? That has been written, and printed too.”

“I told that story myself,” said the man.

“Well, then you must know it; and you must know also that the girl sank into the earth directly, to the Moor-woman, just as the Devil’s great-grandmother was paying her morning visit to inspect the brewery. She saw the girl gliding down, and asked to have her to put on a pedestal, as a remembrance of the visit, and got her too; while I received a present that’s of no use to me—a travelling druggist’s shop—a whole cupboard-full of poetry in bottles. Great-grandmother told me where the cupboard was to be placed, and there it’s standing still. Just look! You’ve your seven four-leaved clovers in your pocket, one of which is a six-leaved one, and so you will be able to see it.”

And sure enough, in the midst of the moor lay something like a great knotted stump of alder, and that was the great-grandmother’s cupboard. The Moor-woman said that this was always open to her and to everyone in the world, if they only knew where the cupboard stood. It could be opened either at the front or at the back, and at every side and corner—a most ingenious piece of work, and yet only an old alder tree stump in appearance. The poets of all lands, and especially those of our own country, had been re-manufactured here; the spirit of them had been extracted, refined, criticised, renovated, concentrated, and then stored up in bottles. With what may be called great aptitude, if it was not genius, the grandmother had taken, as it were, the flavour of this and of that poet, and had added a little devilry, and then corked up the bottles for use during all future times.

“Pray let me see,” said the man.

“Yes, but there are more important things to hear,” replied the Moor-woman.

“But now we are at the cupboard!” said the man. And he looked in. “Here are bottles of all sizes. What is in this one? and what in that one yonder?”

“Here is what they call May-balm,” replied the woman. “I have not tried it myself.

“But I know that if you pour only a small drop of it on the floor, you have at once before you a beautiful woodland lake, with water-lilies, flowering rushes, and wild mint. You need pour only two drops upon an old exercise-book, even on those from the lowest class in the school, and the book becomes a sentimental comedy which is good enough to be performed, and over which people will be sure to fall asleep, so strong is the perfume of it. It is supposed to be out of compliment to me that the label on the bottle bears the inscription, ‘The Brew of the Woman from the Marsh.’

“Here stands the bottle of ‘Scandal.” It looks as if there were only dirty water in it; and it is dirty water, but with effervescing powder of town gossip, three ounces of falsehood, and two grains of truth, stirred about with a birch-twig, not one taken from a rod that has been salted and used on the bleeding backs of sinners—no, taken right from the broom which has been used to sweep the gutter.

“Here is the bottle with ‘Pious Poetry,’ set to psalm tunes. Every drop has a ring about it, like the slamming of the gates of hell, and has been prepared from the blood and sweat of the penitent. Some say it is only the gall of the dove, but people who do not know their natural history say that doves are the gentlest of creatures and have no gall.

“Here stands the bottle of all bottles—it takes up half the cupboard—the bottle with ‘Stories of Everyday Life.’ It is covered over both with bladder and hogskin, for it wouldn’t do to lose any of its strength. Every nation could here get its own soup; it all depends on how you turn and shift the bottle. Here is old German blood-soup with robber-dumplings; also thin cottagers’-soup, with real court officials, who lay like carrots at the bottom, while philosophical fat floats on the top. There is English governess-soup, and the French pôtage à la coq, made from cocks’ legs and sparrows’ eggs, in Danish it’s called cancan-soup. But the best of all the soups is Copenhagen-soup, that’s what the family says.

“Here, in a champagne-bottle, ‘Tragedy’ used to stand; it could go off with grand effect, and that was necessary. ‘Comedy’ looks just like fine sand to throw in people’s eyes—that is to say, the refined comedy; the coarser is also to be found in bottle, but consists only of play-bills of future productions, the most attractive part of which are the titles of the pieces. There are excellent titles for comedies, such as: ‘Dare You Spit on the Watchworks?’ ‘One on the Jaw,’ ‘The Darling Ass,’ and ‘She Is Dead Drunk.’”

The man stood musing, but the thoughts of the woman from the marsh went further; she wanted to put an end to it all.

“I suppose you have seen enough now of the medicine-chest,” she said, “now you know what there is in it.

“But I have not yet told you the ‘more important’ thing you must hear. It’s of much more consequence than poetry and stories. I ought, indeed, to hold my tongue; but there must be a necessity—a fate—a something that sticks in my throat, and that wants to come out. THE WILL-O’-THE-WISPS ARE IN THE TOWN! They have been let loose. You mortals had better beware!!”

“I don’t understand a word of all this!” cried the man.

“Be kind enough to seat yourself on that cupboard,” she retorted, “but take care you don’t fall through and break the bottles—you know what’s inside of them. I must tell of the great event. It occurred no longer ago than the day before yesterday. It did not happen earlier. It has now three hundred and sixty-three days to run about. I suppose you know how many days there are in a year?”

And this is what the Moor-woman told:

There was a great commotion yesterday out here in the marsh! There was a christening feast! A little Will-o’-the-Wisp was born here—in fact, twelve of them were born all together; and they have permission, if they choose to use it, to go abroad among men, and to move about and act among them, just as if they were born mortals. That was a great event in the marsh, and accordingly all the Will-o’-the-Wisps, male and female, went dancing like little lights across the moor. There are some of them of the dog species, but those are not worth mentioning. I sat there on the cupboard, and had all the twelve little newborn Will-o’-the-Wisps upon my lap. They shone like glow-worms; they already began to hop, and increased in size every moment, so that before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, each of them looked just as large as his father or his uncle. Now, it’s an old established regulation and favour, that when the moon stands just as it did yesterday, and the wind blows just as it blew then, it is allowed and accorded to all Will-o’-the-Wisps—that is, to all those who are born at that minute of time—to become mortals, and individually to exert their power for the space of one year.

The Will-o’-the-Wisp may run about in the country and through the world, if it is not afraid of falling into the sea, or of being blown out by a heavy storm. It can enter into a person and speak for him, and make all the movements it pleases. The Will-o’-the-Wisp may take whatever form he likes, of man or woman, and can act in their spirit and in their disguise in such a way that he can accomplish whatever he wishes to do. But he must manage, in the course of the year, to lead three hundred and sixty-five people into a bad way, and in a grand style, too. To lead them away from the right and the truth; and then he reaches the highest point. Such a Will-o’-the-Wisp can attain to the honour of being a runner before the devil’s state chariot; with a fiery-yellow coat and the flames shooting out of his throat. That’s enough to make a simple Will-o’-the-Wisp smack his lips.

But there’s some danger in this, and a great deal of work for a Will-o’-the-Wisp who aspires to play so distinguished a part. If the eyes of the man are opened to what he is, and if the man can then blow him away, it’s all over with him, and he must come back into the marsh; or if, before the year is up, the Will-o’-the-Wisp is seized with a longing to see his family, and so returns to it and gives the matter up, it is over with him likewise, and he can no longer burn clear, and soon becomes extinguished, and cannot be lit up again. And if when the year has elapsed, he has not led three hundred and sixty-five people away from the truth and from all that is grand and noble, he is condemned to be imprisoned in decayed wood, and to lie glimmering there, without being able to move; and that’s the most terrible punishment that can be inflicted on a lively Will-o’-the-Wisp.

Now, all this I know, and all this I told to the twelve little Will-o’-the-Wisps whom I had on my lap, and they became wild with joy.

I told them that the safest and most convenient course was to give up the honour, and do nothing at all; but the little flames would not agree to this, and already fancied themselves clad in fiery yellow clothes, breathing flames from their throats.

“Stay with us,” said some of the older ones.

“Carry on your sport with mortals,” said the others.

“The mortals are drying up our meadows; they’ve taken to draining. What will our successors do?”

“We want to flame; we will flame—flame!” cried the newborn Will-o’-the-Wisps.

And so the affair was settled.

And now a ball was given, a minute long; it could not very well be shorter. The little elf-maidens whirled round three times with the rest, that they might not appear proud, but they preferred dancing with one another.

And now the sponsors’ gifts were presented, and presents were thrown to them. These presents flew like pebbles across the seawater. Each of the elf-maidens gave a little piece of her veil.

“Take that,” they said, “and then you’ll know the higher dance, the most difficult turns and twists—that is to say, if you should find them necessary. You’ll know the proper deportment, and then you can show yourself in the very pick of society.”

The night raven taught each of the young Will-o’-the-Wisps to say, “Goo-goo-good,” and to say it in the right place; and that’s a great gift which brings its own reward.

The owl and the stork—but they said it was not worth mentioning, and so we won’t mention it.

King Waldemar’s wild chase [92] was just then rushing over the moor, and when the great lords heard of the festivities that were going on, they sent a couple of handsome dogs, which hunt on the spoor of the wind, as a present; and these might carry two or three of the Will-o’-the-Wisps. Two old witches, who got their living by riding, were also present at the feast; they taught the young Will-o’-the-Wisps the trick of slipping in through the keyholes; when you know this, it is the same as if all doors are open to you. They offered to carry the youngsters to the town, with which they were well acquainted. They usually rode through the atmosphere on their own back hair, which is fastened into a knot, for they love a hard seat; but now they sat sideways on the wild hunting dogs, took the young Will-o’-the-Wisps in their laps, who wanted to go into the town to mislead and entice mortals, and, whisk! away they were. Now, this is what happened last night. Today the Will-o’-the-Wisps are in the town, and have taken the matter in hand—but where and how? Ah, can you tell me that? Still, I’ve a weather prophet in my big toe, and that always has something to tell me.

“Why, this is a complete story,” exclaimed the man.

“It is only the beginning of one,” replied the woman. “Can you tell me how the Will-o’-the-Wisps deport themselves, and how they behave? and what shapes they assumed to lead people into crooked paths?”

“I believe,” replied the man, “that one could tell quite a romance about the Will-o’-the-Wisps, in twelve parts; or, better still, one might make quite a popular play of them.”

“You might write that,” said the woman, “but it’s best left alone.”

“Yes, that’s better and more agreeable,” the man replied, “for then we shall escape from the newspapers, and not be tied up by them, which is just as uncomfortable as for a Will-o’-the-Wisp to lie in decaying wood, to have to gleam, and not to be able to stir.”

“I don’t care about it either way,” cried the woman. “Let the others write, those who can, and those who cannot likewise. I’ll grant you an old bung from my barrel that will open the cupboard where poetry’s kept in bottles, and you may take from that whatever may be wanting. But you, my good man, seem to have blotted your hands sufficiently with ink, and to have arrived at that time of life and maturity that you need not be running about every year for stories, especially as there are much more important things to be done. You understand, of course, that there is mischief brewing?”

“The Will-o’-the-Wisp is in town,” said the man. “I’ve heard it, and I have understood it. But what do you think I ought to do? I should be thrashed if I were to go to the people and say, ‘Look, yonder goes a Will-o’-the-Wisp in his best clothes!’

“They also go in undress,” replied the woman. “The Will-o’-the-Wisp can assume all kinds of forms, and appear in every place. He goes into the church, but not for the sake of the service; and perhaps he may enter into one or other of the priests. He speaks in the Parliament, not for the benefit of the country, but only for himself. He’s an artist with the colour-pot as well as in the theatre; but when he gets all the power into his own hands, then the pot’s empty! I chatter and chatter, but it must come out, what’s sticking in my throat, even to the detriment of my own family. But I must now be the woman that will save a good many people. It is not done with my good will, or for the sake of a medal. I do the most insane things I possibly can, and then I tell a poet about it, and thus the whole town gets to know of it directly.”

“The town will not take that to heart,” observed the man; “that will not disturb a single person; for they will all think I’m only telling them a story if I say, ‘The Will-o’-the-Wisp is in the town, says the Moor-woman. Take care of yourselves!’”

[ 1865 ]

The Windmill

—

A Windmill stood upon the hill, proud to look at, and it was proud too.

“I am not proud at all,” it said, “but I am very much enlightened without and within. I have sun and moon for my outward use, and for inward use too; and into the bargain I have stearine candles, train oil and lamps, and tallow candles. I may well say that I’m enlightened. I’m a thinking being, and so well constructed that it’s quite delightful. I have a good windpipe in my chest, and I have four wings that are placed outside my head, just beneath my hat. The birds have only two wings, and are obliged to carry them on their backs. I am a Dutchman by birth, that may be seen by my figure—a flying Dutchman. They are considered supernatural beings, I know, and yet I am quite natural. I have a gallery round my chest, and house-room beneath it; that’s where my thoughts dwell. My strongest thought, who rules and reigns, is called by others ‘The Man in the Mill.’ He knows what he wants, and is lord over the meal and the bran; but he has his companion, too, and she calls herself ‘Mother.’ She is the very heart of me. She does not run about stupidly and awkwardly, for she knows what she wants, she knows what she can do, she’s as soft as a zephyr and as strong as a storm; she knows how to begin a thing carefully, and to have her own way. She is my soft temper, and the father is my hard one. They are two, and yet one; they each call the other ‘My half.’ These two have some little boys, young thoughts, that can grow. The little ones keep everything in order. When, lately, in my wisdom, I let the father and the boys examine my throat and the hole in my chest, to see what was going on there—for something in me was out of order, and it’s well to examine oneself—the little ones made a tremendous noise. The youngest jumped up into my hat, and shouted so there that it tickled me. The little thoughts may grow—I know that very well; and out in the world thoughts come too, and not only of my kind, for as far as I can see, I cannot discern anything like myself; but the wingless houses, whose throats make no noise, have thoughts too, and these come to my thoughts, and make love to them, as it is called. It’s wonderful enough—yes, there are many wonderful things. Something has come over me, or into me—something has changed in the mill-work. It seems as if the one half, the father, had altered, and had received a better temper and a more affectionate helpmate—so young and good, and yet the same, only more gentle and good through the course of time. What was bitter has passed away, and the whole is much more comfortable.

“The days go on, and the days come nearer and nearer to clearness and to joy; and then a day will come when it will be over with me; but not over altogether. I must be pulled down that I may be built up again; I shall cease, but yet shall live on. To become quite a different being, and yet remain the same! That’s difficult for me to understand, however enlightened I may be with sun, moon, stearine, train oil, and tallow. My old woodwork and my old brickwork will rise again from the dust!

“I will hope that I may keep my old thoughts, the father in the mill, and the mother, great ones and little ones—the family; for I call them all, great and little, the ‘company of thoughts,’ because I must, and cannot refrain from it.

“And I must also remain ‘myself,’ with my throat in my chest, my wings on my head, the gallery round my body; else I should not know myself, nor could the others know me, and say, ‘There’s the Mill on the hill, proud to look at, and yet not proud at all.’”

That is what the Mill said. Indeed, it said much more, but that is the most important part.

And the days came, and the days went, and yesterday was the last day.

Then the Mill caught fire. The flames rose up high, and beat out and in, and bit at the beams and planks, and ate them up. The Mill fell, and nothing remained of it but a heap of ashes. The smoke drove across the scene of the conflagration, and the wind carried it away.

Whatever had been alive in the mill remained, and what had been gained by it has nothing to do with this story.

The miller’s family—one soul, many thoughts, and yet only one—built a new, a splendid mill, which answered its purpose. It was quite like the old one, and people said, “Why, yonder is the mill on the hill, proud to look at!” But this mill was better arranged, more according to the time than the last, so that progress might be made. The old beams had become worm-eaten and spongy—they lay in dust and ashes. The body of the mill did not rise out of the dust as they had believed it would do. They had taken it literally, and all things are not to be taken literally.

[ 1865 ]

The Bottle-Neck

—

In a narrow crooked street among other abodes of poverty there stood an especially narrow and tall house built of wood, with which time had played such havoc that it had gone quite out of joint in every direction. The house was inhabited by poor people, but poorest of all were those who occupied the attics under the gable. There, before the single little window in the sunshine hung an old bent birdcage which had not even a proper water-glass, but only a Bottle-neck with a cork in it, turned upside down and filled with water. An old maid stood at the window; she had adorned the cage with green chickweed, and a little chaffinch hopped from one perch to the other, and sang and twittered to its heart’s content. “Yes, it’s all very well for you to sing,” said the Bottle-neck—that is to say, it did not utter these words as we do, for a bottle-neck cannot speak; but that’s what it thought to itself in its own quiet mind, just as we human beings talk to ourselves.

“Yes, it’s all very well for you to sing, you who have all your limbs whole. You should just try what it’s like to lose your body and to have only your neck and mouth left, and a cork stuck into that in addition as I have, and you would certainly not sing. But it’s a good thing, all the same, that there’s somebody who is happy. I have no reason to sing, and moreover I can’t sing. Yes, when I was a complete bottle I could, if I was rubbed with a cork; then I was called a perfect lark, a fine lark. That was when I went to a picnic with the tanner’s family, and his daughter was engaged—why, I remember it as if it were only yesterday. I have gone through a great deal, when I come to think of it. I have been through fire and water, deep down into the black earth, and higher up than most of the others, and now I hang here in the air and the sunshine outside a birdcage. Oh, it would be worthwhile hearing my story, but I don’t speak aloud of it, because I can’t.”

And now the Bottle-neck related its story, which was remarkable enough. It told the story to itself, or thought it over quietly in its mind; and the little bird sang his song merrily, and down in the street there was a riding and a running, and everyone was thinking of his own matters or of nothing at all—but the Bottle-neck did think. It thought of the flaming furnace in the factory where it had been blown into life; it still remembered how warm it had been, and how it had gazed into the hissing flames, the place of its birth, and felt a great desire to jump back again into it immediately, and how, as it kept growing cooler, it had gradually found itself getting more comfortable where it was. It had stood in rank and file with a whole regiment of brothers and sisters all out of the same furnace, some of which, however, had been blown into champagne bottles, others into beer-bottles, and that makes a difference. Later, out in the world it may sometimes happen that a beer-bottle may contain the most precious wine, while a champagne bottle be filled with blacking, but even in decay there is always something left by which people can see what one has been—nobility is nobility, even when filled with blacking.

All the bottles were packed up and our bottle too. At that time it did not think of ending its career as a bottle-neck, to work its way up to a bird’s-glass, which is, however, an honourable existence—for in that state one is at least something of consequence, after all. The Bottle did not see daylight again till it was unpacked with its comrades in the wine-merchant’s cellar and rinsed out for the first time; and that was a strange sensation. There it lay empty and corkless, with a very strange feeling as if it lacked something, but what it lacked, it did not know itself. At last it was filled with a fine old wine, provided with a cork and sealed up. It was labelled “first quality,” and it felt as if it had just taken the first prize at an examination; but then the wine was good and the Bottle too. Youth is the time for poetry, so it sang and rang of things of which it had no knowledge: of the green sunny mountains, where the wine grows, where the merry lads and lasses dress the vines, singing, and kissing, and caressing.

How beautiful life is! Of all this the Bottle sang and rang like many a young poet, who often does not understand the meaning of the song he sings.

One morning the Bottle was sold; the tanner’s apprentice had been sent for a bottle of “the best.” And then it was placed in a hamper with ham, cheese, and sausage; the finest butter and the finest bread was there too, and the tanner’s daughter packed the hamper herself. She was young and pretty; in her brown eyes and upon her lips there played a smile. She had soft delicate hands, beautifully white, but her neck and shoulders were still whiter; you saw at once that she was one of the fairest maidens in the town—and still she was not yet engaged.

The basket lay in the young girl’s lap when the family drove out into the forest, the Bottle peeping out from between the folds of the white napkin. There was a red seal on the cork, and the bottle looked straight into the girl’s face; it also looked at the young sailor who sat next to her. The latter was an old playmate, the son of the portrait-painter. He had just passed his examination as mate with honours, and tomorrow he was to sail far away to foreign shores. A good deal had been spoken about this while the basket was being packed, and just then there was no expression of joy in the eyes and mouth of the tanner’s pretty daughter. The young people sauntered through the wood talking together. Of what did they speak? Well, that the Bottle did not hear, for it was standing in the provision basket. It was a long time before it was brought out, but when that was at length done some pleasant matters had come to pass. Everybody laughed, and the tanner’s daughter laughed too; but she spoke less than before, and her cheeks glowed like two red roses.

Then father took the full bottle and the corkscrew in his hand. It is indeed a strange feeling to be drawn like that for the first time. The Bottle-neck had never afterwards forgotten that solemn moment, for he was distinctly heard to say “Pop!” as the cork came out—and how he clucked as the wine was poured into the glasses!

“Long life to the betrothed!” said the old man, and every glass was emptied to the dregs, and the young sailor kissed his beautiful bride.

“Health and happiness!” said both the old people, the father and mother. And the young man filled the glasses again.

“A safe return, and the wedding this day next year!” he cried; and when the glasses were emptied, he took the Bottle, lifted it up, and said: “You have been present on the happiest day of my life, you shall never serve another!”

And he hurled it high in the air.

The tanner’s daughter little thought that she should ever see the flying bottle again, and yet it was to be so. It fell into the thick reeds on the margin of a little woodland lake—the Bottle-neck still remembered quite plainly how it had lain there for a long time.

“I gave them wine, and they give me marsh water—but they meant well!”

He could no longer see the lovers and the happy parents, but he heard them singing and rejoicing for a long time. At last two peasant boys came by, and looking among the reeds, saw the Bottle and picked it up; now it was given to the eldest brother of these boys, who was a sailor, and who was about to start on a long voyage, and had been home yesterday, at the cottage in the wood, to say good-bye. His mother was busy packing up a few things that he was to take with him on his journey, and which his father was to carry to the town that evening to see his son once more, and to bring him a farewell greeting from himself and the boy’s mother. A little bottle of medicated brandy had already been wrapped up and added to the parcel, when the boy entered with a larger and stronger bottle that they had found. It would hold more than the little one, and the brandy being mixed with herbs, would be a capital thing in case of indigestion. It was not red wine such as the bottle had held before that was now poured into it; these were bitter drops, but they were good too—for indigestion, of course. So the large new bottle, and not the little one, was to be taken, and thus the Bottle went travelling once more. It went on board with Peter Jensen, and on board the same ship, too, in which the young mate sailed. But he did not see the Bottle; and if he had, he would never have recognised it, or suspected that it was the same with which they had solemnised the engagement, and drunk to his safe return.

It is true it could no longer give wine, but it contained something which was just as good; and when Peter Jensen brought it out it was always called “the apothecary” by his messmates. It contained the best medicine, something that was good for the inside, and it loyally gave its aid as long as it had a drop left. That was a pleasant time, and the Bottle sang when it was rubbed with the cork, and was called the Great Lark, “Peter Jensen’s lark.”

Long days and months rolled by, and the Bottle already stood in a corner empty when a storm arose—whether it was on the journey out or home that the bottle could not exactly say, for it had not been on shore at all; great waves came rolling heavily and darkly along, lifting and tossing the ship. The mainmast was torn away; a wave stove in one of the planks, and the pumps became useless. It was black night. The ship sank—but at the last moment the young mate wrote on a sheet of paper: “God’s will be done! We are sinking!” He wrote the name of his betrothed, his own name and that of the ship, put the paper into the first empty bottle that he came across, pressed the cork down tightly, and threw the bottle out into the raging sea. He did not know that it was the same bottle which had filled the cup of joy and hope for him and her—and now it was tossed on the billows, carrying a farewell greeting and a message of death.

The ship sank with all her crew; the Bottle flew along like a bird, for it had a heart within it—a letter of love. And the sun rose and the sun set; and the Bottle felt the same sensation as it had when it was being made in the glowing furnace. A longing came over it to fly back into the heat.

It went through calms and fresh storms too; it was, however, hurled against no rock, nor was it swallowed by a shark, but floated about year after year, sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south, just as the currents carried it. It was besides its own master, but one gets tired of that.

The written page, the last farewell from the lover to his lass, would only bring trouble when it came into the proper hands; but where were those hands, so white and soft which once spread the cloth on the fresh grass in the wood on the betrothal day? Where was the tanner’s daughter? Where indeed was the land, and what land lay nearest? None of these questions could the Bottle answer, so it drifted and drifted till at last it got tired of floating about, for that was not its mission at all. But anyhow it went drifting on till it reached land, a foreign land. It did not understand a word of what was spoken here, for it was not the language it had heard spoken before, and one loses a great deal if one does not understand the language.

The Bottle was fished out and examined on all sides; the note that it contained was seen, taken out, turned and twisted, but the people did not understand what there was written on it. They certainly understood that the Bottle must have been thrown overboard and that the paper contained something about it; but what it was they could not tell, and the paper was put back into the Bottle, and it was placed in a large cupboard in a large room in a large house.

Every time strangers came, the paper was brought out, and turned and twisted so that the characters, which were only written in pencil, became more and more illegible, and at last no one could see that they were letters. For a whole year more the Bottle remained in the cupboard, and then it was placed in the loft and became covered with dust and cobwebs.

How often it thought of better days! of the time when it had poured out the red wine in the fresh green wood, when it had been tossed on the wavy billows carrying a secret, a letter, a parting sigh.

Full twenty years did it stand in the loft; it might have stood there longer still, but for the house having to be rebuilt. The roof was taken off, and the Bottle was noticed and spoken about, but it did not understand the language. One cannot learn a language by standing up in a loft, even in twenty years. “If I had remained down in the room,” it thought, “I might have learned it.”

It was now washed and rinsed out, and it was high time too. It felt clear and transparent and young again in its old age, but the paper which it had faithfully borne—that perished in the washing. The bottle was filled with seeds, though it had not the slightest idea what these were, and was corked and well wrapped up. It got to see neither light nor lantern, let alone the sun or moon, and yet one ought to see something when one goes travelling, it thought; but it saw nothing, though it did what was of most importance—it travelled, and reached the place of its destination and was there unpacked.

“What trouble they’ve taken over there with this bottle,” it heard people say, “and I daresay it’s broken;” but it was not broken. It understood every word that was said; it was the language it had heard at the furnace, at the wine merchant’s, in the wood and on the ship, the only good old language it could understand. It had come back home, and the language was a greeting of welcome to it. It almost jumped out of the people’s hands for joy; it hardly noticed that its cork had been drawn and that it had been emptied and carried to the cellar to be stored there and forgotten.

But there’s no place like home, even in the cellar.

It never occurred to the Bottle to consider how long it had lain there; it lay comfortably and for years. At last people came down and took all the bottles out of the cellar, and ours among them.

There was a great festivity out in the garden; burning lamps hung in garlands and paper lanterns shone transparent like great tulips. It was a glorious evening, the weather was still and clear; the stars twinkled, and there was a new moon. One could really see the whole round of the moon like a bluish grey disc half encircled in gold, which was a pretty sight for those with good eyes.

The illumination extended even to the remotest parts of the garden, at least sufficient for anyone to be able to find his way by their light. Among the branches of the hedges stood bottles, each containing a burning light, and here too was the bottle we know, the one which was to end as a bottle-neck—a bird’s drinking-glass. Everything here seemed lovely to it, for it was again out among the green, and in the midst of joy and feasting; it heard music and singing and the noise and murmur of many people, especially from that part of the garden where the lamps burned and the paper lanterns displayed their coloured splendour. It certainly stood in a remote path, but that made it the more conspicuous; it held a light and was both ornamental and useful, which is as it should be. In one such hour one forgets twenty years passed in a loft—and that is a good thing to forget.

Close to it there passed a single pair, like the betrothed pair in the wood of long ago, the sailor and the tanner’s daughter; the bottle seemed to live all that over again. In the garden walked not only the guests, but other people who were permitted to come and view the festive splendour; amongst the latter was an old maid who had not a single relative left in the world. Her thoughts were like those of the Bottle: she was thinking of the green wood and of two young lovers—two who concerned her very dearly, in whom she had some interest—indeed she was one of them, and that had been the happiest hour of her life, an hour one never forgets, even if one becomes ever such an old maid. But she did not recognise the Bottle, neither did the latter notice the old maid; so do we pass each other in this world till we meet again—and meet again they did, for they were both again in the same town.

From the garden the Bottle went once more to the wine merchant’s, was again filled with wine and sold to the aeronaut, who was to make an ascent in his balloon on the following Sunday. A great crowd of people were assembled to see the sight; a military band had been engaged, and many other preparations had been made. The bottle saw it all from a basket in which it lay next to a live rabbit, who was wretchedly low-spirited, because he knew he went up only to come down again with a parachute. The Bottle however knew nothing of the “up” or the “down”; it only saw that the balloon blew itself out bigger and bigger, and that when it could swell no more it began to rise and to become more and more restless, The ropes which held it were cut, and it floated up with the aeronaut, the basket, the bottle and the rabbit, while the music played and all the people shouted “Hurrah!”

“This is a wonderful excursion up into the air!” thought the Bottle; “this is a new kind of sailing. But up here there’s no fear of running into anything!”

Thousands of people gazed up at the balloon, and the old maid looked up at it too; she was standing at the open window in her attic, under which hung the cage with the little chaffinch, which at that time had no water-glass, but had to content itself with an old cup.

In the window itself stood a myrtle in a pot; this had been pushed a little to one side so that it should not fall out, for the old maid was leaning out of the window to look. She distinctly saw the aeronaut in the balloon and how he let down the rabbit by the parachute and then drank to the health of all the spectators, finally hurling the bottle high into the air. She little thought that this was the very bottle she had seen flying up in honour of her and of her betrothed on that joyful day in the green wood years ago.

The Bottle had no time for reflection at so unexpectedly and suddenly reaching the highest point in its career. Steeples and roofs lay far, far beneath it, and the people looked extremely small.

But now it descended, and in quite a different fashion to the rabbit: it turned somersaults in the air, and felt so young and so loose and careless; it was still half full of wine, but did not remain so long.

What a journey! The sun shone on the bottle, and all the people were looking at it; the balloon was already a long way off, and soon the Bottle was off too, for it fell on one of the roofs and broke, but the pieces had still so much go in them that they could not lie still, but went bounding and rolling along till they reached the yard and there they lay in still smaller pieces; only the bottle neck remained whole, and that was cut off as if with a diamond.

“That would make a fine bird-glass!” said the people in the cellar; but as they had neither bird nor cage it would be going a little too far to expect them to provide both simply because they had a bottle-neck which might be used as a glass. But the old maid up in the garret—she might perhaps be able to use it—and so the Bottle-neck was taken up to her, and had a cork put into it. What was formerly the top was now at the bottom, as often happens when changes take place; some fresh water was put into it, and it was hung up on the cage of the little bird, which sang and twittered right merrily.

“Yes, it’s all very well for you to sing!” said the Bottle-neck, which was considered a great curiosity for having been up in a balloon—that was all that was known of its history. Now it hung there as a bird-glass, and heard the noise and bustle of the people down in the street and the voice of the old maid in the room within. An old friend had come to see her and they were speaking—not of the Bottle-neck, but of the myrtle in the window.

“No, you must really not spend a dollar for your daughter’s bridal wreath!” said the old maid. “You shall have a pretty bunch from me, full of blossoms. Look how splendidly my tree blooms. Well, it has grown up from a sprig of the myrtle that you gave me on the day of my engagement, and from which I was to have made my own bridal wreath when the year had passed. But my wedding-day never came. The eyes closed that were to have made my life all joy and happiness. My dear one sleeps sweetly in the bed of the ocean. The myrtle has become an old tree, and I have become a yet older woman. When the myrtle you gave me faded, I took the last green shoot and planted it in the earth, and out of it has grown this great tree; and now the myrtle will serve at a wedding after all—as a bridal wreath for your daughter.”

Tears stood in the eyes of the old maid; she spoke of the beloved of her youth, of their betrothal in the wood. Many thoughts came to her, but the thought never came that, quite close to her before the window, was a remembrance of those times—the neck of the bottle that shouted aloud for joy when the cork flew up with a pop at her betrothal. But the Bottle-neck did not recognise her either, for it was not listening to what she said—chiefly because it was thinking only about itself.

[ 1858 ]

Two Maidens

—

Do you know what I mean by “a Maiden”? I mean, what our road-pavers call “a maiden;” a thing used to ram down the paving-stones with. This sort of maiden is made of wood; broad below, and girt round with iron rings. At the top she is narrow, and has a stick passed across through her waist, and this stick supplies the maiden with arms.

Two such Maidens once stood in a yard, among shovels, measuring-tapes, and wheelbarrows. Now a report had been spread that the Maidens were to be called no longer “maidens,” but “hand-rammers,” or “stamps.”

Now, there are among us human creatures certain individuals who are known as “emancipated women,” as, for instance, principals of institutions, dancers who stand professionally on one leg, milliners, and sick-nurses; and with this class of emancipated women the two Maidens in the shed associated themselves. They were “maidens” among the paver folk, and determined not to give up this honourable appellation, and let themselves be miscalled “rammers.”

“A maiden is a person, a human being,” they declared, “but ‘stamps’ and ‘hand-rammers’ are things, and among we won’t be called things—that’s insulting us.”

“My betrothed has a right to object,” observed the younger of the two, who was betrothed to a ramming-block, that is to say, a large machine used in driving stakes into the ground—doing, in fact, on a larger scale the same sort of work that “the maiden” does on a smaller. “As ‘a maiden’ he is willing to take me, but probably not as a thing, and therefore I cannot consent to their changing my name.”

“For my part, I would sooner have my two arms wrenched off!” protested the elder.

But the Wheelbarrow was of an opposite opinion, and the Wheelbarrow was looked upon as of some consequence, for he considered himself a quarter of a coach, because he went about upon one wheel. “Let me remind you that to be called ‘maidens’ is common enough, not near so distinctive a name is ‘stamp,’ for that has some connection with ‘signet’ and ‘seal’—think of the ‘royal signet,’ the ‘seal of the law,’ and such-like glorious phrases! In your place I would give up the name ‘maiden.’”

“Never! I am too old to change!” declared the elder.

“You do not seem to understand what is called the ‘European necessity,’” said the honest old Measuring Tape. “People have to subject themselves, limit themselves, give in to the exigencies of the times; and if it is now regulated that the maidens are to be called by a new name, by that new name they must be called. There is a measuring-tape for everything.”

“Then,” said the youngest, “if changes there must be, I would rather be called ‘missy,’ for a ‘missy’ is still a ‘maiden.’”

“But I would rather be chopped up for firewood than change at all!” insisted the elder.

It was now time for work; the Maidens were placed on the wheelbarrow, as usual, which was respectful treatment, but “maidens” they were called no longer.

“Maid—!” cried they, as they stamped upon the paving-stones; “Maid—!” they began, but they did not finish the word; they resolved to treat the offenders with silent contempt. But in their own little society they always spoke of each other as “maidens,” and praised the good old days when everything was called by its proper name, and those who were maidens were called maidens. And “maidens” they both remained, for the Ramming-block, the big machine aforementioned, actually broke off his engagement with the youngest; for nothing would suit him but that he must have a maiden for his bride.

[ 1854 ]

Five Out of One Shell

—

There were five peas in one shell: they were green, the pod was green, and so they thought all the world was green; and that was just as it should be! The shell grew, and the peas grew; they accommodated themselves to circumstances, sitting all in a row. The sun shone without, and warmed the husk, and the rain made it clear and transparent; it was mild and agreeable in the bright day and and dark at night, just as it should be, and the peas as they sat there became bigger and bigger, and more and more thoughtful, for they felt there must be something else for them to do.

“Are we to sit here forever?” asked one. “I’m afraid we shall become hard by long sitting. It seems to me there must be something outside: I have a kind of inkling of it.”

And weeks went by. The peas became yellow, and the pod also.

“All the world’s turning yellow,” said they; and they had a right to say it.

Suddenly they felt a tug at the shell. The shell was torn off, passed through human hands, and glided down into the pocket of a jacket, in company with other full pods.

“Now we shall soon be opened!” they said; and that is just what they were waiting for.

“I should like to know who of us will get farthest!” said the smallest of the five. “Yes, now it will soon show itself.”

“What is to be will be,” said the biggest.

“Crack!” the pod burst, and all the five peas rolled out into the bright sunshine. There they lay in a child’s hand A little boy was clutching them, and said they were fine peas for his pea-shooter; and he put one in directly and shot it out.

“Now I’m flying out into the wide world, catch me if you can!” And he was gone.

“I,” said the second, “I shall fly straight into the sun. That’s a pod worth looking at, and one that exactly suits me.” And away he went.

“We’ll go to sleep wherever we arrive,” said the two next, “but we shall roll on all the same.” And they certainly roiled and tumbled down on the ground before they got into the pea-shooter; but they were put in for all that. “We shall go farthest,” said they.

“What is to happen will happen,” said the last, as he was shot forth out of the pea-shooter; and he flew up against the old board under the garret window, just into a crack which was filled up with moss and soft mould; and the moss closed round him; there he lay a prisoner indeed, but not forgotten by provident Nature.

“What is to happen will happen,” said he.

Within, in the little garret, lived a poor woman who went out in the day to clean stoves, chop wood, and to do other hard work of that sort, for she was strong and industrious too. But she always remained poor; and at home in the garret lay her half-grown only daughter, who was very delicate and weak; for a whole year she had kept her bed, and it seemed as if she could neither live nor die.

“She is going to her little sister,” the woman said. “I had only the two children, and it was not an easy thing to provide for both, but the good God provided for one of them by taking her home to Himself; now I should be glad to keep the other that was left me; but I suppose they are not to remain separated, and my sick girl will go to her sister in heaven.”

But the sick girl remained where she was. She lay quiet And patient all day long while her mother went to earn money out of doors. It was spring, and early in the morning, just as the mother was about to go out to work, the sun shone mildly and pleasantly through the little window, and threw its rays across the floor; and the sick girl fixed her eyes on the lowest pane in the window.

“What may that green thing be that looks in at the window? It is moving in the wind.”

And the mother stepped to the window, and half opened it. “Oh!” said she, “on my word, that is a little pea which has taken root here, and is putting out its little leaves. How can it have got here into the crack? That is a little garden to look at.”

And the sick girl’s bed was moved nearer to the window, so that she could always see the growing pea; and the mother went forth to her work.

“Mother, I think I shall get well,” said the sick child in the evening. “The sun shone in upon me today delightfully warm. The little pea is prospering famously, and I shall prosper too, and get up, and go out into the warm sunshine.”

“God grant it!” said the mother, but she did not believe it would be so; but she took care to prop with a little stick the green plant which had given her daughter the pleasant thoughts of life, so that it might not be broken by the wind; she tied a piece of string to the windowsill and to the upper part of the frame, so that the pea might have something round which it could twine, when it shot up: and it did shoot up indeed—one could see how it grew every day.

“Really, here is a flower coming!” said the woman one day; and now she began to cherish the hope that her sick daughter would recover. She remembered that lately the child had spoken much more cheerfully than before, that in the last few days she had risen up in bed of her own accord, and had sat upright, looking with delighted eyes at the little garden in which only one plant grew. A week afterward the invalid for the first time sat up for a whole hour. Quite happy, she sat there in the warm sunshine; the window was opened, and outside before it stood a pink pea blossom, fully blown. The sick girl bent down and gently kissed the delicate leaves. This day was like a festival.

“The Heavenly Father Himself has planted that pea, and caused it to prosper, to be a joy to you, and to me also, my blessed child!” said the glad mother; and she smiled at the flower, as if it had been a good angel.

But about the other peas? Why, the one who flew out into the wide world and said, “Catch me if you can,” fell into the gutter on the roof, and found a home in a pigeon’s crop. The two lazy ones got just as far, for they, too, were eaten up by pigeons, and thus, at any rate, they were of some real use, but the fourth, who wanted to go up into the sun, fell into the gutter, and lay there in the dirty water for weeks and weeks, and swelled prodigiously.

“How beautifully fat I’m growing!” said the Pea. “I shall burst at last; and I don’t think any pea can do more than that. I’m the most remarkable of all the five that were to the pod.” And the Gutter confirmed the opinion.

But the young girl at the garret window stood there with gleaming eyes, with the roseate hue of health on her cheeks, and folded her thin hands over the pea blossom, and thanked Heaven for it.

“I,” said the Gutter, “shall stand up for my own pea.”

[ 1853 ]

The Butterfly

—

The Butterfly wanted a bride, and he, of course, wished to select a very pretty one from among the flowers. He therefore cast a critical glance over all the flower-beds and found that every flower sat quietly and modestly on her stalk, as became a maiden who is not engaged; but there were a great many there, and the choice threatened to become tedious. The Butterfly did not care to take so much trouble, so he flew down to the Daisy. The French call this little flower “Marguerite;” they know that she can prophesy, and that she does this when lovers, as they often do, pluck off one leaf after another, putting to each leaf a question concerning their lovers. “Does he love me from his heart? or does he play a part? loves he little? loves he much? loves he not at all?” This is the way it goes on. Everyone asks in his own language. So the Butterfly came to have his fortune told; he did not, however, pull off the petals, but imprinted a kiss on each, thinking that one gains most by kindness.

“Dear little Daisy Marguerite,” he said, “you are the cleverest woman among the flowers, for you can prophesy. Pray do tell me which one I shall get. Which will be my bride? When I know that, I will fly straight to her and propose.” But Marguerite did not answer. She was angry at his having called her a woman when she was still a maiden; there’s a big difference. He asked for the second and the third time; but when she remained mute and answered not a single word, he would not ask any longer, but flew away to begin his wooing at once.

It was one of the first days of spring, and the snowdrop and crocus were everywhere in bloom.

“They are very pretty,” thought the Butterfly; “sweet young ladies, but a little too much of the school-girl about them.” He, like all boys, looked out for older maidens.

Then he flew off to the anemones, but they were too shy for him, and the violets a little too sentimental; the lime blossoms were too small and had too many relations; whilst the apple blossoms—well, it is true, they looked like roses; but they bloomed today, to fade tomorrow, at the first wind that blew. Such a union would be of too short duration, he thought. The pea blossom was the one that pleased him most; it was red and white and very delicate and dainty, and belonged to the domesticated maidens who look well and are also useful in the kitchen. He was just about to propose when close by the blossom he spied a pod at whose end hung a withered flower. “Who is that?” he asked. “That’s my sister,” answered the pea-blossom. “Oh, indeed! And you’ll look like that later on?” he said, and flew away quite horrified.

The honeysuckle hung in bloom over the hedge—an abundance of young ladies all of one kind with long faces and yellow complexions. No! that kind did not suit him!

But which kind did he like best then?

Spring passed and summer was nearly over, autumn came, and he was still undecided. The flowers now appeared in the most gorgeous apparel, but in vain—they lacked the fresh fragrance of youth. A heart that is no longer young itself requires fragrance, and very little of that is to be found among the dahlias and poppies. So the Butterfly turned to the mint near the ground. But this plant has fragrance in every leaf, not only in its blossoms, and smells from top to bottom. “I will take her,” said the Butterfly. And so he proposed.

But the mint stood stiff and still, and heard what he had to say. At last she said: “Friendship, if you like, but nothing more! I am old and you are old. We might, it is true, live for each other, but as for marrying—no! Don’t let us make fools of ourselves in our old age?”

So the Butterfly got no wife at all. He had been too long choosing, and that’s a bad thing to do. He remained an old bachelor.

•  •  •

It was late in the autumn, with rainy and cloudy weather. The cold wind blew over the bowed backs of the willows, so that they creaked again. It was not the weather for flying about in summer clothes; but fortunately the Butterfly was not out in it. He had got a shelter by chance. It was in a room heated by a stove, and as warm as summer. He could exist here, he said, well enough.

“But it is not enough merely to exist,” said he, “I need freedom, sunshine, and a little flower for a companion.”

Then he flew against the windowpane, and was seen and admired by those in the room, who caught him, and stuck him on a pin, in a box of curiosities. They could not do more for him.

“Now I am perched on a stalk, like the flowers,” said the Butterfly. “It is not very pleasant, certainly. It is almost like being married, one is so pinned down then.” And with this thought he consoled himself a little.

“That seems very poor consolation,” said one of the potted plants in the room.

“Ah,” thought the Butterfly, “one can’t very well trust these plants in pots; they have too much to do with mankind.”

[ 1861 ]

The Teapot

—

There was a proud Teapot, proud of being porcelain, proud of its long spout, proud of its broad handle; it had something before and behind: the spout before, the handle behind, and that was what it talked about; but it did not talk of its lid—that was cracked, it was riveted, it had defects, and one does not talk about one’s defects—there are plenty of others to do that. The cups, the cream pot, and sugar bowl, the whole tea-service would be reminded much more of the lid’s imperfection and talk about that, than of the sound handle and the remarkable spout. The Teapot knew it.

“I know you,” it said within itself, “I know, too, my imperfection, and I am well aware that in that very thing is seen my humility, my modesty. Imperfections have we all, but then one also has an endowment. The cups get a handle, the sugar bowl a lid, I get both, and one thing besides in front which they never got. I get a spout, and that makes me a queen on the tea-table. The sugar bowl and cream pot are allowed to be tasty serving maids, but I am the one who gives, yes, the one high in council. I spread abroad a blessing among thirsty mankind. In my insides the Chinese leaves are brewed in the boiling, tasteless water.”

All this the Teapot said in its fresh young life. It stood on the table that was spread for tea, it was lifted by a very delicate hand: but the very delicate hand was awkward, the Teapot fell, the spout snapped off, and the handle snapped off. The lid was no worse to speak of—the worst had been spoken of that.

The Teapot lay in a swoon on the floor, while the boiling water ran out of it. It was a horrid shame, but the worst was that they jeered at it, they jeered at the Teapot and not at the awkward hand.

“I never shall forget that experience!” said the Teapot, when it afterward talked to itself of the course of its life. “I was called an invalid, and placed in a corner, and the day after was given away to a woman who begged for victuals. I fell into poverty, and stood dumb both outside and in. But then, just as I was, began my better life. One can be one thing and still become quite another.

“Earth was placed in me. For a Teapot that is the same as being buried, but in the earth was placed a flower bulb. Who placed it there, who gave it, I know not; but given it was, and it became a compensation for the Chinese leaves and the boiling water, a compensation for the broken handle and spout.

“And the bulb lay in the earth, the bulb lay in me, it became my heart, my living heart, such as I never before had possessed. There was life in me, power and might: the pulses beat, the bulb put forth sprouts, it was the springing up of thoughts and feelings: they burst forth in flower.

“I saw it, I bore it, I forgot myself in its delight. Blessed it is to forget oneself in another. It gave me no thanks, it did not think of me—it was admired and praised. I was so glad at that: how happy it must it have been! One day I heard it said that it deserved a better pot. I was thumped hard on my back—that was a great affliction; but the flower was put in a better pot—and I was thrown away in the yard where I lie as an old potsherd; but I have the memory, and that I can never lose.”

[ 1864 ]

The Rags

—

At the door of a paper-mill stood heaps of dust and rubbish, piled up into stacks; they had been gathered far and wide, and every rag in them had a tale to tell, and told it too; but we cannot listen to them all. Some of the rags were home-born, others came from foreign lands. Here now was a Danish rag, lying close to a rag from Norway; rank Danish was the one, and rank Norse the other; and there was likely to be some fun between the two, as any experienced Dane or Norseman could tell you.

They understood each other well enough, though the two languages were as different—so the Norwegian said—as French and Hebrew. “We go to the hill-side for ours, and get it fresh from the fountain-head, while the Dane cooks up a mawkish, wishy-washy sort of a lingo.”

The rags talked, and rags are rags all the world over; they are thought nothing of except in the dust-heap.

“I am Norse,” said the Norwegian; “and when I have said I am Norse, I guess I have said enough. I am firm of fibre, like the granite rocks of old Norway. The land there has a constitution, just like free America. It sets my fibres tickling to think of what I am, and to ring out my thoughts in words of the real old grit.”

“But we have a complete literature,” said the Danish rag; “do you understand what that is?”

“Understand!” repeated the Norwegian. “O this flat-land creature! shall I give him a hoist uphill, and a Northern Light or two, clout that he is? When the Norway sun has thawed the ice, then come lubberly Danish hulks, bringing us butter and cheese, a right noble cargo; and they bring, too, by way of ballast, the Danish literature. We don’t want it. One can do without stale beer in a land of sparkling springs, and up yonder is a natural well that was never bored; no, not puffed into European notice by newsmongers, confederate jobbers, and book-making tourists in foreign parts. I speak free from the bottom of my lungs, and the Dane must get used to free sound; and so he will someday, in his Scandinavian, clamber up our proud mountain land—that primary knob of the universe!”

“A Danish rag could never talk like that; no!” said the Dane. “It is not our nature: I know myself: and all our rags are like me. We are so good-natured, so unassuming. We only think too little of ourselves. Not that we gain much by our modesty: but I do like it; I consider it quite charming. Still I am perfectly aware of my own good qualities, I assure you, but I don’t talk about them: nobody shall ever bring such a charge against me. I am gentle and complaisant; bear everything patiently, spite nobody, and speak good of all men—though there is not much good to be said of other people; but that is their business. I can afford to smile at it, I feel myself so much superior.”

“Have done with this flat-land drivel; it turns me sick,” said the Norwegian. He caught a puff of wind, and fluttered away from his own heap onto another.

Paper they both became, and, as chance would have it, the Norwegian rag became a sheet on which a Norseman wrote a true-love letter to a Danish girl; and the Danish rag became the manuscript for a Danish ode in honour of Norway’s strength and beauty.

Something good there may come even of rags, when they are once out of the dust-heap, and the change has been made in favour of truth and beauty; they keep up a good understanding between us, and in that there is a blessing.

The story is done. It is rather pretty, and offensive to nobody except to Rags.

[ 1869 ]

The Pigs

—

Since Charles Dickens has told us about a pig, we are already good-humoured when we hear one grunt. Holy Anthony has taken it under his patronage, and if one thinks of “the prodigal son” one is at once in one’s mind in a pig-sty; and it was before a pig-sty that our carriage stopped over in Sweden.

Towards the highroad, close by his house, a peasant had his pig-sty, and indeed it was a pig-sty without comparison. It had been one day an old state carriage; the seats were lifted out and the wheels taken off, and so it stood without any other alteration on the ground. There were four pigs in it; were these the first ones that were in it? Why, that was impossible to decide, but everything pointed out that it had been a state carriage, even the piece of red cloth that hung down from the ceiling—everything indicated that it had seen better days.

“Umph! umph!” sounded inside, and the old coach creaked and lamented; it had indeed a sad ending. “The beautiful is gone!” it sighed, or would have done so if it had been able to.

We came back in the autumn; the coach was still there, but the Pigs were not. They were playing the masters in the wood; blossoms and leaves had fallen down from the trees, storm and rain were swaying the sceptre, and let them have neither rest nor peace; the birds of passage were gone. “The beautiful is gone! Here the splendid green wood, the warm sunshine, the song of birds have all vanished!” So it sounded and cracked in the trunks of the lofty trees, and a sigh so deep, a sigh out of the heart of the wild rose-bush, from him who was sitting there—the Rose King—was heard. Do you know him? He is beard all over—the most beautiful red-green beard—he is easily to be recognised. Go to the wild rose-hedges in the autumn, when all the leaves have fallen down, and only the red hips are left; you will often find amongst them a large red-green mossy flower, that is the Rose King; a small green leaf grew forth from his head, that is his feather; he is the only man of his kind on the rose-bush, and it was he who sighed.

“Gone, gone!—The beautiful is gone! The roses have gone, the leaves have dropped off! Here it’s wet, here it’s rough! The birds have become silent, and the pigs come to feed on acorns; they are the masters in the wood!”

There were cold nights and gloomy days, but the Raven, nevertheless, sat on the branch and sang “brave, brave.” Raven and Crow sat on the high branch; they have a large family, and they all said “brave, brave!” and what the crowd says is always right.

Under the high trees on the road was a large pool, and here lay a herd of pigs, large and small; they found the place exceptionally beautiful; oui, they said, that was all the French they knew—that was at least something. They were so clever and so fat.

The old ones lay quietly and meditated; the young ones, on the other hand, were busy, and had no rest. A little Pig had a curly tail, and this curl was the pride of the mother; she thought all the others only looked at the curl, and only thought of it, but this they did not do: they thought of themselves and of the useful, and for what purpose the wood was there.

They had always heard that the acorns which they ate grew at the roots of the trees, and therefore they rooted up the ground; but now came a little Pig—for the youngest always find out new things—which declared that the acorns fell down from the branches; one had fallen on its own head, and gave rise to this idea, later on it had made observations, and now it was quite sure. The old ones put their heads together and said “Umph, umph! all the beauty is gone. The chirping of the birds is at an end, we want fruit! Everything that can be eaten is good, and we eat everything!”

“Oui, oui,” they all said.

But the old Pig looked at her little one with the curly tail. “One must not overlook the beautiful,” she said.

“Brave, brave,” said the Crow, and flew down from the tree in order to be appointed nightingale; there must needs be one there and the Crow was at once appointed!

“Gone, gone,” sighed the Rose King; “the beautiful is gone!”

It was rough, gloomy, cold, and stormy, and the rain was sweeping in heavy showers over fields and wood.

Where are the birds which sang, where are the flowers on the meadow and the sweet berries of the wood? Gone, gone!

Then a light sparkled from the forester’s cottage; it was lit like a star, and threw its long rays between the trees; a song sounded from the house; beautiful children were playing within round the grandfather; he sat holding the Bible on his knees and read of God and eternal life, and spoke of the spring which would come back, of the wood which would have fresh green, of the roses that bloom, of the nightingales that sing, and of the beautiful that would soon be master again!

But the Rose King did not hear it; he was sitting in the wet cold weather and sighed, Gone, gone! The Pigs were the masters in the wood, and the old Sow looked at the little one with the curly tail. “There always remains someone who has eyes for the beautiful!” said the old Sow.

[ 1851 ]

A Great Grief

—

This story really consists of two parts. The first part might be left out, but it gives us a few particulars, and these are useful.

We were staying at a gentleman’s country house, where it happened that the master was absent for a few days. In the meantime, there arrived from the next town a lady; she had a pug dog with her, and came, she said, to dispose of shares in her tan-yard. She had her papers with her, and we advised her to put them in an envelope, and to write thereon the address of the proprietor of the estate, “General War-Commissary Knight,” etc.

She listened to us attentively, seized the pen, paused, and begged us to repeat the direction slowly. We complied, and she wrote; but in the midst of the “General War-” she struck fast, sighed deeply, and said, “I am only a woman!” Her Puggie had seated itself on the ground while she wrote, and growled; for the dog had come with her for amusement and for the sake of its health; and then the bare floor ought not to be offered to a visitor. His outward appearance was characterized by a snub nose and a very fat back.

“He doesn’t bite,” said the lady; “he has no teeth. He is like one of the family, faithful and grumpy; but the latter is my grandchildren’s fault, for they have teased him; they play at wedding, and want to give him the part of the bridesmaid, and that’s too much for him, poor old fellow.”

And she delivered her papers, and took Puggie upon her arm. And this is the first part of the story which might have been left out.

PUGGIE DIED!! That’s the second part.

It was about a week afterwards we arrived in the town, and put up at the inn. Our windows looked into the tan-yard, which was divided into two parts by a partition of planks; in one half were many skins and hides, raw and tanned. Here was all the apparatus necessary to carry on a tannery, and it belonged to the widow. Puggie had died in the morning, and was to be buried in this part of the yard; the grandchildren of the widow (that is, of the tanner’s widow, for Puggie had never been married) filled up the grave, and it was a beautiful grave—it must have been quite pleasant to lie there.

The grave was bordered with pieces of flower-pots and strewn over with sand; quite at the top they had stuck up half a beer bottle, with the neck upwards, and that was not at all allegorical.

The children danced round the grave, and the eldest of the boys among them, a practical youngster of seven years, made the proposition that there should be an exhibition of Puggie’s burial-place for all who lived in the lane; the price of admission was to be a trouser button, for every boy would be sure to have one, and each might also give one for a little girl. This proposal was adopted by acclamation.

And all the children out of the lane—yes, even out of the little lane at the back—flocked to the place, and each gave a button. Many were noticed to go about on that afternoon with only one suspender; but then they had seen Puggie’s grave, and the sight was worth much more.

But in front of the tan-yard, close to the entrance, stood a little girl clothed in rags, very pretty to look at, with curly hair, and eyes so blue and clear that it was a pleasure to look into them. The child said not a word, nor did she cry; but each time the little door was opened she gave a long, long look into the yard. She had not a button—that she knew right well, and therefore she remained standing sorrowfully outside, till all the others had seen the grave and had gone away; then she sat down, held her little brown hands before her eyes, and burst into tears; this girl alone had not seen Puggie’s grave. It was a grief as great to her as any grown person can experience.

We saw this from above; and looked at from above, how many a grief of our own and of others can make us smile! That is the story, and whoever does not understand it may go and purchase a share in the tan-yard from the window.

[ 1853 ]

What Happened to the Thistle

—

Around the fine old mansion was a beautiful garden with rare trees and flowers; the guests of the house expressed their admiration of it; the people of the district, from town and country, came on Sundays and holidays and begged permission to see the garden; even whole schools came to visit it.

Near the fence that separated the garden from the meadow stood an immense Thistle. It was an uncommonly large and fine thistle, with several branches spreading out from the root, and altogether was so strong and full as to make it well worthy of the name “thistle-bush.”

No one ever noticed it, save the old Donkey that pulled the milk cart for the dairymaids. He stood grazing in the meadow nearby and stretched his old neck to reach the Thistle, saying: “You are beautiful! I could eat you!” But the tether was too short to allow him to get near enough to eat it.

There were guests at the Hall, fine, aristocratic relatives from town, and among them a young lady who had come from a long distance—all the way from Scotland. She was of old and noble family and rich in gold and lands—a bride well worth the winning, thought more than one young man to himself; yes, and their mothers thought so, too!

The young people amused themselves on the lawn, playing croquet and flitting about among the flowers, each young girl gathering a flower to put in the buttonhole of one of the gentlemen.

The young Scotch lady looked about for a flower, but none of them seemed to please her, until, happening to glance over the fence, she spied the fine, large thistle-bush, full of bluish-red, sturdy-looking flowers. She smiled as she saw it, and begged the son of the house to get one of them for her.

“That is Scotland’s flower,” she said; “it grows and blossoms in our coat of arms. Get that one yonder for me, please.”

And he gathered the finest of the thistle flowers, though he pricked his fingers as much as if it had been growing on a wild rosebush.

She took the flower and put it in his buttonhole, which made him feel greatly honoured. Each of the other young men would gladly have given up his graceful garden flower if he might have worn the one given by the delicate hands of the Scotch girl. As keenly as the son of the house felt the honour conferred upon him, the Thistle felt even more highly honoured. She seemed to feel dew and sunshine going through her!

“It seems I am of more consequence than I thought,” she said to herself. “I ought by rights to stand inside and not outside the fence. One gets strangely placed in this world, but now I have at least one of my flowers over the fence—and not only over the fence, but in a buttonhole!”

To each one of her buds as it opened, the Thistle-bush told this great event. And not many days had passed before she heard—not from the people who passed, nor yet from the twittering of little birds, but from the air, which gives out, far and wide, the sounds that it has treasured up from the shadiest walks of the beautiful garden and from the most secluded rooms at the Hall, where doors and windows are left open—that the young man who received the thistle flower from the hands of the Scottish maiden had received her heart and hand as well.

“That is my doing!” said the Thistle, thinking of the flower she had given to the buttonhole. And every new flower that came was told of this wonderful event.

“Surely I shall now be taken and planted in the garden,” thought the Thistle. “Perhaps I shall be put into a flowerpot, for that is by far the most honourable position.” She thought of this so long that she ended by saying to herself with the firm conviction of truth, “I shall be planted in a flowerpot!”

She promised every little bud that came that it also should be placed in a pot and perhaps have a place in a buttonhole—that being the highest position one could aspire to. But none of them got into a flowerpot, and still less into a gentleman’s buttonhole.

They lived on light and air, and drank sunshine in the day and dew at night. They received visits from bee and hornet, who came to look for the honey in the flower, and who took the honey and left the flower.

“The good-for-nothing fellows,” said the Thistle-bush. “I would pierce them if I could!”

The flowers drooped and faded, but new ones always came.

“You come in good time,” said the Thistle-bush to them. “I am expecting every moment to be taken over the fence.”

A couple of harmless daisies and a huge, thin plant of canary grass listened to this with the deepest respect, believing all they heard. The old Donkey, that had to pull the milk cart, cast longing looks toward the blooming Thistle and tried to reach it, but his tether was too short. And the Thistle-bush thought and thought, so much and so long, of the Scotch thistle—to whom she believed herself related—that at last she fancied she had come from Scotland and that her parents had grown into the Scottish arms.

It was a great thought, but a great Thistle may well have great thoughts.

“Sometimes one is of noble race even if one does not know it,” said the nettle growing close by—it had a kind of presentiment that it might be woven into muslin, if properly treated.

The summer passed, and the autumn passed; the leaves fell from the trees; the flowers came with stronger colours and less perfume; the gardener’s lad sang on the other side of the fence:

“Up the hill and down the hill,

That’s the way of the world still.”

The young pine trees in the wood began to feel a longing for Christmas, though Christmas was still a long way off.

“Here I am still,” said the Thistle. “It seems that I am quite forgotten, and yet it was I who made the match. They were engaged, and now they are married—the wedding was a week ago. I do not make a single step forward—for I cannot.”

Some weeks passed. The Thistle had her last, solitary flower, which was large and full and growing down near the root. The wind blew coldly over it, the colour faded, and all its glory disappeared, leaving only the cup of the flower, now grown as large as the flower of an artichoke and glistening like a silvered sunflower.

The young couple came along the garden path, and as they passed near the fence, the bride, glancing over it, said, “Why, there stands the large Thistle! it has no flowers now.”

“Yes, there is still the ghost of the last one,” said her husband, pointing to the silvery remains of the last flower—a flower in itself.

“How beautiful it is!” she said. “We must have one carved in the frame of our picture.”

And once more the young man had to get over the fence, to break off the silvery cup of the thistle flower. It pricked his fingers for his pains, because he had called it a ghost. And then it was brought into the garden, and to the Hall, and into the drawing room. There stood a large picture—the portraits of the two, and in the bridegroom’s buttonhole was painted a thistle. They talked of it and of the flower cup they had brought in with them—the last silver-shimmering thistle flower, that was to be reproduced in the carving of the frame.

The air took all their words and scattered them about, far and wide.

“What strange things happen to one!” said the Thistle-bush. “My firstborn went to live in a buttonhole, my last-born in a frame! I wonder what is to become of me.”

The old Donkey, standing by the roadside, cast loving glances at the Thistle and said, “Come to me, my nibble darling, for I cannot go to you; my tether is too short!”

But the Thistle-bush made no answer. She grew more and more thoughtful, and she thought as far ahead as Christmas, till her budding thoughts opened into flower.

“When one’s children are safely housed, a mother is quite content to stay outside the fence.”

“That is an honourable thought,” said the sunshine; “and you shall also have a good place, never fear.”

“In a flowerpot or in a frame?” asked the Thistle.

“In a story,” answered the sunshine.

And here is the story!

[ 1869 ]

Which Was the Happiest?

—

“What beautiful roses!” said the Sunshine. “And each bud will soon shoot forth, and become just as handsome. They are my children! I have kissed them into life!”

“Nay, they are my children!” said the Dew. “I have suckled them with my tears.”

“Indeed they are not; I am their mother!” said the Rosebush. “Thou and the Sunshine are but sponsors, who gave godmother’s gifts according to your means and good-will.”

“My beautiful children!” they all three exclaimed, and wished each blossom the greatest fortune; but only one could be most happy, and one had to be least happy: but which of them?

“That I will ascertain!” said the Wind. “I roam wildly about, I penetrate the narrowest chinks, I know everything both within and without!”

Every blown rose heard these words; every swelling bud perceived them.

Just then a sorrowful, affectionate mother, clad in mourning, chanced to walk through the garden. She plucked one of the roses which was only half-blown, yet fresh and full. This seemed to her to be the loveliest of them all. She took the rose to her quiet, silent chamber, where a few days ago her young, bright, and joyous daughter had been moving nimbly and merrily up and down; but now, alas! lay like a sleeping marble image, in the black coffin. The mother kissed her departed child; then she kissed the half-blown rose, and laid it on the bosom of the young girl, half hoping that by its freshness, and by the kiss of a loving mother, the heart of her dear child might perhaps again begin to beat.

The Rose seemed to swell; each leaf quivered with joy. “What a road of love,” it said. “has been granted unto me to walk! I am become like the child of a human being; I receive a mother’s kiss; I hear the words of blessing, and enter into the unknown realm of bliss, dreaming at the bosom of the pale angel! In truth, I am the happiest of all of us sisters!”

In the garden where the Rose-bush stood, an old woman was walking, who had been employed to weed the garden. She also gazed upon the splendid bush, and kept her eyes upon the largest fully developed rose. Only a dew-drop, and one hot day more, and the petals would fall. This the old woman saw, and she said that the rose had lived long enough for beauty; now it should also, she meant, be of some practical use. So she plucked it, wrapped it up in an old newspaper, and took it home to the other pale and faded roses, to be pickled, to be potpourri, to go into company with the little blue boys named lavenders, and to be embalmed with salt. Understand, to be embalmed—that is an honour only granted to roses and royal persons.

“I am the most honoured!” said the Rose, when the weeding woman took it home. “I am the happiest; I am going to be embalmed.”

Now two young men were promenading in the garden. One was a Painter, the other was a Poet. Each of them plucked a rose, beautiful to behold. The Painter represented on the canvas an image of the blooming Rose, an image so perfectly beautiful, that the Rose itself supposed that it was looking in the glass.

“Thus,” said the Painter, “this Rose shall live through many succeeding generations, in which millions on millions of roses wither and die.”

“Ah! I became, after all, the most favoured!” said this Rose; “I had the best fortune!”

Now the Poet looked at his rose, he wrote a poem on it in loving, mysterious terms. Indeed, it was a whole pictorial book of love which he wrote; it was an immortal piece of poetry.

“By this book I have become immortal,” said the Rose. “I am the most fortunate!”

However, in the very midst of all this splendour of roses, there was one almost hidden by the others. Accidentally, perhaps fortunately, it had a little deformity, sat a little obliquely on the stock, and on one side the leaves did not correspond to those on the opposite side; indeed, in the midst of the blossom itself, a little green crippled leaf was about to grow up. Such things happen now and then, even to roses.

“Poor child!’: said the Wind, kissing its cheek. The Rose believed this kissing to be a greeting and homage. It had an idea of being formed somewhat differently from the other roses, and that a green leaf was about to grow up in its very centre, and this it considered an ornament. A butterfly flew down and kissed its leaves. Now the butterfly was a wooer, but the Rose discarded him. Then came an immensely big grasshopper. However, he seated himself on another rose, and rubbed his shinbone, which, strange to say, is a token of love amongst grasshoppers. The Rose on which he was seated did not understand it, but that with the green, crippled leaf, did; for upon her the big grasshopper looked with eyes that plainly said: “I could eat thee from mere love!” And this is indeed the highest point which love can reach, when one is absorbed in the other! But the Rose resisted, and would by no means be absorbed in the jumping dandy. Now a nightingale began to sing in the moonlight night.

“This singing is only in honour of me; I am serenaded!” said the Rose with the deformity, or with the ornament, as she believed it to be. “Why am I thus to be distinguished in preference to all my sisters? Why did I receive this deformity, I mean this ornament, which makes me the most lucky?”

Now two cigar-smoking gentlemen appeared in the garden. They spoke of roses and of tobacco. Roses are said not to be able to endure tobacco smoke; they fade, become greenish. It was to be tested. But the modest gentlemen could not persuade themselves to take one of the very finest roses; they took the one with the deformity.

“Indeed, one more honour!” said the Rose. “I am fortunate in the extreme! Much more so than any of my sisters!”

But in the midst of this self-conceit and tobacco smoke, she became greenish yellow.

One rose, still half bud, but perhaps the most beautiful on the bush, was given a place of honour in the gardener’s elegant bouquet. It was brought to the young, haughty lord of the house, and rode with him in his fine carriage. It paraded in all its beauty amongst other fragrant flowers, it shared the splendid festivities of the house. Men and women sat gorgeously dressed, lighted by a thousand lamps; the music sounded; the theatre was brilliantly illuminated, as if it were an ocean of brightness; and when the young danseuse, in the midst of stormy applause, appeared on the stage, bouquet after bouquet flew like a rain of flowers before her feet. There the bouquet fell in which the beautiful rose paraded like a diamond star. It felt its whole indescribable happiness; it felt the honour and splendour by which it was surrounded, and when touching the floor it also danced; it leaped for joy, it rushed over the stage so that its stem broke off. The young danseuse did not get it, for it rolled swiftly behind the scenery, where a servant took it up, saw how beautiful and fragrant it was, pocketed it, and when he got home put it into a wine-glass filled with water, where it lay all the night. Early in the morning it was placed before his grandmother, who sat, feeble with age, in her armchair. She looked upon the stemless but beautiful rose, delighted in it and in its fragrance.

“You were not placed upon a rich and fashionable lady’s table,” she said, “but you came to a poor old woman. How beautiful you are!”

And with childlike joy she looked upon the blossom, no doubt thinking of her own blooming youth which now had passed away.

“The pane was cracked,” said the Wind. “I got easily in, saw the old woman’s youthful bright eyes, and the stemless, yet beautiful Rose in the wine-glass. Indeed, the happiest of them all! I know it! I can tell it!”

Each rose on the bush in the garden had its own history.

Each rose believed, and thought itself the happiest, and it is faith that makes us happy. Yet the last Rose believed itself the very happiest. “I survive them all,” it said; “I am the last, the only one, mother’s dearest child!”

“And I am the mother of all of them,” said the Rose-bush.

“No, I am!” said the Sunshine.

“And I!” said the Dew.

“Each has a part in it!” the Wind finally said; “and each shall have a part of it!” and then the Wind strewed its petals out over the hedge where the dew-drops lay, and where the sun was shining. “I got also my part,” said the Wind, “for I got the history of all the roses which I will launch into the wide world! Tell me, then: Which was most happy of them all? That you must tell, Sunshine, for I think I said enough!”

[ 1868 ]

There Is a Difference

—

It was in the month of May. The wind still blew cold, but bushes and trees, field and meadow, told that spring had come. Everything was covered with flowers, even to the blossoming hedges. Here spring was looking after his own business, and preaching down from a little apple tree, from which hung a single branch, fresh and blooming, covered with delicate pink blossoms that were just about to open. The Apple Tree Branch knew very well how beautiful it was, for that knowledge lies in the leaf as well as in the flesh. It was therefore not surprised when a nobleman’s carriage stopped before it, and the young countess said that an apple-branch was the loveliest thing that could be seen, and that it was spring itself in its most beautiful form. The Branch was broken off, and taking it in her delicate hand, she sheltered it with her silk parasol. Then they drove to the castle, in which there were lofty halls and splendid rooms. Pure white curtains fluttered in front of the open windows, and beautiful flowers stood in shining transparent vases. In one of these, which looked as if it had been made of fresh-fallen snow, the Apple Branch was placed among some fresh light beech twigs. It was a pleasure to look at it.

Then the Branch became proud, and that is quite human.

People of various kinds came through the rooms, and according to their rank, they expressed their admiration. Some said nothing, others again too much, and the Apple Branch soon understood that there was a difference between human beings just as between plants.

“Some are for ornament, and some for giving nourishment; there are even some one could do without altogether,” thought the Apple Branch; and as it stood just before the open window, whence it could see into the garden and across the field, it had flowers and plants enough to look at and think about, for there were rich ones and poor ones—some most miserable things too.

“Poor despised herbs!” said the Apple Branch, “there is indeed a difference! How unhappy they must be, if that kind can feel like I and my equals do. There is indeed a difference, and so there ought to be, else we would all be alike.”

And the Apple Branch looked with a sort of pity upon a particular kind of flower which grew in great numbers in the fields and ditches. No one made nosegays of them, they were much too common; indeed they could be found even between the paving stones. They sprang up like the worst kind of weeds, and had the ugly name of “dog-flower” or “dandelion” or “the devil’s milk-pail.”

“Poor despised plant,” said the Apple Branch. “It is not your fault that you were given the ugly name that you bear. But it is with plants as with men, there must be a difference!”

“Difference!” said the Sunbeam, kissing the blossoming apple branch, but also kissing the yellow dog-flower out in the fields; all the brothers of the Sunbeam kissed them, the poor flowers as well as the rich.

The Apple Branch had never thought about Heaven’s boundless love for all that lives and is sustained by it, nor had it thought how many beautiful and good things may lie hidden though not forgotten; but that too was human.

The Sunbeam, the ray of light, knew this better.

“You don’t see far, you don’t see clearly. What is the despised plant that you were just pitying?”

“The dandelion!” said the Apple Branch. “It is never made into a nosegay, and is trampled underfoot; there are too many of them, and when they run to seed they fly like bits of wool along the roads and hang on to people’s clothes. It is only a weed, but there must be weeds too. I am really very thankful that I was not made one of those flowers.”

Across the fields there came a troop of children. The youngest of them was still so small that he was carried by the others. When he was placed amongst the yellow flowers in the ditch, he laughed aloud for joy, kicked his little legs about, and rolling over and over, plucked only the yellow flowers, kissing them in his sweet innocence. The elder children pulled the flowers from off the tall stalks, and bending the stalks round, stuck the ends into one another, so that, link by link, a chain was made. First one for their neck, then one to hang round their shoulders and waist, and then one to make fast on their breast and head—quite a wealth of green links and chains. But the eldest children of all carefully took the full-blown flowers by the stalks on which hung the feathery crown formed by the seeds; this loose airy wool-flower, which is a real work of art, looking as though made of the finest feathers, fleece, or down, they held to their mouths and tried to blow off with one breath. Their grandmother had told them that whoever could do that would get new clothes before the year was out. On such occasions the despised flower became quite a prophet.

“Do you see?” said the Sunbeam. “Do you see its beauty? Do you see its power?”

“Yes—over children,” answered the Apple Branch.

An old woman then came into the field and, digging with the blunt blade of a knife round the roots of the plant, pulled them up. With some of them she was going to make tea for herself, and for the others she would get some money by selling them to the apothecary.

“But beauty is something higher,” said the Apple Branch. “Only the chosen ones enter the kingdom of the beautiful. There is a difference between plants, just as there is a difference between human beings.”

The Sunbeam spoke of the boundless love of Heaven as revealed in creation, of all living beings, and of the equal distribution of all things in time and eternity.

“Yes, but that is only your opinion,” said the Apple Branch.

Some people now came into the room, and the beautiful young countess appeared—she who had placed the Apple Branch in the transparent vase, where it was bathed in sunlight. She was carrying something that she had wrapped in three or four large leaves; these served as a shield, so that neither a draught nor gust of wind should injure it, and it was carried with such care as had never been bestowed upon an apple-branch. The large leaves were carefully removed, and the delicate feathery seed-crown of the despised yellow dandelion appeared. It was this that she had plucked so carefully, and carried with every precaution, so that not one of the loose, delicate feathery darts which make up its downy form should be blown away. She had brought it home uninjured, and admired its beautiful shape, its airy brightness, its own peculiar construction, and its beauty which was to be borne away by the wind.

“Do see how wonderfully sweet Heaven has formed it,” she said. “I will paint it together with the Apple Branch, which all think so extremely beautiful; but this poor flower has received quite as much loveliness from kind Providence in another way. However different they may be, they are still both the children of the kingdom of beauty.”

The Sunbeam kissed the lowly flower and the blossoming Apple Branch, whose leaves seemed to blush at the act.

[ 1852 ]

A Leaf from the Sky

—

High up yonder, in the thin, clear air, flew an angel with a flower from the heavenly garden. As he was kissing the flower, a very little leaf fell down into the soft soil in the midst of the wood, and immediately took root, and sprouted, and sent forth shoots among the other plants.

“A funny kind of slip that,” said the Plants.

And neither Thistle nor Stinging-Nettle would recognize the stranger.

“That must be a kind of garden plant,” said they.

And they sneered; and the plant was despised by them as being a thing of the garden.

“Where do you think you are going?” cried the lofty Thistles, whose leaves are all armed with thorns. “You give yourself a good deal of space. That’s all nonsense—we are not here to support you!” they grumbled.

And winter came, and snow covered the plant; but the plant imparted to the snowy covering a lustre as if the sun was shining upon it from below as from above. When spring came, the plant appeared as a blooming object, more beautiful than any production of the forest.

And now appeared on the scene the botanical professor, who could show in black and white that he was what he was. He inspected the plant and tested it, but found it was not included in his botanical system; and he could not possibly find out to what class it belonged.

“That must be some new subordinate species,” he said. “I don’t know it. It’s not included in any system.”

“Not included in any system!” repeated the Thistles and the Nettles.

The great trees that stood round about saw and heard it; but they said not a word, good or bad, which is the wisest thing to do for people who are stupid.

There came through the forest a poor innocent girl. Her heart was pure, and her understanding was enlarged by faith. Her whole inheritance was an old Bible; but out of its pages a voice said to her, “If people wish to do us evil, remember how it was said of Joseph. They imagined evil in their hearts, but God turned it to good. If we suffer wrong—if we are misunderstood and despised—then we may recall the words of Him who was purity and goodness itself, and who forgave and prayed for those who buffeted and nailed Him to the cross.”

The girl stood still in front of the wonderful plant, whose great leaves exhaled a sweet and refreshing fragrance, and whose flowers glittered like coloured flame in the sun; and from each flower there came a sound as though it concealed within itself a deep fount of melody that thousands of years could not exhaust. With pious gratitude the girl looked on this beautiful work of the Creator, and bent down one of the branches toward herself to breathe in its sweetness; and a light arose in her soul. It seemed to do her heart good; and gladly would she have plucked a flower, but she could not make up her mind to break one off, for it would soon fade if she did so. Therefore the girl only took a single leaf, and laid it in her Bible at home; and it lay there quite fresh, always green, and never fading.

Among the pages of the Bible it was kept; and, with the Bible, it was laid under the young girl’s head when, a few weeks afterward, she lay in her coffin, with the solemn calm of death on her gentle face, as if the earthly remains bore the imprint of the truth that she now stood before her Creator.

But the wonderful plant still bloomed in the forest. It was almost like a tree to look upon; and all the birds of passage bowed before it.

“That’s giving itself foreign airs now,” said the Thistle and the Burdocks; “we never behave like that here.”

And the black snails actually spat at the flower.

Then came the Swineherd. He was collecting thistles and shrubs, to burn them for the ashes. The wonderful plant was placed bodily in his bundle.

“This will be as useful as any,” he said; and so said, so done.

But soon afterward, the King of the country was troubled with a terrible depression of spirits. He was busy and industrious, but that did him no good. They read him deep and learned books, and then they read from the lightest and most superficial that they could find; but it was of no use. Then one of the wise men of the world, to whom they had applied, sent a messenger to tell the King that there was one remedy to give him relief and to cure him. He said:

“In the King’s own country there grows in a forest a plant, of heavenly origin. Its appearance is thus and thus. It cannot be mistaken.”

“I fancy it was taken up in my bundle, and burned to ashes long ago,” said the Swineherd; “but I did not know any better.”

“You did not know any better! Ignorance of Ignorances!”

And those words the Swineherd might well take to himself, for they were meant for him, and for no one else.

Not another leaf was to be found; the only one lay in the coffin of the dead girl, and no one knew anything about that

And the King himself, in his melancholy, wandered out to the spot in the wood.

“Here is where the plant stood,” he said. “It is a sacred place.”

And the place was surrounded with a golden railing, and a sentry was posted there.

The botanical professor wrote a long treatise upon the heavenly plant. For this he was gilded all over, and this gilding suited him and his family very well. And indeed that was the most agreeable part of the whole story. And the King remained as low-spirited as before; but he had always been so, at least so the sentry said.

[ 1855 ]

Beauty of Form
and Beauty of Mind

—

The sculptor Alfred—I suppose you know him? Everybody knows him: he won a gold medal, made a journey to Italy and then came home again; he was young at that time, he is still young, although he is ten years older than he was then.

When he had come home, he paid a visit to one of the small towns of the island of Zealand. Everybody knew who the stranger was and whence he came, and one of the richest inhabitants gave a party in his honour, to which all who were of any consequence or had any property were invited; it was quite an event, and all knew of it, although it was not announced by beating of drums. Apprentice boys, the children of the lower class, and even some of their parents stood before the house and gazed upon the light that shone through the curtains; the watchman might have well imagined that he gave the party, such a number of people were in the street. It looked like a festival; and a festival took place in the house, for Mr. Alfred the sculptor was there. He talked and told anecdotes, and all listened to him with delight and with a kind of reverence; there was also an elderly widow of an official who seemed, as far as Mr. Alfred was concerned, to be like a piece of clean blotting paper; she took in all that was said and asked for more. She appreciated everything, and was terribly ignorant——a kind of female Caspar Hauser.

“I should like to see Rome,” she said. “It must be a charming city where so many strangers continually arrive. Do give me a description of Rome. What does the city look like when you enter its gate?”

“I am unable to exactly describe it,” answered the sculptor. “A large open place, and in the centre of it an obelisk a thousand years old.”

“An organist!” exclaimed the lady, having never met the word obelisk.

Some of the guests had difficulty in suppressing their laughter, and the sculptor also could hardly remain serious, but his smile vanished when he perceived close by the side of the inquisitive lady two dark-blue eyes—they belonged to her daughter, and a woman who had such a daughter could not be silly!

The mother was, as it were, a fountain of questions, while the daughter, who listened without saying a word, might have been taken for the beautiful naiad of the fountain. How beautiful she was! She was a study for the sculptor, to be contemplated but not to converse with, for she did not speak, or at any rate very little.

“Has the Pope a large family?” inquired the lady.

The young man considerately answered as if he had been asked a different question, “No, he does not come from a great family.”

“That is not what I mean,” persisted the widow; “I wish to know if he has a wife and children?”

“The Pope is not allowed to marry,” said the sculptor.

“I don’t like that,” remarked the lady.

Indeed she might have asked more reasonable questions; but if she had not been allowed to speak in such a manner, would her daughter have been there, leaning so gracefully upon her shoulder, and looking straight in front of her with an almost sad smile on her face?

Then Mr. Alfred spoke again, and told of the glory of colour in Italy, of the purple hills, the blue Mediterranean, the azure sky of the south, the brightness and glory of which could only be surpassed in the north by a maiden’s deep blue eyes. And this he said with a peculiar stress, but she whom he wished to understand his meaning looked quite unconcerned, and that was again charming.

“Italy,” sighed a few guests.

“Travelling,” sighed others. “Charming, charming!”

“Yes, if I only win a hundred thousand dollars in the lottery,” said the widow, “then we should travel, I and my daughter; and Mr. Alfred, you must be our guide. We three shall travel together: and a couple of good friends with us.” And she nodded in such a friendly way to the company that any one of them would have thought that he was to accompany them to Italy.

“Indeed we shall go to Italy! But we shall not go where robbers are; we shall keep to Rome, and to the highroads, where one is safe.”

The daughter sighed very gently; and how much may a sigh mean, or how much can be attributed to it! The young man found it very significant. The two blue eyes, lit up this evening in his honour, must hide treasures—treasures of heart and mind—much richer than all the sights of Rome; and when he went home that night he had lost his heart, and was hopelessly in love with the young lady.

The widow’s house was the one most frequently visited by the sculptor; and it was evident that his visits were not intended for the mother, although she was the person who conversed with him, but for the daughter. They called her Kala. Her real name, Karen Malene, was contracted into the one name, Kala. She was beautiful, but some people said she was rather dull, and remained in bed until late in the morning.

“She has been accustomed to that since her infancy,” said her mother; “she is a beauty, and they are usually easily tired. She stays late in bed, but that is why her eyes are so clear.”

What a power was in these bright, deep blue eyes! “Still waters run deep;” the young man felt the truth of this saying, and his heart had sunk into their depths. He talked and talked, and the mother was as simple and inquisitive in her questions as when they first met.

It was a pleasure to hear Alfred describe anything; he spoke of Naples, of excursions to Mount Vesuvius, and showed coloured prints of several of the eruptions. The widow had never heard of them before, or given any thought to such things.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed; “so that is a burning mountain. Is it not very dangerous to the people who live near it?”

“Whole cities have been destroyed,” Alfred replied; “for in stance, Pompeii and Herculanum.”

“Oh, the poor people!—and you saw it all with your own eyes?”

“No, I did not see any of the eruptions depicted here, but I will show you a sketch of my own of an eruption I once saw.”

He laid a pencil drawing on the table, and mamma, who had been absorbed in the contemplation of highly coloured prints, looked at the pale drawing and exclaimed in astonishment, “Did you see it throw up white fire?”

Alfred’s respect for Kala’s mother suffered a severe shock for a moment; but, dazzled by the light which surrounded Kala, he soon found it quite natural that the old lady should have no eye for colour. After all it was of very little consequence, for Kala’s mother had the best of all possessions, namely, Kala herself.

Alfred and Kala were betrothed, which was natural enough, and the engagement was announced in the newspapers of the little town. The mother purchased thirty copies of the paper, that she might cut the paragraph out and send it to friends and acquaintances. The betrothed pair were happy, and the mother-in-law-elect was happy too, for she said it seemed like connecting herself with Thorwaldsen.

“You are a true successor of Thorwaldsen,” she said to Alfred; and it seemed to him as if she had said a clever thing for once. Kala was silent, but her eyes sparkled, her lips smiled, and every movement was graceful; that cannot be repeated too often.

Alfred decided to take a bust of Kala, and also of her mother.

They sat to him accordingly, and saw how he moulded and formed the soft clay with his fingers.

“I suppose it is only on our account that you perform this commonplace work yourself, instead of leaving it to your servant to do all that sticking together,” said the old lady.

“No, it is necessary that I should mould the clay myself,” he replied.

“Ah, yes, you are always so polite,” she said with a smile; and Kala silently pressed his hand, all soiled as it was with the clay.

Then he unfolded to them both the beauties of Nature in all her works, pointing out how the inanimate matter was inferior to animate nature in the scale of creation; how the plant was above the mineral, the animal above the plant, and man above them all. He strove to show them how beauty of mind is visible in the outward form, and how it is the sculptor’s task to seize this charm of expression and reproduce it in his work.

Kala said nothing, but nodded approbation of what he said, while her mother made the following confession:

“It’s difficult to follow all that, but I go hobbling after you with my thoughts, though what you say makes my head whirl round and round. Still, I contrive to lay hold of some of it.”

And Kala’s beauty had a firm hold on Alfred, it filled his soul and held a mastery over him. Beauty gleamed from Kala’s every feature—shone in her eyes, lurked in the corners of her mouth and in every movement of her fingers. Alfred, the sculptor, saw this: he spoke only to her, thought only of her, and the two became one, and so it might be said that she spoke much, for he and she were one, and he was always talking to her.

Such was the betrothal—now came the wedding, with bridesmaids and wedding presents, all duly mentioned in the wedding speech. The widow had set up Thorwaldsen’s bust at the end of the table, attired in a dressing gown, for he was to be a guest; such was her whim. Songs were sung and cheers given, for it was a gay wedding, and they were a handsome pair.

“Pygmalion loved his Galathea,” said one of the songs.

“Ah, that is one of your mythologies,” said the old lady.

The next day the young couple started for Copenhagen, where they were to live. The mother accompanied them, “to look after the commonplace,” as she said, meaning the domestic economy. Kala was like a doll in a doll’s house, for everything was so bright and new and so fine. There they sat, all three of them, and as for Alfred, a proverb may describe his position—he was like a swan among the geese.

The enchanting form had taken him captive. He had looked at the casket without caring to inquire what it contained, and this omission often brings the greatest unhappiness into married life. The casket may be injured, the gilding may come off, and then the purchaser regrets his bargain. In a large party it is very disagreeable to find that one’s buttons are giving way, and that there are no buckles to fall back upon; but it is worse still in a great company to become aware that your wife and mother-in-law are talking nonsense, and that you cannot depend upon yourself to produce a little ready wit to carry off the stupidity of the whole affair.

The young married couple often sat hand in hand, he speaking and she letting fall a word now and then, in the same melodious voice, the same bell-like tones. It was a mental relief when Sophy, one of her friends, came to visit them. Sophy was not pretty; she was certainly free from bodily deformity, though Kala always said she was a little crooked, but no eye but a friend’s would have noticed it. She was a very sensible girl, yet it never occurred to her that she might be a dangerous person here. Her appearance was like a breath of fresh air in the doll’s house, and a change of atmosphere was really necessary—they all owned that. They felt they needed a change, and so the young couple and the mother travelled to Italy.

•  •  •

“Thank Heaven, we are within our own four walls again!” mother and daughter both exclaimed when they came home a year afterwards.

“There is no real pleasure in travelling,” said mamma; “to speak the truth, it is very tiring—I beg pardon for saying so. I soon got weary of it, although I had my children with me, and, besides, it is very expensive work travelling, very expensive. And all those galleries one is expected to see, and the quantity of things one is obliged to run after! It must be done for decency’s sake, for you are sure to be asked, when you come back, if you have seen everything, and will be told most likely that you have left out the one thing that was worth seeing. I got tired at last of those endless Madonnas; I began to think I was turning into a Madonna myself.”

“And then the living, mamma,” said Kala.

“Yes,” she replied, “no such thing as a respectable meat-soup; it is wretched stuff, their cookery.”

The journey had also tired Kala; but she was always tired, that was the worst of it. So they sent for Sophy, and she was taken into the house to live with them; and her presence was a real advantage. Mamma-in-law acknowledged that Sophy was not only a clever housekeeper, but also well informed and accomplished, though the latter could hardly be expected from a person who was so badly off. She was a generous-hearted, faithful girl as well—they were able to see that while Kala lay sick, fading away. When the casket is everything, it should be strong, or else it is all over. And it was all over with the casket, for Kala died.

“She was beautiful,” said her mother; “she was quite different from the beauties they call ‘antiques,’ for they are so damaged. A beauty should be perfect, and Kala was a perfect beauty.”

Both Alfred and mamma shed tears and wore mourning. She wore mourning the longest, for black suited her, and then she experienced another grief. Alfred married again, married Sophy, who was nothing at all to look at.

“He has gone to the very extreme,” said mamma-in-law; “he has gone from the most beautiful to the ugliest, and he has forgotten his first wife. Men have no constancy. My husband was of a different stamp, but then he died before me.”

“‘Pygmalion loved his Galathea,’ was a song they sang at my first wedding” said Alfred; “I once fell in love with a beautiful statue, which came to life in my arms; but the kindred soul, which is a gift from heaven, the angel who can sympathise with and elevate us, I have not found and won till now. Sophy, you did not come in the glory of outward beauty; though you are fair, fairer than is necessary. But the chief thing is this: you came to teach the sculptor that his work is but dust and clay, a form made of material that decays, and that what we should seek for is the ethereal essence of mind and spirit. Poor Kala! ours was but a meeting by the wayside; in the next world, where we all shall know each other by union of souls, we shall be almost strangers.”

“That was not kindly said,” replied Sophy, “nor spoken like a true Christian. In the next world, where there is no marrying, or giving in marriage, but where, as you say, souls will attract each other by sympathy, there everything beautiful is developed and raised to a higher state of existence. Her soul may acquire such completeness that it may harmonize with yours, even more than mine, and you will once more utter your first rapturous exclamation, ‘Beautiful, most beautiful!”’

[ 1860 ]

Psyche

—

At the dawn of day, through the red atmosphere, shines a large star, morning’s clearest star; its ray quivers upon the white wall, as if it would there inscribe what it had to relate—what in the course of a thousand years it has witnessed here and there on our revolving earth.

Listen to one of its histories:

Lately (its “lately” is a century ago to us human beings) the rays watched a young artist; it was in the territory of the Pope, in the capital of the world—Rome. Much has changed there in the flight of years, but nothing so rapidly as the change which takes place in the human form between childhood and old age. The imperial city was then, as now, in ruins; fig trees and laurels grew among the fallen marble pillars, and over the shattered bath-chambers, with their gold-enamelled walls; the Colosseum was a ruin; the bells of the churches rang, incense perfumed the air, processions moved with lights and splendid canopies through the streets. The Holy Church ruled all, and art was patronised by it. At Rome lived the world’s great painter, Raphael; there also lived the first sculptor of his age, Michael Angelo. The Pope himself paid homage to these two artists, and honoured them by his visits. Art was appreciated, admired, and recompensed. But even then not all that was great and worthy of praise was known and brought forward.

In a narrow little street stood an old house; it had formerly been a temple, and there dwelt a young artist. He was poor and unknown; however, he had a few young friends, artists like himself, young in mind, in hopes, in thoughts. They told him that he was rich in talents but that he was a fool, since he never would believe in his own powers. He always destroyed what he had formed in clay; he was never satisfied with anything he did, and never had anything finished so as to have it seen and known, and it was necessary to have this in order to make money.

“You are a dreamer,” they said, “and therein lies your misfortune. But this arises from your never having lived yet, not having tasted life, enjoyed it in large exhilarating draughts, as it ought to be enjoyed. It is only in youth that one can do this. Look at the great master, Raphael, whom the Pope honours and the world admires: he does not abstain from wine and good fare.”

“He dines with the baker’s wife, the charming Fornarina,” said Angelo, one of the liveliest of the young group.

They all talked a great deal, after the fashion of gay young men. They insisted on carrying the youthful artist off with them to scenes of amusement and riot—scenes of folly they might have been called—and for a moment he felt inclined to accompany them. His blood was warm, his fancy powerful; he could join in their jovial chat, and laugh as loud as any of them; yet what they called “Raphael’s pleasant life” vanished from his mind like a morning mist; he thought only of the inspiration that was apparent in the great master’s works. If he stood in the Vatican near the beautiful forms the masters of a thousand years before had created out of marble blocks, then his breast heaved; he felt within himself something so elevated, so holy, so grand and good, that he longed to chisel such statues from the marble blocks. He wished to give a form to the glorious conceptions of his mind, but how, and what form? The soft clay that was moulded into beautiful figures by his fingers one day, was the next day, as usual, broken up.

Once, as he was passing one of the rich palaces, of which there are so many at Rome, he stepped within the large open entrance court, and saw arched corridors adorned with statues, enclosing a little garden full of the most beautiful roses. Great white flowers, with green juicy leaves, shot up the marble basin, where the clear waters splashed, and near it glided a figure, that of a young girl, the daughter of the princely house—so delicate, so light, so lovely! He had never beheld so beautiful a woman. Yes—painted by Raphael, painted as Psyche, in one of the palaces of Rome! Yes—there she stood as if living!

She also lived in his thoughts and heart. And he hurried home to his humble apartment, and formed a Psyche of clay; it was the rich, the high-born young Roman lady, and for the first time he looked with satisfaction on his work. It was life itself—it was herself. And his friends, when they saw it, were loud in their congratulations. This work was a proof of his excellence in art, that they had themselves already known, and the world should now know it also.

Clay may look fleshy and life-like, but it has not the whiteness of marble, and does not last so long. His Psyche must be sculptured in marble, and the expensive block of marble required he already possessed: it had lain for many years in the court-yard, a legacy from his parents. Broken bottles, decayed vegetables, and all manner of refuse, had been heaped on it and soiled it, but within it was white as the mountain snow. Psyche was to be chiselled from it.

One day it happened (the clear star tells nothing of this, for it did not see what passed, but we know it), a distinguished Roman party came to the narrow humble street. The carriage stopped near it. The party had come to see the young artist’s work, of which they had heard by accident. And who were these aristocratic visitors? Unfortunate young man! All too happy young man, he might also have been called. The young girl herself stood there in his studio; and with what a smile when her father exclaimed, “But it is you, you yourself to the life!” That smile could not be copied, that glance could not be imitated—that speaking glance which she cast on the young artist! It was a glance that fascinated, enchanted, and destroyed.

“The Psyche must be finished in marble,” said the rich nobleman. And that was a life-giving word to the inanimate clay and to the heavy marble block, as it was a life-giving word to the young man.

“When the work is finished, I will purchase it,” said the noble visitor.

It seemed as if a new era had dawned on the humble studio; joy and sprightliness enlivened it now, and ennui fled before constant employment. The bright morning star saw how quickly the work advanced. The clay itself became as if animated with a soul, for even in it stood forth, in perfect beauty, each now well-known feature.

“Now I know what life is,” exclaimed the young artist joyfully; “it is love. There is glory in the excellent; rapture in the beautiful. What my friends call life and enjoyment are corrupt and perishable—they are bubbles in the fermenting dregs, not the pure heavenly altar-wine that consecrates life.”

The block of marble was raised, the chisel hewed large pieces from it; it was measured, pointed, and marked. The work proceeded; little by little, the stone assumed a form of beauty—Psyche—charming as God’s creation in the young female. The heavy marble became life-like, dancing, airy, and a graceful Psyche, with the bright smile so heavenly and innocent, such as had mirrored itself in the young sculptor’s heart.

The star of the rose-tinted morn saw it, and well understood what was stirring in the young man’s heart—understood the changing colour on his cheek, the fire in his eye—as he carved the likeness of what God had created.

“You are a master, such as those in the time of the Greeks,” said his delighted friends; “The whole world will soon admire your Psyche.”

“My Psyche!” he exclaimed. “Mine! yes, such she must be. I too am an artist like these great ones of by-gone days. God has bestowed on me the gift of genius, which raises its possession to a level with the high-born.”

And he sank on his knees, and wept his thanks to God, and forgot Him for her—for her image in marble. The figure of Psyche stood there, as if formed of snow, blushing rosy red in the morning sun.

In reality he was to see her, living, moving, her whose voice had sounded like the sweetest music. He was to go to the splendid palace, to announce that the marble Psyche was finished. He went thither, passed through the open court to where the water poured, splashing from dolphins, into the marble basin, around which the white flowers clustered, and the roses shed their fragrance. He entered the large lofty hall, whose walls and roof were adorned with armorial bearings and heraldic designs. Well-dressed pompous-looking servants strutted up and down, like sleigh-horses with their jingling bells; others of them, insolent-looking fellows, were stretched at their ease on handsomely carved wooden benches; they seemed the masters of the house. He told his errand, and was then conducted up the white marble stairs which were covered with soft carpets.

Statues were ranged on both sides; he passed through handsome rooms with pictures and bright mosaic floors. For a moment he felt oppressed by all this magnificence and splendour—it nearly took his breath away. But he speedily recovered himself; for the princely owner of the mansion received him kindly, almost cordially, and, after they had finished their conversation, requested him, when bidding him adieu, to go to the apartments of the young Signora, who wished also to see him. Servants marshalled him through superb saloons and suites of rooms to the chamber where she sat, elegantly dressed and radiant in beauty.

She spoke to him. No Miserere, no tones of sacred music, could more have melted the heart and elevated the soul. He seized her hand, and carried it to his lips; never was rose so soft. But there issued a fire from that rose—a fire that penetrated through him and turned his head; words poured forth from his lips, which he scarcely knew himself, like the crater pouring forth glowing lava. He told her of his love. She stood amazed, offended, insulted, with a haughty and scornful look, an expression which had been called forth instantaneously by his passionate avowal of his sentiments towards her. Her cheeks glowed, her lips became quite pale; her eyes flashed fire, and were yet as dark as ebon night.

“Madman!” she exclaimed; “begone! away!” And she turned angrily from him, while her beautiful countenance assumed the look of that fabulous beauty with the snaky locks that turned the beholder into stone

Like a sinking, lifeless thing, he descended into the street; like a sleep-walker he reached his home. But there he awoke to pain and fury; he seized his hammer, lifted it high in the air, and was on the point of breaking the beautiful marble statue, but in his distracted state of mind he had not observed that Angelo was standing near him. The latter caught his arm, exclaiming, “Have you gone mad? What would you do?”

They struggled with each other. Angelo was the stronger of the two, and, drawing a deep breath, the young sculptor threw himself on a chair.

“What has happened?” asked Angelo. “Calm yourself, and speak.”

But what could he tell? what could he say? And when Angelo found that he could get nothing out of him, he gave up questioning him.

“Your blood thickens in this constant dreaming. Be a man like the rest of us, and do not live only in the ideal: you will go deranged at this rate. Take wine until you feel it get a little into your head; that will make you sleep well. Let a pretty girl be your doctor; a girl from the Campagna is as charming as a princess in her marble palace. Both are the daughters of Eve, and not to be distinguished from each other in Paradise. Follow your Angelo! Let me be your angel, the angel of life for you! The time will come when you will be old, and your limbs will be useless to you. Why, on a fine sunny day, when everything is laughing and joyous, do you look like a withered straw that can grow no more? I do not believe what the priests say, that there is a life beyond the grave. It is a pretty fancy, a tale for children—pleasant enough if one could put faith in it. I, however, do not live in fancies only, but in the world of realities. Come with me! Be a man!”

And he drew him out with him; it was easy to do so at that moment. There was a heat in the young artist’s blood, a change in his feelings; he longed to throw off all his old habits, all that he was accustomed to—to throw off his own former self—and he consented to accompany Angelo.

On the outskirts of Rome was a hostelry much frequented by artists. It was built amidst the ruins of an old bath-chamber; the large yellow lemons hung among their dark bright leaves, and adorned the greatest part of the old reddish-gilt walls. The hostelry was a deep vault, almost like a hole in the ruin. A lamp burned within it, before a picture of the Madonna; a large fire was blazing in the stove (roasting, boiling and frying were going on there); on the outside, under lemon and laurel trees, stood two tables spread for refreshments.

Kindly and joyously were the two artists welcomed by their friends. None of them ate much, but they all drank a great deal; that caused hilarity. There was singing, and playing the guitar; Saltarello sounded, and the merry dance began. A couple of young Roman girls, models for the artists, joined in the dance, and took part in their mirth—two charming Bacchantes! They had not, indeed, the delicacy of Psyche—they were not graceful, lovely roses—but they were fresh, ruddy, hardy carnations.

How warm it was that day! Warm even after the sun had gone down—heat in the blood, heat in the air, heat in every look! The atmosphere seemed to be composed of gold and roses—life itself was gold and roses.

“Now at last you are with us! Let yourself be borne on the stream around you and within you.”

“I never before felt so well and so joyous,” cried the young sculptor. “You are right, you are all right; I was a fool, a visionary. Men should seek for realities, and not wrap themselves up in fantasies.” Amidst songs and the tinkling of guitars, the young men sallied forth from the hostelry, and took their way, in the clear starlit evening, through the small streets; the two ruddy carnations, daughters of the Campagna, accompanied them. In Angelo’s room amidst sketches and folios scattered about, and glowing voluptuous paintings, their voices sounded more subdued, but not less full of passion. On the floor lay many a drawing of the Campagna’s daughters in various attractive attitudes: they were full of beauty, yet the originals were still more beautiful. The six-branched chandeliers were burning, and the light glared in the scene of sensual joy.

“Apollo! Jupiter! Into your heaven and happiness am I wafted. It seems as if the flower of life has in this moment sprung up in my heart.”

Yes, it sprang up, but it broke and fell, and a deadening hideous sensation seized upon him. It dimmed his sight, stupefied his mind! perception failed, and all became dark around him.

He gained his home, and sat down on his bed, and tried to collect his thoughts. “Fie!” was the exclamation uttered by his own mouth from the bottom of his heart. “Wretch! begone! away!” and he breathed a sigh full of the deepest grief.

“Begone! away!” These words of hers—the living Psyche’s words—were re-echoed in his breast, re-echoed from his lips. He laid his head on his pillow; his thoughts became confused, and he slept.

At the dawn of day, he arose, and sat down to reflect. What had happened? Had he dreamed it all—dreamed her words—dreamed his visit to the hostelry, and the evening with the flaunting carnations of the Campagna? No, all was reality—a reality such as he had never before experienced.

Through the purplish haze of the early morning shone the clear star; its rays fell upon him and upon the marble Psyche. He trembled as he gazed on the imperishable image; he felt that there was impurity in his look, and he threw a covering over it. Once only he removed the veil to touch the statue, but he could not bear to see his own work.

Quiet, gloomy, absorbed in his own thoughts, he sat the livelong day. He noticed nothing, knew nothing of what was going on about him, and no one knew what was going on within his heart.

Days, weeks passed; the nights were the longest. The glittering star saw him one morning, pale, shaking with fever, arise from his couch, go to the marble figure, lift the veil from it, gaze for a moment with an expression of deep devotion and sorrow on his work, and then, almost sinking under its weight he dragged the statue out into the garden. In it there was a dried-up, dilapidated, disused well, which could only be called a deep hole; he sank this Psyche in it, threw in earth over it, and covered the new-made grave with brushwood and nettles. “Begone! away!” was the short funeral service.

The star witnessed this through the rose-tinted atmosphere, and its ray quivered on two large tears upon the corpse-like cheeks of the young fever-stricken man—death-stricken they called him on his sick-bed.

The monk Ignatius came to see him as a friend and physician—came with religious comforting words, and spoke to him of the Church’s happiness and peace, of the sins of mankind, the grace and mercy of God.

And his words fell like warm sunbeams on the damp spongy ground; it steamed, and the misty vapours ascended from it, so that the thoughts and mental images which had received their shapes from realities were cleared, and he was enabled to take a more just view of man’s life. The delusions of guilt abounded in it, and such there had been for him. Art was a sorceress that lured us to vanity and earthly lusts. We are false towards ourselves, false towards our friends, false towards our God. The serpent always repeats within us, “Eat thereof; then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods!”

He seemed now for the first time to understand himself, and to have found the way to truth and rest. On the Church shone light from on high; in the monk’s cell dwelt that peace amidst which the human tree might grow to flourish in eternity.

Brother Ignatius encouraged these sentiments, and the artist’s resolution was taken. A child of the world became a servant of the Church: the young sculptor bade adieu to all his former pursuits, and went into a monastery.

How kindly, how gladly, was he received by the Brothers!

What a Sunday fête was his initiation! The Almighty, it seemed to him, was in the sunshine that illumined the church. His glory beamed from the holy images and from the white cross. And when he now, at the hour of the setting sun, stood in his little cell, and, opening the window, looked out over the ancient Rome, the ruined temples, the magnificent but dead Colosseum—when he saw all this in the springtime, when the acacias were in bloom, the evergreens were fresh, roses bursting from their buds, citron and orange trees shining, palms waving—he felt himself tranquillised and cheered as he had never been before. The quiet open Campagna extended towards the misty snow-decked hills, which seemed painted in the air. All, blended together, breathed of peace, of beauty, so soothingly, so dreamily—a dream the whole.

Yes, the world was a dream here. A dream may continue for an hour, and come again at another hour; but life in a cloister is a life of years, long and many.

He might have attested the truth of this saying, that from within comes much which taints mankind. What was that fire that sometimes blazed throughout him? What was that source from which evil, against his will, was always welling forth? He scourged his body, but from within came the evil yet again. What was that spirit within him, which, with the pliancy of a serpent coiled itself up, and crept into his conscience under the cloak of universal love, and comforted him? The saints pray for us, the holy mother prays for us, Jesus Himself has shed his blood for us. Was it weakness of mind or the volatile feelings of youth that caused him sometimes to think himself received into grace, and made him fancy himself exalted by that—exalted over so many? For he had not cast from him the vanities of the world? Was he not a son of the Church?

One day, after the lapse of many years, he met Angelo, who recognised him.

“Man!” exclaimed Angelo. “Yes, surely it is yourself. Are you happy now? You have sinned against God, for you have thrown away His gracious gift, and abandoned your mission in the world. Read the parable of the confided talent. The Master who related it spoke the truth. What have you won or found? Have you not allotted to yourself a life of dreams? To your religion not a mere coinage of the brain? What if all be but a dream—pretty yet fantastic thoughts?”

“Away from me, Satan!” cried the monk, as he fled from Angelo.

“There is a devil, a personified devil! I saw him today,” groaned the monk. “I only held out a finger to him, and he seized my whole hand! Ah, no!” he sighed. “In myself there is sin, and in that man there is sin; but he is not crushed by it—he goes with brow erect, and lives in happiness. I seek my happiness in the consolations of religion. If only they were consolations—if all here, as in the world I left, were but pleasing thoughts! They are delusions, like the crimson skies of evening, like the beautiful sea-blue tint on the distant hills. Close by these look very different. Eternity, thou art like the wide, interminable, calm-looking ocean: it beckons, calls us, fills us with forebodings, and if we venture on it, we sink, we disappear, die, cease to exist! Delusions! Begone! Away!”

And tearless, lost in his own thoughts, he sat upon his hard pallet: then he knelt. Before whom? The stone cross that stood on the wall? No, habit alone made him kneel there.

And the deeper he looked into himself, the darker became his thoughts, “Nothing within, nothing without—a lifetime wasted!” And that cold snowball of thoughts rolled on, grew larger, crushed him, destroyed him.

“To none dare I speak of the gnawing worm within me; my secret is my prisoner. Yet if I could get rid of it, I would be Thine, O God!”

And a spirit of piety awoke and struggled within him.

“Lord, Lord!” he exclaimed in his despair. “Be merciful, grant me faith! I despised and abandoned Thy gracious gift—my mission into this world. I was wanting in strength; Thou hadst not bestowed that on me. Immortal fame—Psyche—still lingers in my heart. Begone! Away! They shall be buried like yonder Psyche, the brightest gem of my life. That shall never ascend from its dark grave.”

The star in the rose-tinted morn shone brightly—the star that assuredly shall be extinguished and annihilated, while the spirits of mankind live amidst celestial light.

Its trembling rays fell upon the white wall, but it inscribed no memorial there of the blessed trust in God, of the grace, of the holy love, that dwell in the believer’s heart.

“Psyche within me can never die—it will live in consciousness! Can what is inconceivable be? Yes, yes! For I myself am inconceivable. Thou art inconceivable, O Lord! The whole of Thy universe is inconceivable—a work of power, of excellence, of love!” His eyes beamed with the brightest radiance for a moment, and then became dim and corpse-like. The church bells rang their funeral peal over him—the dead; and he was buried in earth brought from Jerusalem, and mingled with the ashes of departed saints.

Some years afterwards the skeleton was taken up, as had been the skeletons of the dead monks before him; it was attired in the brown cowl, with a rosary in its hand, and it was placed in a niche among the human bones which were found in the burying-ground of the monastery. And the sun shone outside and incense perfumed the air within, and masses were said.

Years again went by.

The bones of the skeleton had fallen from each other, and become mixed together. The skulls were gathered and set up—they formed quite an outer wall to the church. There stood also his skull in the burning sunshine: there were so many, many death’s heads, that no one knew now the names they had borne, nor his. And see! in the sunshine there moved something living within the two eye-sockets. What could that be? A motley-coloured lizard had sprung into the interior of the skull, and was passing out and in through the large empty sockets of the eye. There was life now within that head, where once grand ideas, bright dreams, love of art, and excellence had dwelt—from whence hot tears had rolled, and where had lived the hope of immortality. The lizard sprang forth and vanished; the skull mouldered away and became dust in dust.

It was a century from that time. The clear star shone unchanged, as brightly and beautifully as a thousand years before; the dawn of day was red, fresh, and blushing as a rose-bud.

Where once had been a narrow street, with the ruins of an ancient temple, stood now a convent. A grave was to be dug in the garden, for a young nun had died, and at an early hour in the morning she was to be buried. In digging the grave the spade knocked against a stone. Dazzling white it appeared—the pure marble became visible. A round shoulder first presented itself; the spade was used more cautiously, and a female head was soon discovered, and then the wings of a butterfly. From the grave in which the young nun was to be laid, they raised, in the red morning light, a beautiful statue—Psyche carved in the finest marble. “How charming it is! how perfect!—an exquisite work, from the most glorious period of art!” it was said.

Who could have been the sculptor? No one knew that—none knew him except the clear star that had shone for a thousand years; it knew his earthly career, his trials, his weakness. But he was dead, returned to the dust. Yet the result of his greatest effort, the most admirable, which proved his vast genius—Psyche—that never can die; that might outlive fame. That was seen, appreciated, admired, and loved.

The clear star in the rosy-streaked morn seals its glittering ray upon Psyche, and upon the delighted countenances of the admiring beholders, who saw a Soul created in the marble block.

All that is earthly returns to earth, and is forgotten; only the star in the infinite vault of heaven bears it in remembrance. What is heavenly retains renown from its own excellence; and when even renown shall fade, Psyche shall still live.

[ 1861 ]

A Rose from Homer’s Grave

—

The Nightingale’s love for the Rose pervades the songs of the East: they describe how the winged songster serenades his fragrant flower in the silent starlight night.

Not far from Smyrna, under high plane trees where the merchant drives his heavily-loaded camels, which proudly raise their long necks and stride with heavy step over the hallowed ground, I saw a hedge of roses in full bloom; wild pigeons flew about in the high branches of the trees, and when a sunbeam glided over their wings they shone like mother-of-pearl. There was one rose in the hedge which was more beautiful than all the others, and this Rose the Nightingale was entreating for love; but the rose was silent—a dewdrop lay, like a tear of compassion on her petals; the branch on which she grew was bending down over several large stones.

“Here sleeps the greatest singer that ever lived on earth!” said the Rose. “On this grave I will breathe forth sweet fragrance and strew my petals over it when the wind scatters them! The singer of Troy became the earth from which I grew forth!—I, a rose from Homer’s grave, am too sacred to bloom for a poor Nightingale!” And the grieving Nightingale sang itself to death.

A camel-driver came to the spot with his loaded camels and his black slaves; his little son found the dead bird and buried the songster in the grave of the great Homer, while the Rose trembled in the wind. The evening came; the Rose folded her petals closer together and dreamed, and this was her dream.

It had been a beautiful sunny day; a troop of strangers approached, they had made a pilgrimage to Homer’s grave. Among them was a singer from the north, from the home of fogs and of the aurora borealis; he broke the Rose off, pressed it tightly in a book, and carried it with him into another part of the world—into his distant native country. The Rose withered for grief, and lay between the leaves of the book which the singer opened in his own home and said: “Here is a rose from Homer’s gravel”

This the flower dreamed, and when she awoke she trembled in the wind, so that a dewdrop fell from her petals on the singer’s grave. The sun rose, and the flower was more beautiful than ever; the day grew very hot and she was still in her own warm Asia. Then steps were heard: strangers from France came, as the Rose had seen them in her dream, and among them was also a poet from the north: he plucked the Rose, pressed a kiss on her beautiful mouth, and carried it with him to the home of fog and aurora borealis. This flower now rests in his “Iliad” like a mummy, and as in a dream, she heard him say as he opened the book, “Here is a rose from Homer’s grave.”

[ 1842 ]

The Gardener and the Gentry

—

Four or five miles from the capital stood an old manor house, with thick walls, towers, and pointed gable-ends. Here lived, but only in the summer season, a rich and courtly family. This manor house was the best and the most beautiful of all the houses they owned. It looked outside as if it had just been cast in a foundry, and within it was comfort itself. The family arms were carved in stone over the door; beautiful roses twined about the arms and the balcony; a grass-plot extended before the house with red-thorn and white-thorn, and many rare flowers grew even outside the conservatory. The manor kept also a very skilful gardener. It was a real pleasure to see the flower-garden, the orchard, and the kitchen-garden. There was still to be seen a portion of the manor’s original garden, a few box tree hedges cut in shape of crowns and pyramids, and behind these two mighty old trees almost always without leaves. One might almost think that a storm or water-spout had scattered great lumps of manure on their branches, but each lump was a bird’s-nest. A swarm of rooks and crows from time immemorial had built their nests here. It was a whole town full of birds, and the birds were the manorial lords here. They did not care for the proprietors, the manor’s oldest family branch, nor for the present owner of the manor—these were nothing to them; but they bore with the wandering creatures below them, notwithstanding that once in a while they shot with guns in a way that made the birds’ back-bones shiver, and made every bird fly up, crying “Rak, Rak!”

The gardener very often explained to the master the necessity of felling the old trees, as they did not look well, and by taking them away they would probably also get rid of the screaming birds, which would seek another place. But he never could be induced either to give up the trees or the swarm of birds—the manor could not spare them, as they were relics of the good old times, that ought always to be kept in remembrance.

“The trees are the birds’ heritage by this time!” said the master. “So let them keep them, my good Larsen.” Larsen was the gardener’s name, but that is of very little consequence in this story. “Haven’t you room enough to work in, little Larsen? Have you not the flower-garden, the green-houses, the orchard and the kitchen-garden!” He cared for them, he kept them in order and cultivated them with zeal and ability, and the family knew it; but they did not conceal from him that they often tasted fruits and saw flowers in other houses that surpassed what he had in his garden, and that was a sore trial to the gardener, who always wished to do the best, and really did the best he could. He was good-hearted, and a faithful servant.

The owner sent one day for him, and told him kindly that the day before, at a party given by some friends of rank, they had eaten apples and pears which were so juicy and flavourful that all the guests had loudly expressed their admiration. To be sure, they were not native fruits, but they ought by all means to be introduced here, and to be acclimatized if possible. They learned that the fruit was bought of one of the first fruit-dealers in the city, and the gardener was to ride to town and find out about where they came from, and then order some slips for grafting. The gardener was very well acquainted with the dealer, because he was the very person to whom he sold the fruit that grew in the manor garden, beyond what was needed by the family. So the gardener went to town and asked the fruit-dealer where he had found those apples and pears that were praised so highly.

“They are from your own garden,” said the fruit-dealer, and he showed him, both the apples and pears, which he recognized. Now, how happy the gardener felt! He hastened back to his master, and told him that the apples and pears were all from his own garden. But he would not believe it.

“It cannot be possible, Larsen. Can you get a written certificate of that from the fruit-dealer?” And that he could; and brought him a written certificate.

“That is certainly wonderful!” said the family.

And now every day were set on the table great dishes filled with beautiful apples and pears from their own garden; bushels and barrels of these fruits were sent to friends in the city and country, nay, were even sent abroad. It was exceedingly pleasant; but when they talked with the gardener they said that the last two seasons had been remarkably favourable for fruits, and that fruits had done well all over the country.

Some time passed. The family were at dinner at court. The next day the gardener was sent for. They had eaten melons at the royal table which they found very juicy and well-flavoured; they came from his Majesty’s green-house. “You must go and see the court-gardener, and let him give you some seeds of those melons.”

“But the gardener at the court got his melon-seeds from us,” said the gardener, highly delighted.

“But then that man understands how to bring the fruit to a higher perfection,” was the answer. “Each particular melon was delicious.”

“Well; then, I really may feel proud,” said the gardener. “I must tell your lordship that the gardener at the court did not succeed very well with his melons this year, and so, seeing how beautiful ours looked, he tasted them and ordered from me three of them for the castle.”

“Larsen, do not pretend to say that those were melons from our garden.”

“Really, I dare say as much,” said the gardener, who went to the court-gardener and got from him a written certificate to the effect that the melons on the royal. table were from the manor. That was certainly a great surprise to the family, and they did not keep the story to themselves. Melon-seeds were sent far and wide, in the same way as had been done with the slips, which they were now hearing had begun to take, and to bear fruit of an excellent kind. The fruit was named after the manor, and the name was written in English, German, and French.

This was something they never had dreamed of.

“We are afraid that the gardener will come to think too much of himself,” said they; but he looked on it in another way: what he wished was to get the reputation of being one of the best gardeners in the country, and to produce every year something exquisite out of all sorts of garden stuff, and that he did. But he often had to hear that the fruits which he first brought, the apples and pears, were after all the best. All other kinds of fruits were inferior to these. The melons, too, were very good, but they belonged to quite another species. His strawberries were very excellent, but by no means better than many others; and when it happened one year that his radishes did not succeed, they only spoke of them, and not of other good things he had made succeed.

It really seemed as if the family felt some relief in saying “It won’t turn out well this year, little Larsen!” They seemed quite glad when they could say “It won’t turn out well!”

The gardener used always twice a week to bring them fresh flowers, tastefully arranged, and the colours by his arrangements were brought out in stronger light.

“You have good taste, Larsen,” said the owner, “but that is a gift from our Lord, not from yourself.”

One day the gardener brought a great crystal vase with a floating leaf of a white water-lily, upon which was laid, with its long thick stalk descending into the water, a sparkling blue flower as large as a sunflower.

“The sacred lotus of Hindustan!” exclaimed the family. They had never seen such a flower; it was placed every day in the sunshine, and in the evening under artificial light. Everyone who saw it found it wonderfully beautiful and rare; and that said the most noble young lady in the country, the wise and kind-hearted princess. The lord of the manor deemed it an honour to present her with the flower, and the princess took it with her to the castle. Now the master of the house went down to the garden to pluck another flower of the same sort, but he could not find any. So he sent for the gardener, and asked him where he kept the blue lotus. “I have been looking for it in vain,” said he. “I went into the conservatory, and round about the flower-garden.”

“No, it is not there!” said the gardener. “It is nothing else than a common flower from the kitchen-garden, but do you not find it beautiful? It looks as if it was the blue cactus, and yet it is only a kitchen-herb. It is the flower of the artichoke!”

“You should have told us that at the time!” said the master. “We supposed of course that it was a strange and rare flower. You have made us ridiculous in the eyes of the young princess! She saw the flower in our house and thought it beautiful. She did not know the flower, and she is versed in botany, too, but then that has nothing to do with kitchen-herbs. How could you take it into your head, my good Larsen, to put such a flower up in our drawing-room? It makes us ridiculous.”

And the magnificent blue flower from the kitchen-garden was turned out of the drawing-room, which was not at all the place for it. The master made his apology to the princess, telling her that it was only a kitchen-herb which the gardener had taken into his head to exhibit, but that he had been well reprimanded for it.

“That was a pity,” said the princess, “for he has really opened our eyes to see the beauty of a flower in a place where we should not have thought of looking for it. Our gardener shall every day, as long as the artichoke is in bloom, bring one of them up into the drawing-room.”

Then the master told his gardener that he might again bring them a fresh artichoke-flower. “It is, after all, a very nice flower,” said he, “and a truly remarkable one.” And so the gardener was praised again. “Larsen likes that,” said the master; “he is a spoiled child.”

In the autumn there came up a great gale, which increased so violently in the night that. several large trees in the outskirts of the wood were torn up by the roots; and to the great grief of the household, but to the gardener’s delight, the two big trees blew down, with all their birds’-nests on them. In the manor house they heard during the storm the screaming of rooks and crows, beating their wings against the windows.

“Now I suppose you are happy, Larsen,” said the master: “the storm has felled the trees, and the birds have gone off to the woods; there is nothing left from the good old days; it is all gone, and we are very sorry for it.”

The gardener said nothing, but he thought of what he long had turned over in his mind, how he could make that pretty sunny spot very useful, so that it could become an ornament to the garden and a pride to the family. The great trees which had been blown down had shattered the venerable box-hedge that was cut into fanciful shapes.

Here he set out a multitude of plants that were not to be seen in other gardens. He made an earthen wall, on which he planted all sorts of native flowers from the fields and woods. What no other gardener had ever thought of planting in the manor garden he planted, giving each its appropriate soil, and the plants were in sunlight or shadow according as each species required. He cared tenderly for them, and they grew up finely. The juniper tree from the heaths of Jutland rose in shape and colour like the Italian cypress; the shining, thorny holly, as green in the winter’s cold as in the summer’s sun, was splendid to see. In the foreground grew ferns of various species: some of them looked as if they were children of the palm tree; others, as if they were parents of the pretty plants called “Venus’s golden locks” or “Maiden-hair.” Here stood the despised burdock, which is so beautiful in its freshness that it looks well even in a bouquet. The burdock stood in a dry place, but below in the moist soil grew the colt’s-foot, also a despised plant, but yet most picturesque, with its tall stem and large leaf. Like a candelabrum with a multitude of branches six feet high, and with flower against flower, rose the mullein, a mere field plant. Here stood the woodruff and the lily of the valley, the wild calla and the fine three-leaved wood-sorrel. It was a wonder to see all this beauty!

In the front grew in rows very small French pear trees, trained on wires. By plenty of sun and good care they soon bore as juicy fruits as in their own country. Instead of the two old leafless trees was placed a tall flag-staff, where the flag of Dannebrog was displayed; and nearby stood another pole, where the hop-tendril in summer or harvest-time wound its fragrant flowers; but in wintertime, after ancient custom, oat-sheaves were fastened to it, that the birds of the air might find here a good meal in the happy Christmas-time.

“Our good Larsen is growing sentimental as he grows old,” said the family; “but he is faithful, and quite devoted to us.”

In one of the illustrated papers there was a picture at New Year’s of the old manor, with the flag-staff and the oat-sheaves for the birds of the air, and the paper said that the old manor had preserved that beautiful old custom, and deserved great credit for it.

“They beat the drum for all Larsen’s doings,” said the family. “He is a lucky fellow, and we may almost be proud of having such a man in our service.”

But they were not a bit proud of it. They were very well aware that they were the lords of the manor; they could give Larsen dismissal, in fact, but they did not. They were good people, and fortunate it is for every Mr. Larsen that there are so many good people like them.

Yes, that is the story of the gardener and the manor. Now you may think a little about it.

[ 1871 ]

The Most Extraordinary Thing

—

The one who could do the most extraordinary thing should have the king’s daughter and the half of his kingdom.

The young men, yes, the old ones too, strained all their wits, their nerves, and muscles; two ate themselves to death and one drank himself dead, to do the Most Extraoidinary thing most to their liking. But that was not the way it was to be done. The little boys in the street tried to spit on the small of their own backs. That seemed to them the most extraordinary thing to do.

On a certain day there was to be an exhibition of what each had to show as his “Most Extraordinary.” Judges were appointed from children of three years up to folks of ninety. It was a grand Exposition of Extraordinary things, but all were soon agreed that the Most Extraordinary was a great hall clock in a case, singularly contrived outside and in. When the clock struck, out came animated figures that showed what hour was struck. It was twelve whole representations, with moving figures that sang and spoke. It surely was the Most Extraordinary thing, said the people.

The clock struck one, and Moses stood on the Mount and wrote down on the tables of the law the first great commandment: “There is one only true God.”

The clock struck two, and the Garden of Paradise was seen, with Adam and Eve meeting—two happy people; without owning so much as a clothes-press they were betrothed.

At the stroke of three the Three Holy Kings appeared, only one of them was black as coal: he could not help that, the sun had blackened him; they came bringing incense and precious gifts.

When four sounded, the Seasons came: Spring with a cuckoo on a budding beech bough; Summer with a grasshopper on a ripe ear of corn; Autumn with an empty stork’s nest—the birds had flown away; Winter with an old crow that could tell stories, perched on the corner of the stove—old stories of by-gone days.

At five o’clock, the five senses were seen. Sight came in the shape of a spectacle-maker. Hearing was a copper-smith; Smell sold violets and anemones; Taste was a cook; and Feeling an undertaker, with crape down to his heels.

The clock struck six; there sat a gambler who threw the dice, and the highest side was turned up with sixes on it.

Then the seven days of the week, or the seven deadly sins—folks could not tell which, for they heard them all at once, and it was not easy to distinguish them.

Then came a choir of monks and sang the eight o’clock vesper song.

At the stroke of nine the Nine Muses came out: one was employed at the astronomical observatory; one at the historical records room; the rest were at the theatre.

When ten struck, Moses stepped forth with the tables of the law; thereon were all God’s commandments, and they were ten in all.

The clock struck again, when small boys and girls sprang dancing out; they played a game and sang: “Two and two and seven, the clock has struck eleven.”

And that it did strike. Now came the stroke of twelve, when the watchman marched out with his heavy cape and morning star; [93] he sang the old watch song:

’Twas at the midnight hour

Our Saviour, he was born.

and while he sang, the roses grew and grew into angels’ heads lasting on rainbow-hued wings.

It was goodly to hear, it was charming to see. The whole thing was an amazing work of art, the Most Extraordinary thing, said everyone. The artist was a young man, good-hearted and happy as a child, a true friend and help to his poor parents; he was worthy of the princess and the half of the kingdom.

The day for announcing the decision had come, the whole town was dressed up, and the princess sat on the throne of the country that had been newly stuffed with horse-hair, but still it had not been made any more comfortable or agreeable.

The judges round about looked very knowingly at him who was to get the prize, and he stood there so happy and proud; his fortune was won, he had done the Most Extraordinary thing.

“Nay, that shall I now do!” suddenly cried out a long-legged working-fellow. “I am the man for the Most Extraordinary thing!” and so he swung a great axe at the work of art.

“Crick, crack, crash!” there lay the whole thing. Wheels and feathers flew about. It was a grand ruin.

“I could do that!” said the man; “my work has beat his, and overcome all of you at the same time. I have done the Most Extraordinary thing!”

“Ruined such a work of art!” said the judges; “yes, that was the Most Extraordinary thing.” All the people said the same thing, and so he was to have the princess and half the kingdom; for a promise is a promise, even if it is of the most extraordinary kind.

They sounded the trumpets from the ramparts and from all the towers in town: “The nuptials are to be celebrated!” The princess was not particularly pleased at it, but she looked pretty and was most expensively dressed. The church was bright with lights in the evening; it looked best then. The ladies of rank in the town sang and led the bride forward; the knights sang and accompanied the bridegroom; he strutted as stiffly as if he never could be knocked over.

Now they stopped singing; it was so still that one could have heard a pin drop on the ground; but in the midst of the quiet there was a great noise and a crash; the great church doors flew open, and “boom! boom!”—all the works of the clock came marching through the doorway, and halted between the bride and groom.

Dead men cannot walk again—that we know very well—but a work of art can go again! The body was shattered to pieces, but not the spirit; the spirit of art made a joke, and indeed it was no joke!

The work of art stood there as really as when it was whole and untouched. The clock struck one stroke after another, right on to twelve, and the figures crowded out: first Moses, shining as if flames flashed from his forehead; he flung the heavy stone tables of the law at the bridegroom’s feet and fastened them to the church floor.

“I cannot lift them again!” said Moses. “You have broken my arms; stand there where you are.”

Now came Adam and Eve, the three Wise Men of the East, and the four Seasons; each said his disagreeable truth, and said “Shame on you!” But he was not in the least ashamed.

All the figures that showed each hour came forth out of the clock, and all grew wondrous big; it was as if there were scarcely room for the real people, and when, at the stroke of twelve, the watchman stepped forth with his great cape and morning star, there was a wonderful commotion. The watchman went straight up to the bridegroom and struck him on the forehead with his morning star.

“Lie there!” said he. “Like for like; now we are revenged and the master too. We vanish!”

And so they did vanish—the whole of this work of art. But the candles round about in the church grew into great flowers of light, and the gilded stars under the roof sent forth clear streaming light; the organ sounded of itself. All the people said that they had lived to see the Most Extraordinary thing.

“Now do you summon the right one!” said the princess, “the one that made the work of art; he is to be my lawful husband and lord.”

And he stood in the church; the whole people were his train; all were happy, all blessed him—there was no one who was envious, and that was the Most Extraordinary thing.

[ 1870 ]

What One Can Invent

—

There was once a young man who wanted to become a poet. He wanted to be a poet by the next Easter, that he might marry and live by poetizing, and that, he knew, consisted merely in a knack of inventing, but then he never could invent! He was quite sure that he had been born too late; every subject had been taken before he came into the world, and there was nothing left for him to write about!

“What happy mortals were those who were born a thousand years ago,” he sighed, “for then it was an easy matter to become immortal! Even those who were born but a hundred years ago were enviable; even then there was still something left to poetize about. But now all subjects are worn threadbare, and there is no use in my trying to write the nap on again!”

He thought and thought about it, till he grew quite thin and forlorn, poor fellow. No doctor could help him; there was but one who would be able to find the right remedy for him, and that was that wonderfully clever little old woman who lived in the little hut by the turnpike gate, that she opened and shut for all who passed that way. She was wise and learned, and could open far more than the gate; she was much wiser than the doctor who drives in his own carriage, and pays title-taxes.

“I must go to her,” said the young man. Her home was small and tidy, but dreary to look at—not a tree, not a flower, grew anywhere near it. There was a bee-hive at the door—very useful! There was a little potato-field—very useful! and a ditch with a blackthorn bush that had flowered, and was bearing fruit—berries that pucker your mouth if you eat them before the frost has nipped them.

“This is a true a picture of our unpoetic time,” thought the young man. At least here was a thought, a grain of gold that he found at the door of the little old woman’s cottage.

“Write that thought down,” she said. “Even crumbs are bread. I know why you have come here; you cannot invent, and yet you want to be a poet by next Easter!”

“Everything has been written about,” he sighed; “our time is not as the olden time.”

“No, it is not,” said the old woman. “In the olden time, folk such as I, who knew many weighty secrets, and how to cure by the help of wonderful herbs, were burned alive; and in the olden time, the poets went about with empty stomachs and out at elbows. Ours is a very good time, the very best, much better than the olden time; but your want of invention all lies in your having no eyes to see with, and no ears to hear, and you do not say your prayers of an evening. There are any amount of things all around you that one might poetize and write about, when one knows how to write stories. You can find it in the earth where it grows and sprouts; you can dip into the running or the stagnant water, and you will find it there; but first of all, you must understand the way of doing it—must know how to catch a ray of sunshine. Now, just try my spectacles, put my ear-trumpet to your ear, say your prayers, and do, for once, leave off thinking of yourself.”

That last request was almost more than he could fulfil—more than even such a wonderful old woman ought to ask.

He got the spectacles and the ear-trumpet, and was posted in the middle of the potato-field. She put a great potato into his hand. Sounds came from within it; there came a song with words, a “story of every-day life,” in ten volumes—but ten hills will do as well.

What was it the potato sang?

She sang of herself and of her family, of the arrival of the potato in Europe,and all she had to suffer from suspicion and ill-will before she was acknowledged, as she is now, to be a greater treasure than a lump of gold.

“We were distributed, by order of the King, at the courthouse in every town; and there was issued a circular, setting forth our value and great merits, but no one believed it; they had not even the slightest idea how to plant us. One man dug a hole and threw his whole bushel of potatoes into it; another stuck them into the ground, one here, another there, and then waited for them to grow, and expected them to shoot up like trees that would bear potatoes, just as apple trees bear apples. There came buds, and stems, and flowers, and watery fruit, but it all withered away, and no one thought of the real blessing, the potato, that lay hidden under it all, in the ground. Yes, we have suffered much and been tried—that is, our forefathers have, but it all comes right in the end. Now you know our story.”

“That’s enough,” said the old woman; “now look at the blackthorn.”

“We, too,” said the blackthorn, “have many relations in the land where the potatoes came from. A party of bold Norwegians from Norway steered their course westward through storm and fog till they came to an unknown country, where, under the ice and snow, they found herbs and grass, and bushes with blue-black berries of the vine—the blackthorn it was, whose berries ripen with the frost, and so do we. And that country they call ‘Vineland,’ and ‘Greenland,’ and ‘Blackthorn Land.’”

“Why, that is quite a romantic story,” said the young man.

“Now just follow me,” said the little old woman, as she led him to the bee hive.

What life and movement there was! Then he looked in; there were bees standing in all the corridors, moving their wings like fans, so that there might be plenty of fresh air all through that large honey factory; that was their department. Then there were bees coming in from outside, from the sunshine and the flowers; they had been born with baskets on their legs; they brought the dust of the flowers and emptied it out of their little leg-baskets; then it was sorted and worked up into honey and wax. Some came, some went; the queen of the hive wanted to fly, but when she flies, then all the others must fly too, and the right time for that had not yet come; but fly she would, and then to prevent her doing so, they bit her majesty’s wings off—so that she was obliged to stay where she was.

“Now get up on the side of the ditch, where you can see all the town-folk going past,” said the little old woman.

“Goodness, what an endless number of people,” said the young man. “One story after another! I seem to hear such buzzing and singing, and now it all grows quite confused! I feel quite dizzy—I shall fall!”

“No, don’t,” said the old woman—“don’t fall backward: just go forward, right into the crowd of people; have eyes for all you see there, ears for all you hear, and above all, have a heart in it all! and before long you will be able to invent, and have thoughts for writing down—but before you go you must give me back my spectacles and my ear-trumpet,” and then she took both.

“Now I see nothing more,” said the young man. “I do not even hear anything.”

“In that case, it is quite impossible for you to be a poet by next Easter,” said the old woman.

“But when shall I be a poet?” he asked.

“Neither by Easter nor by Whitsuntide! You have no knack at inventing,” said she.

“But how then must I do, to get my living by poetizing?”

“That I will tell you: write about those who have written. To hit their writings is to hit them. Don’t let yourself be frightened; the more you do of such writing, the more you will earn, and you and your wife will be able to eat cake every day.”

“What a trick she has at inventing,” thought the young man. And he did as she had told him. He hit out boldly at every other poet, because he could not be a poet himself.

All this the little old woman, has told me; she knows what one can invent

[ 1869 ]

It’s Perfectly Certain

—

“That’s a terrible story,” said a Hen—it was in a part of the town where the affair had not taken place—“that’s a terrible story about the hen-house! I shouldn’t dare to sleep alone at night! It’s a good thing there are so many of us on the perch.” She proceeded to tell it, so that the feathers of the other hens stood on end, and the cock let his comb droop. “It’s perfectly certain!”

But we will begin at the beginning, and this took place in a hen-house in another quarter of the town. The sun had set, and the fowls had flown up to roost. A Hen—she had white feathers and short legs—laid her regulation egg, and was a respectable hen in every way. Just as she got on the perch, she pecked at herself with her beak, and a little feather fell off her.

“There it goes,” said she; “the more I peck myself the prettier I get!” It was said, to be sure, in fun, for she was the merry one among the hens, being for the rest, as I said, highly respectable, and thereupon she went to sleep.

It was dark all round; hen sat by hen, and the one that sat next to her did not go to sleep. She heard and she didn’t hear, as indeed one must in this world if one is to live in peace and quiet, but she couldn’t help saying to her neighbour: “Did you hear what was said just then? I name no names, but there is a hen who plucks herself to improve her looks. If I were a cock I should despise her.”

Now just above the hens sat Mrs. Owl with her owl husband and owl children. They had sharp ears in that family; they heard every word the neighbour hen said, and they rolled their eyes, and the mother owl fanned herself with her wings. “Pray don’t listen—but you must have heard what was said just then. I heard it with my own ears, and one’s bound to hear a lot before they fall off! There’s one of the hens who has so totally forgotten what is becoming for a hen that she sits there pecking off all her feathers and allowing the cock to look on.”

“Prenez garde aux enfants,” said the father owl. “That’s not a thing for the children to hear.”

“But I must tell just the owl over the way; she is such a very well conducted bird.” And off flew the mother.

“Hoo hoo! Oo hoo!” they both hooted down to the pigeons in the pigeon-house, over the way: “Have you heard? Have you heard? There’s a hen who has plucked off all her feathers for love of the cock! She’ll freeze to death, if she’s not dead already. Oo hoo!”

“Where, where?” cooed the Pigeons.

“In the yard over the way. I as good as saw it myself. It’s almost too improper a story to tell; but it’s perfectly certain.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure of it; every single word,” said the Pigeons, and cooed down to their own hen-house: “There’s a hen—some say there are two—who have plucked off all their feathers so as not to look like the rest, and attract the cock’s notice that way. It’s a risky game! One can easily catch a chill and die of fever, and they are dead, both of them.”

“Wake up! Wake up!” crowed the Cock, flying up on to the board fence. He was still a bit drowsy, but he crowed for all that. “There are three hens who have died of unrequited affection for a cock; they’ve plucked all their feathers off. It’s an ugly story. I won’t keep it to myself. Pass it on!”

“Pass it on!” squeaked the Bats. And the hens clucked and the cocks crowed: “Pass it on! Pass it on!” And so the story went from one hen-house to another, and finally back to the place from which it had really started.

“There are five hens”, it ran “who have all plucked their feathers off to show which of them has got thinnest from affection for the cock! And after that they pecked each one another till the blood came and all fell down dead, to the shame and scandal of their family and the grave damage of their owners.”

And the Hen who had dropped the little loose feather naturally did not recognize her own story, and as she was a respectable hen, she said: “I despise those hens. But, alas, there are many of that class! A thing like this ought not to be hushed up, and I shall do what I can to let this story get into the papers, and be known through the whole country. That is what these hens and their families deserve!”

It did get into the papers, and was printed, and it is perfectly certain: one little feather can turn into five hens.

[ 1852 ]

Good Humour

—

My father left me the best inheritance any man can leave to his son—Good Humour. But who was my father? Why, that really has nothing to do with the good humour. He was lively and quick, although somewhat stout and fat; in fact, he was in body and mind the very opposite to what one would expect from a man of his calling. But what was his position, what services did he render to the community? Why, if that were to be written down and printed at the very beginning of a book, most people would lay the book down almost as soon as they had opened it, saying, “That is enough; I don’t want anything of this kind.” And yet my father was neither hangman nor headsman; on; on the contrary, his office was such that it placed him at the head of the most distinguished citizens of the town, and he was fully entitled to be there, for it was his proper place. He must needs be the foremost of all—before the bishop, nay, even before princes of royal blood, because he was the driver of the hearse.

There, now I have betrayed the secret! and I must confess that, when one saw my father sitting high up on the box of Death’s bus, clad in his big black cloak, having a black-trimmed hat on, and then looked into his face, which was as round and smiling as a picture of the sun, one could not think of mourning and the grave; for his face said, “It doesn’t matter, never mind—it will go much better than one thinks.”

So, you see, from him I have my good humour and also the habit of often going to the churchyard: and that is quite amusing, if one goes there in good spirits. I forgot to say that I also take the Advertiser, as he used to do.

I am no longer young—I have neither wife nor child, nor a library to entertain me, but I read, as I have mentioned, the Advertiser; that suffices me. It is my favourite newspaper, as it was my father’s.

The Advertiser is a most useful paper, and contains really everything a man requires to know; therein I find who preaches in the churches and who preaches in the new books; it tells you about charitable institutions, and contains many harmless poetical attempts. Marriages are desired, and meetings brought about. I can learn where I may get houses, servants, well-fitting clothes, and delicacies for the table when I want them; I know who is selling off and who is buying in. Then, too, I hear of so many deeds of pure, disinterested benevolence! I become, by dint of patient study, and at the cost of a little imagination, initiated into so many interesting family mysteries. All this through reading the advertisement sheets.

All is so simple and natural! One can indeed live very happily and be buried, if one reads the Advertiser—nay, at the end of one’s life one has such a heap of paper that one can comfortably lie on it, unless he prefers wood shavings for his resting-place.

The Advertiser and the churchyard were always the two things that most elevated my mind, and best nourished my good temper.

Everybody can peruse the Advertiser by himself, but let him go with me to the churchyard. Let us go there when the sun is shining and the trees are green; let us walk about between the graves. Every one of them is a closed book with its back turned up; one can read its title, which says all the book contains, and yet says nothing at all. But I know my way; I learned much from my father, and something I know from my own experience. I have it all written down in a book, which I have made for use and pleasure; there is something written about them all, and about a few more.

Now we are at the churchyard.

Here, behind the railings, painted out in white, where once a rose-tree stood—that is gone now, and only a little bush of evergreen from the neighbour’s grave stretches a few straggling branches in, lest it be entirely bare—rests a very unfortunate man, and yet he was, as people call it, well-off when he was alive; he had sufficient to live comfortably, and something to spare, but the world—that is to say “art”—used him too badly. When he went in the evening to the theatre to enjoy a play thoroughly, he nearly went out of his mind when the machinist put too strong a light into one of the cheeks of the moon, or when the canvases representing the sky were hanging in front of the scene instead of behind, or if they made a palm appear in a garden at Copenhagen, or a cactus plant in Switzerland, or beech trees in the northern regions of Norway. What does it matter to anyone? Who would trouble his mind about anything of that sort? It is only a play which is intended to amuse people. Sometimes the people applauded too much in his opinion, sometimes not enough. “That is wet wood tonight,” he used to say, “it will not catch fire;” and when he looked round to see what sort of people were there, then he found that they laughed in the wrong places, when they were not expected to laugh at all. All this angered him, pained him, and made him miserable; and now he rests in the grave.

Here rests a man who was very lucky in life; I mean to say that he was a nobleman of high birth, and that was his luck, for otherwise he would have been scarcely worth notice. Nature orders all things so wisely that it is a pleasure to think of it! He went to and fro in state, he was introduced into the salons of great people. He used to wear a coat richly embroidered with silk; and one might very well have compared him with a fine bell-pull in a drawing-room. Behind the handsome embroidered bell-rope is always a good strong cord which really does all the service required. And this man had his good cord behind him, who now pulls the wires behind a new embroidered bell-rope. Is it not so? everything is so wisely arranged that it is easy enough to keep up one’s good humour.

Now here rests—it is very sad indeed—a man who exercised his brains for sixty-seven years in perpetual search for a good idea; at last, according to his own opinion, he had one, and was so pleased with himself that he died for joy. So his good idea was of no use to any-one, for nobody heard anything at all about it. I am inclined to think that this good idea will prevent him from resting quietly in the grave; for suppose the idea was such that it could only be well explained at breakfast-time, and being a dead man, he can only rise about midnight (according to the common notion about ghosts)—it is not suitable for the time; nobody enjoys it, and the man must take his good idea again down with him into his grave—that must be a troubled grave.

Here rests a miser: in her lifetime this woman was so dreadfully stingy that she used to get up at night and mew in order to make her neighbours believe she kept a cat, which she did not—there was thriftiness for you.

Here rests a young lady of good family, who liked immensely to sing in society: when she sang “Mi manca la voce,” [“I have no voice”] it was the only true thing she said in her life.

Here is a maiden of another kind. When the canary bird of the heart begins to chirp, reason puts her fingers in her ears. The maiden was going to be married, but—well, it’s an every-day story, and we will let the dead rest.

Here lies a widow who, with music in her tongue, carried gall in her heart. She used to visit the families in the neighbourhood and try to find out their shortcomings, and she was very zealous in this pursuit.

What you see here is a family grave. All the members of this family were so much of one opinion that when the whole world and all the newspapers said a certain thing was so, and the little boy came home from school and said it was not so, he was right, because he belonged to the family. And you can be sure, if it happened that the cock of this family crowed at midnight, they said it was morning, even if the watchman and all the clocks of the town were announcing the midnight hour.

The great poet Goethe concludes his “Faust” with the words: “May be continued”; we may say the same about our walk through the churchyard. I often come here; and when any of my friends or non-friends go too far, I go out to the churchyard, select a plot of ground, and consecrate it to him or to her, whomsoever I wish to bury; then I do bury them immediately, and they remain there dead and powerless until they return as new and better people. I write down their lives and deeds into my book in my own fashion; everybody ought to do so. Nobody should be vexed; if his friends do something foolish, let him bury them at once and keep his good temper. He can also read the Advertiser, which is a paper written by the people, although their hands are sometimes guided.

When the time comes that I myself and the story of my life are to be bound in the grave, I wish they may write upon it the epitaph:

A Man of Good Humour.

[ 1852 ]

The Greenies

—

A Rose-Tree stood in the window. Only a short time ago, it was green and fresh, and now it looked sickly—no doubt it was in poor health. A whole regiment was quartered on it and was eating it up; but notwithstanding this greediness, the regiment was a very decent and respectable one. It wore bright green uniforms. I spoke to one of the Greenies; he was but three days old, and yet he was already a grandfather. Do you know what he said? It is all true—he spoke of himself and of the rest of the regiment. Listen!

“We are the most wonderful creatures in the world. We are engaged at a very early age, and immediately have the wedding. When the cold weather comes, we lay our eggs; the little ones lie snug and warm. The wisest of creatures, the ant, (we have the greatest respect for him!) understands us. He appreciates us, you may be sure. He does not eat us up at once; he takes our eggs, lays them in the family ant-hill, on the ground-floor—lays them, labelled and numbered, side by side, layer on layer, so that each day a new one may creep out of the egg. Then he puts us in a stable, pinches our hind legs, and milks us till we die. He has given us the prettiest name—‘Little milch-cow!’

“All creatures, who, like the ant, are gifted with common sense, call us so: it is only human beings who do not; they give us another name, and that we feel to be a great affront—great enough to embitter our whole life. Could you not write a protest against it for us? could you not rouse these Human beings to a sense of the wrong they do us? They look at us so stupidly, at times with such envious eyes, just because we eat a rose-leaf, while they eat every created thing, all that is green and grows. O, they give us the most humiliating name! I will not even mention it. Ugh! I feel it in my stomach; I cannot even pronounce it—at least not when I have my uniform on, and I always wear that.

“I was born on a rose-leaf. I and the whole regiment live on the rose-tree. We live off it, in fact; but then it lives again in us, who belong to the higher order of created beings. The human beings do not like us; they come and murder us with soap suds—it is a horrid drink! I seem to smell it even now; it is dreadful to be washed when one was not made to be washed. Man! you who look at us with your severe soapsud eyes, think what our place in nature is: we are born on roses, we die in roses—our whole life is a poem. Do not give us the name which you yourself think most despicable, the name that I cannot bear to pronounce; call us the ants’ milch-cows—the rose-tree regiment—the little green things.”

And I—the man—stood looking at the tree, and at the little green ones—whose name I shall not mention, for I should not like to wound the feelings of one of the citizens of the rose-tree, a large family with eggs and young ones—and at the soap-suds that I was going to wash them in, for I had come with soap and water, and murderous intentions; but now I will use it for soap-bubbles. Look! how beautiful! perhaps there lies a fairy tale in each, and the bubble grows so large and radiant, and it looks as if there were a pearl lying inside of it!

The bubble swayed and swung, and flew to the door and then burst; but the door opened wide, and there stood Dame Fairy-tale herself! and now she will tell you better than I can about—I won’t say the name—the little green things.

“Plant-lice!” said Dame Fairy-tale. “One must call things by their right names; and if one may not do so always, one at least must have the privilege of doing so in Fairy-tales!”

[ 1868 ]

The Drop of Water

—

Surely you know what a microscope is—that wonderful glass which makes everything appear a hundred times larger than it really is. If you look through a microscope at a single drop of ditch-water, you will perceive more than a thousand strange-shaped creatures, such as you never could imagine dwelling in the water. It looks not unlike a plateful of shrimps, all jumping and crowding upon each other; and so ferocious are these little creatures that they will tear off each other’s arms and legs without mercy; and yet they are happy and merry after their fashion.

Now there was once an old man, whom all his neighbours called Cribbley Crabbley—a curious name to be sure! He always liked to make the best of everything, and, when he could not manage it otherwise, he tried magic.

So one day he sat with his microscope held up to his eye, looking at a drop of ditch-water. O, what a strange sight was that! All the thousand little imps in the water were jumping and springing about, and devouring each other, or pulling each other to pieces.

“Upon my word, this is too horrible! ”’ quoth old Cribbley Crabbley; “there must surely be some means of making them live in peace and quiet.” And he thought and thought, but still could not hit on the right expedient. “I must give them a colour,” he said at last; “then I shall be able to see them more distinctly.” And accordingly he let fall into the water a tiny drop of something that looked like red wine, but in reality it was witches’ blood; whereupon all the strange little creatures immediately became red all over, not unlike the Red Indians; the drop of water now seemed a whole townful of naked wild men.

“What have you there?” inquired another old magician, who had no name at all, which made him more remarkable even than Cribbley Crabbley.

“Well, if you can guess what it is,” replied Cribbley Crabbley, “I will give it to you; but I warn you, you’ll not find it out so easily.”

And the magician without a name looked through the microscope. The scene now revealed to his eyes actually resembled a town where all the inhabitants were running about without clothing; it was a horrible sight! But it was still more horrible to see how they kicked and cuffed, struggled and fought, pulled and bit each other. All those that were lowest must needs strive to get uppermost, and all those that were highest must be thrust down. “Look, look!” they seemed to be crying out, “his leg is longer than mine; pah! off with it! And there is one who has a little lump behind his ear—an innocent little lump enough, but it pains him, and it shall pain him more!” And they hacked at it, and seized hold of him, and devoured him, merely because of this little lump. Only one of the creatures was quiet, very quiet, and still; it sat by itself, like a little modest damsel, wishing for nothing but peace and rest. But the others would not have it so; they pulled the little damsel forward, cuffed her, cut at her, and ate her.

“This is most uncommonly amusing,” remarked the nameless magician.

“Do you think so? Well, but what is it?” asked Cribbley Crabbley. “Can you guess, or can you not?—that’s the question.”

“To be sure I can guess,” was the reply of the nameless magician, “easy enough. It is either Copenhagen or some other large city; I don’t know which, for they are all alike. It is some large city.”

“It is a drop of ditch-water!” said Cribbley Crabbley.

[ 1848 ]

In a Thousand Years

—

Yes, in a thousand years people will fly on the wings of steam through the air, over the ocean! The young inhabitants of America will become visitors of old Europe. They will come over to see the monuments and the great cities, which will then be in ruins, just as we in our time make pilgrimages to the tottering splendours of Southern Asia. In a thousand years they will come!

The Thames, the Danube, and the Rhine still roll in their course, Mont Blanc stands firm with its snow-capped summit, and the Northern Lights gleam over the lands of the North; but generation after generation has become dust, whole rows of the mighty of the moment are forgotten, like those who already slumber under the hill on which the rich trader whose ground it is has built a bench, on which he can sit and look out across his waving corn-fields.

“To Europe!” cry the young sons of America; “to the land of our ancestors, the glorious land of monuments and fancy—to Europe!”

The ship of the air comes. It is crowded with passengers, for the transit is quicker than by sea. The electro-magnetic wire under the ocean has already telegraphed the number of the aerial caravan. Europe is in sight: it is the coast of Ireland that they see, but the passengers are still asleep; they will not be called till they are exactly over England. There they will first step on European shore, in the land of Shakespeare, as the educated call it; in the land of politics, the land of machines, as it is called by others.

Here they stay a whole day. That is all the time the busy race can devote to the whole of England and Scotland. Then the journey is continued through the tunnel under the English Channel, to France, the land of Charlemagne and Napoleon. Moliere is named, the learned men talk of the classic school of remote antiquity: there is rejoicing and shouting for the names of heroes, poets, and men of science, whom our time does not know, but who will be born after our time in Paris, the centre of Europe, and elsewhere.

The air steamboat flies over the country whence Columbus went forth, where Cortez was born, and where Calderon sang dramas in sounding verse. Beautiful black-eyed women live still in the blooming valleys, and the oldest songs speak of the Cid and the Alhambra.

Then through the air, over the sea, to Italy, where once lay old, everlasting Rome. It has vanished! The Campagna lies desert: a single ruined wall is shown as the remains of St. Peter’s, but there is a doubt if this ruin be genuine.

Next to Greece, to sleep a night in the grand hotel at the top of Mount Olympus, to say that they have been there; and the journey is continued to the Bosphorus, to rest there a few hours, and see the place where Byzantium lay; and where the legend tells that the harem stood in the time of the Turks, poor fishermen are now spreading their nets.

Over the remains of mighty cities on the broad Danube, cities which we in our time know not, the travellers pass; but here and there, on the rich sites of those that time shall bring forth, the caravan sometimes descends, and departs thence again.

Down below lies Germany, that was once covered with a close net of railway and canals, the region where Luther spoke, where Goethe sang, and Mozart once held the sceptre of harmony. Great names shine there, in science and in art, names that are unknown to us. One day devoted to seeing Germany, and one for the North, the country of Oersted and Linnaeus, and for Norway, the land of the old heroes and the young Normans. Iceland is visited on the journey home. The geysers burn no more, Hecla is an extinct volcano, but the rocky island is still fixed in the midst of the foaming sea, a continual monument of legend and poetry.

“There is really a great deal to be seen in Europe,” says the young American, “and we have seen it in a week, according to the directions of the great traveller” (and here he mentions the name of one of his contemporaries) “in his celebrated work, ‘How to See all Europe in a Week.’”

[ 1852 ]

Children’s Prattle

—

There was a large children’s party at the merchant’s house; rich folks’ children and great folks’ children were there. The merchant, their host, was a man of sense and education; his father, who had been originally a horse-jockey, but honest and thrifty always, had made a great point of his son’s having plenty of book-learning. And book-learning the son had, and a kind heart besides, but of all this there was less talk than of his money. Grand people visited at the merchant’s—people of blood, as the saying is, and people of intellect—people too who had both, and people who had neither.

This time there was a children’s party and children’s prattle, and children, as we know, say what they mean. Among the young visitors was a pretty little girl who was terribly proud. The servants had taught her this pride, not her parents; they were far too sensible for that. Her father was a Groom of the Bedchamber, which is a high office at court; that’s something very grand, and she knew it.

“I am a child of the Bedchamber,” she said. Now, she might just as well have been a child of the cellar, for no one can help their birth.

And then she informed the other children that she was “well born,” and affirmed that people who were not well born from the first could not get on in the world; it was no good reading and being ever so diligent—if you were not well born, you would never be anything.

“And as for people whose names end with ‘sen’,” she declared, “nothing can ever be made of them! You must put your arms akimbo, and keep these ‘sen’ at a distance!” And with this she arched her delicate little arms with the elbows turned out to show what she meant—and her little arms were very pretty, too. She was a sweet little girl.

But the merchant’s little daughter got quite angry at this; her father’s name was Petersen, and she knew that it ended in “sen,” so she said as proudly as she could:

“But my father can buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of bonbons and let the children scramble for them; can your father do that?”

“Yes; but my father,” said the journalist’s little girl, “can put your father and everybody’s father in the newspaper. Everybody is afraid of him, my mother says, for it’s my father who rules the newspaper.”

And the little girl looked quite proud, as if she had been a real princess who had something to be proud of.

Meanwhile, close outside the open door, stood a poor boy, peeping in through the crack. Such a fellow as he might not come into the room; he had been turning the roasting-spit for the cook, and now had got leave to take a peep through the door at the beautifully dressed children who held this conversation. I don’t think it could have been much of a pleasure for him.

“I wish I were one of them,” he thought, and when he heard what they said, it made him feel quite low-spirited. His parents had not a penny in the world; they had little idea of reading a newspaper, far less of writing one; and then, worst of all, his father’s name, and consequently his own, ended with “sen.” “Nothing in the world could be made of him,” he was told. That was sad indeed! But still it seemed to him that he had been born, and very well born too—it could not possibly be otherwise.

So much for that evening.

•  •  •

Many years passed away; the children were now grown-up men and women.

There now stood in the city a handsome house, full of splendid furniture and beautiful works of art; all people were glad to see it, and would even come from a great distance for the purpose. And which of these children was the owner of this house? It is not so easy to guess. Why, the house belonged to the poor boy; he had become somebody, in spite of the “sen” at the end of his name—for that name was Thorwaldsen.

And the three little girls—the children of the three aristocracies of birth, of money, and of intellect? Well; there is nothing to be said about them. They are all alike. They grew up to be all very respectable, comfortable, and commonplace. They were well-meaning people. Their silly talk that evening at the party was only Children’s Prattle.

[ 1859 ]

Aunty

—

You should have known Aunty. She was so charming. Yes, well, that is to say, she was not charming at all as the word is usually understood; but she was good and kind, amusing in her way—just the thing, in short, to chat about, when one feels in the mood for gossiping and laughing. She was fit to be put in a play; and that simply and solely because she herself lived for the play-house, and all that goes on in it She was far above any scandal; and even Commercial Agent Bigg (or Pig, as Aunty called him) could only say she was stage-struck.

“The theatre is my school-room,” said she; “my fountain of knowledge. There I have rubbed up my old Bible history; take ‘Moses,’ for instance, or ‘Joseph and his Brethren;’ they are operas now. It is there that I have studied my General History, my Geography, and foreign Manners and Customs. From French pieces I have learned Paris life—rather naughty, but highly interesting. How I have cried over the ‘Riguebourg Family;’ to think that the husband must drink himself to death, and all to let his wife get her young sweetheart. Aye, many and many’s the tear I’ve shed, all those fifty years of play-going.”

Aunty knew every piece, every bit of scenery, every actor that came on, or ever had come on. She seemed really only to live during the nine theatrical months. A summer without a summer theatre was enough to age her; while a theatrical evening that lasted till morning was a prolongation of life. She did not say like other people, “We shall soon have spring: the stork is come!”; or “There is news in the paper of the early strawberries.” No; the autumn was what she announced, thus: “Have you seen the Box-office is open? They’ll soon begin the performances.”

She reckoned the worth of a house and its situation entirely by its distance from the theatre. It was a real sorrow to her when she had to leave the narrow court behind the theatre, and move to the wide street a little further off, and live there without any opposite neighbours.

“At home my windows should be my theatre-box. One can’t sit there in the dumps, never seeing a soul. But where I live now I seem to be clean out in the country; not a living creature in sight unless I go into the back kitchen, and clamber up on the sink; that’s the only way of getting at my neighbours. Now, in that old court of mine, I could look right into the flax-dealer’s; and then I had only three hundred steps to take to the theatre; now it takes me three thousand steps—and military steps, too.”

Aunty might sometimes be out of sorts; but, well or ill, she never missed the play. Her doctor ordered her, one evening, to put her feet in poultices; she did as he told her; but rode off to the theatre, and sat there with her feet in poultices. If she had died there, she would have been contented. Thorwaldsen died in the theatre; she called that “a blessed death.”

She could not form any notion of heaven if there was to be no theatre there. It was not exactly promised us: but only think of all the great actors and actresses who had gone before; surely they must find some fresh scene of action.

Aunty had her own electric wire from the theatre to her room. A telegram came every Sunday at coffee time. Her electric wire was from “Mr. Sivertsen of the stage-machinery department.” It was he who gave the signals for up or down, on or off, with the curtain and scenery. From him she received a brief and business-like report of the coming pieces. Shakespeare’s “Tempest” he called “wretched stuff! there is so much to set up! why, it begins with water to back-scene No. 1.” That was to say, that so far backward stretched the rolling billows. On the other hand, if a piece could get through five acts without a single change of decorations, he pronounced it sensible and well-constructed; a steady-going piece that could play itself, without any pushing or pulling.

Aunty used to talk about “a goodish time back,” meaning some thirty-odd years, when she and Mr. Sivertsen were both younger; how he was then already in the machinery department, and how he became her “benefactor.” In those days it was the custom, at the great and only theatre of the town, to admit spectators into the part called the “flies,” over the stage, and every machinist had one or two places to give away. It was soon chock-full; and the company was very select; the wives of generals and aldermen had been there, it was said; it was so interesting to look down behind the scenes, and see how the performers stood and moved, when the curtain was down.

Aunty had been there many times; especially to tragedies and ballets: for the pieces that required the largest casts were the most interesting to see from the flies. One sat up there pretty nearly in darkness. Most people brought their suppers with them. Once three apples, a slice of bread and butter, and a sausage-roll, came straight down into the prison where Ugolino and his sons were just about to die of hunger. This sausage-roll produced a great effect. It was cheered by the audience; but the worthy management refused in future to have any spectators up in the flies.

“But still, I have been there seven-and-thirty times,” said Aunty; “and for that I shall always remember Mr. Sivertsen.”

On the very last evening that the flies were still open to the public, the “Judgment of Solomon” was played; Aunty could remember it so well. From her benefactor, Mr. Sivertsen, she had obtained a ticket for Agent Bigg. Not that he deserved one; he was always flouting and fleering at the theatre, and teasing her about it; still she did get him admission to the flies, for all that. He wanted to look at this player-stuff from the other side.

“Those were his very words, and just like him,” said Aunty.

So he saw the “Judgment of Solomon “from above, and fell asleep. It was easy to guess that he had been dining out and joining in several toasts. He slept till he was locked in, and sat the whole dark night in the theatre loft. He had a story to tell of his waking up; but Aunty did not believe a bit of it.

“The play was played out, the lamps and lights were all out, all the people were out, above and beneath; but then began the after-piece, the genuine comedy, the best of all,” said the agent. “Then life came into the affair. It was not ‘Solomon’s Judgment’ that was given now, but ‘Judgment Day at the Theatre.’” And Agent Bigg had the impudence to try and make our aunt believe all this. That was the thanks she got for having got him a place in the flies.

What the agent went on to tell might be comical enough, but there was mockery and spite at the bottom of it.

“It was dark up there,” said the agent; “but then began the demon-show, the grand spectacle, ‘Judgment Day at the Theatre.’ Ticket-takers stood at the doors, and every spectator had to show his spiritual testimonial, to settle whether he was to enter free-handed or handcuffed, and with or without a gag in his mouth. Fine gentlefolk, who came too late, when the performance had already begun, and young fellows given to losing their time, were tethered outside. There they were shod with felt, so as to creep in gently before the next act, besides being gagged. And so began ‘Judgment Day at the Theatre.’”

“All malice, and not a bit of truth in it,” said Aunty.

The scene-painter, if he wished to get into heaven, had to clamber up some stairs which he had painted himself, but which were too high for the longest pair of legs. That, to be sure, was only a sin against perspective. All the trees, flowers, and buildings, which the machinist had taken such pains to plant in lands quite foreign to them, the poor wretch had to transplant into their proper homes, and all before cock-crow, if he looked for any chance of heaven. Mr. Bigg had better mind his own chances of getting there! And then to hear what he told of the performers, both in tragedy and comedy, in song and in dance—why, it was shameful of Mr. Bigg! Mr. Pig indeed! he never deserved his place in the flies! Aunty would not believe him on his oath. It was all written out, he said; and he swore (the pig) it should be printed when he was dead and buried—not before, he had no wish to be flayed alive.

Aunty had once been in terror and anguish in her own temple of happiness, the theatre. It was a winter day; one of those days when we have just two hours of foggy daylight. It was bleak and snowy; but Aunty was bound for the theatre. A little opera and a great ballet were performed, and a prologue and an epilogue into the bargain; and that would last till late at night. Aunty must needs go; so she borrowed a pair of fur boots from her lodger—boots with fur inside and out, and which reached far up her legs.

She came to the theatre and into her box; the boots were warm, so she kept them on. Suddenly there arose a cry of “Fire!” Smoke came from one of the wings, smoke came from the flies; there was a terrible panic. People stormed out. Aunty sat furthest from the door. “Second tier, left-hand side; the decorations show best there,” she used to say; “they are always arranged to look prettiest from the king’s side of the house.” Aunty wanted to get out of it, but those before her, in their blundering excitement, slammed the door fast. There stood Aunty; there was no way out, and no way in, for the next box had too high a partition. She called; nobody heard her. She looked over at the tier underneath; it was empty; the balustrade was low; there was not far to drop. In her fright she felt young and active. She prepared for a jump. She got one foot on the bench, the other over the balustrade; and there she sat astride, well draped in her flowered skirt, with a long leg dangling below it, displaying an enormous sledging-boot. That was a sight to see! Seen it was, and Aunty was heard at last; and she was easily saved, for there was no fire to speak of.

That was the most memorable evening in her life, she used to say; and she thanked Heaven she could not see herself, or she would have died of embarrassment.

Her benefactor in the machinery department, Mr. Sivertsen came to her regularly every Sunday. But it was a long time from Sunday to Sunday. Latterly, therefore, in the middle of the week, she used to have in a little child “for the scraps;” that is to say, to make a supper off the remains of Aunty’s dinner. This child was a young member of the ballet, only too happy to get a meal. She used to tread the boards as a page or a fairy. Her hardest part was that of hind-legs for the lion in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.” She grew up in time to be the forelegs; for this she was only paid half a guilder, though she had been paid a whole guilder when she was the hind-legs, but then she had to creep about stooping, and panting for want of fresh air. This was very interesting to know, observed Aunty.

If everyone got his deserts, Aunty would have lasted as long as the theatre. But she could not hold out so long. Neither did she die in it, but quietly and decently in her own bed. Meanwhile her dying words were full of meaning; she asked, “What are they going to play tomorrow?”

She left behind her about five hundred dollars—so at least we conclude from the interest, which came to twenty dollars. The money was left as a legacy to some one or other deserving old spinster, living alone in the world. It was to be used for taking a place on the second tier, left side, every Saturday; for on that day they gave the best pieces. Only one condition was imposed on the legatee. As she sat in the theatre, every Saturday, she was to think of Aunty, lying in her grave.

This was Aunty’s Religious Foundation.

[ 1866 ]

The Door-Key

—

Every key has its own history, and of keys there are many kinds: a Chamberlain’s key, [94] a watch-key, St. Peter’s key, and so forth. We might tell a great deal about all the keys; but now we are only telling about the Councillor’s door-key.

It had come into existence in the hands of a locksmith, but it might well have believed itself to be the handiwork of a blacksmith—the man treated it in such a way with hammer and file. Being too large for one’s trousers pocket, it had to go into the overcoat pocket. There it often lay in utter darkness, but usually it had its own appointed hanging place on the wall, close by the side of the Councillor’s shadow-silhouette, taken in infancy, in which he looked just like a suet-dumpling.

It is said that every human being acquires in his character and manner of living something from the particular celestial sign under which he may chance to have been born; as, for instance, the Bull, the Virgin, or Scorpion, as they are called in the almanacs. The Councillor’s wife never used to mention any of these, but said that her husband was born under the sign of the “Wheelbarrow,” for one had to be always pushing him on and on. His father had pushed him into an office, his mother had pushed him into matrimony, and his wife pushed him on until he was made a Councillor; the latter fact, however, she did not mention, being quite a worthy, sensible sort of woman, who held her tongue in the right place, and spoke and pushed in the right place.

He was now somewhat advanced in years—“set and steady,” as he used to say himself; a well-read man, kind, and “key-wise” to boot, which last epithet we shall soon have an opportunity of understanding somewhat better. He was always merry, loving all mankind, and fond of conversing with each and everybody. When he went into the town, it was hard to get him home again, if his wife did not happen to be with him to push him onward. For he must needs chat with every acquaintance he met. Now his acquaintances were rather numerous, and this circumstance was tryingly felt by the family dinner. Mrs. Councillor would sit at her window and keep a look-out. “Now he is coming,” she would say to the maid; “put the pot on the fire. There, he stops to speak to somebody; take it off, or the meat will be overdone! Now he comes at last; put the pot on again!”

But he did not come after all. He would stand under the very windows of his house and nod up to her; but if an acquaintance chanced to pass by, he could not help saying a word or two; and if while he was talking to this one another came by, he would seize the former by the buttonhole, the latter by the hand, and shout at the same time to a third, who wished to pass by.

This was a heavy trial for the patience of the Councillor’s wife. “Councillor! Councillor!” she would shout; “bless me if that man was not born under the sign of the ‘Wheelbarrow;’ he will not move without being pushed.”

He was fond of calling at booksellers’ shops, and looking at books and periodicals. He used to give his bookseller a small remuneration for the privilege of reading all the new books at home; that is to say, for permission to cut the books up the front, but not along the top, for then they could not be sold as new. He was a walking gazette, yet a quite harmless one: he knew everything about engagements, weddings, funerals, book-talk, and town-talk, and would mysteriously, also, hint at his authentic information in matters which to all else were secrets. This mysterious information he owed to the Door-key.

The Councillor and his wife had lived in their own house since they were newly married; and they had also possessed that identical door-key since then; but then they were ignorant of its wonderful powers, which they only learned at a much later period.

It was in the days of King Frederick the Sixth. Copenhagen had no gas then; it had only train-oil lamps; there was no Casino, no Tivoli Gardens, no tramways, and no railways. It was short of all the public amusements which it now enjoys. On Sundays people would go for a walk out of the town-gates towards the Lombards’ churchyard, read the inscriptions on the graves, sit down in the grass and eat from their food basket, and drink a glass; or they would go to Fredericksberg, where a military band used to play in front of the palace; whilst crowds of people went to see the royal family rowing about in the narrow canals of the park, the old king himself steering his barge, and, with the queen, kindly saluting everyone, without distinction of rank.

Well-to-do families from the town would visit this place and drink their afternoon tea. Hot water was to be had at a small cottage in the field outside the park, but they had to bring their own tea service.

Hither once on a sunny Sunday afternoon repaired the Councillor and his wife; the maid-servant walking in front and carrying the tea-service, with basket of provisions and a “sip of cognac.”

“Take the key with you,” said Mrs. Councillor, “so we may slip in by ourselves when we return; you know, they lock the gate here at dusk, and the bell-wire was broken this morning! How late we shall get home! After having been in Fredericksberg Park, we must look in at Casorti’s theatre at West-bridge, to see the pantomime: it is to be ‘Harlequin, Chief of the Thrashers.’ You see them come down in a cloud; it costs two shillings a head.”

And so they went to Fredericksberg, heard the music, saw the royal barges with their waving banners, saw the old king himself, and the white swans. After drinking some very nice tea, they hurried off, yet they did not arrive in good time at the theatre.

The dancing on the rope was finished, and the dance on stilts was finished, and the pantomime had started; as usual, they were too late, and as usual it was the Councillor’s fault; every moment on the road he would stop to speak to an acquaintance; within the theatre he also found several good friends, and when the performance was over he and his wife were obliged to accompany home a family of “the Bridge” to enjoy a glass of punch; the delay was to be only ten minutes, which, however, extended to a whole hour. They talked and talked. A certain Swedish baron was so entertaining—or perhaps he was German, for the Councillor had not precisely caught which—but the trick with the key which that individual taught him—that he had caught forever. The thing was extraordinarily interesting! He could get the key to answer everything that one asked it, even the most secret matters. The Councillor’s door-key was just the thing for the purpose; it was heavy in the wards and they must hang downwards. The baron let the handle of the key rest on the forefinger of his right hand. There it dangled light and free, and every throb of the pulse in the finger could easily put it into motion and make it swing; and if this did not happen, the baron understood how to cause it imperceptibly to turn as he wished. Every turn denoted a letter of the alphabet from A as far as one chose. When the first letter was discovered, the key would turn to the opposite side; then the next letter was found out, and so one got whole words, sentences, and answers to questions. It was all a deception, but at any rate some diversion; such was the Councillor’s first thought, but he did not retain it, for he got quite absorbed in the key.

“Husband! Husband!” exclaimed Mrs. Councillor. “The Westgate is shut at twelve o’clock! we shall not get through; we have but a quarter of an hour to hurry in.”

Hurry they must; several persons who were going into the town soon got ahead of them. At last they approached the outmost guardhouse as the clock was striking twelve, and the gates were being slammed in their faces; a number of people found themselves shut out, and amongst these were Mr. and Mrs. Councillor, with their maidservant, tea-service, and an empty food basket. Some stood there terror-stricken; others appeared rather vexed than otherwise; each took it after his own fashion. What was to be done? Happily of late the provision had been passed, that one of the town-gates, the northern one, should remain open at night, and pedestrians were allowed to slip through the guardhouse into the town.

The road to the Northgate was by no means short, but the weather was fine, the sky bright with starlight and shooting stars; the frogs were croaking in the moat and ponds. The company began singing song after song, but the Councillor did not sing, nor did he look up to the stars; nay, he did not even look down to his own feet, for plump! he fell the whole length of his body on the very edge of the moat. People might have thought that he had drunk too much; but it was not the punch, it was the key that had gone to his head, and kept on turning there. At last they reached the Northgate guardhouse, crossed the bridge, and slipped into the town.

“Now I feel happy again,” said the Mrs. Councillor, “for here we are at our own door!”

“But where is the key?” said the Councillor; it was neither in the back-pocket nor in the side-pocket.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the Councillor’s wife. “Haven’t you got the key? You have lost it in the key-tricks with the baron! How are we to get in now? You know that the bell-wire was broken this morning, and the watchman has no key for our house! We are in a nice plight!”

The maid-servant began to whine, whilst the Councillor was the only one who showed presence of mind.

“We must break in a window-pane at the grocer’s!” he said, “to get him up, and then we can get into the house.”

He broke one pane of glass—he broke two. “Petersen!” he shouted, thrusting the handle of his umbrella in at the broken windowpanes. At this moment, the grocer’s daughter began to scream loudly. The grocer threw open the door of his shop with the outcry “Hullo! watchman!” and before he had properly seen and recognised the Councillor’s family and let them in, the watchman blew his whistle, and in the next street another watchman answered and whistled. People showed themselves in the windows. “Where is the fire? Where is the riot?” they asked, and were asking still, when the Councillor was already in his room, taking off his overcoat; and in it lay the door-key, not in the pocket, but within the lining, where it had slipped through a hole that ought not to have been in the pocket.

From that night the door-key assumed a peculiar importance of its own. Not only when going out in the evening, but also when at home, the Councillor was pleased to show off his wisdom, and make the key answer questions.

He would imagine to himself the most probable answer, and cause the key to return it; but this was not the case with the young Pharmacist, a young man closely related to the Councillor’s wife.

This Pharmacist was a wit, and of a critical turn of mind; he had already as a mere schoolboy sent in critical articles on books and theatrical performances, but without his signature, which is always important. He was what is called a “bel esprit,” but he did not believe in spirits, and, least of all, key-spirits.

“Yes, I believe—I believe,” he said, “my worthy Mr. Councillor, I believe in door-keys and all key-spirits much as firmly as I believe in that new science which is just dawning—table-turning and the spirits in old and new furniture. Have you heard about it? I have! I have doubted—you know I am sceptical, but I have been converted on reading, in a quite trustworthy foreign paper, a most terrific account: only fancy, Councillor! I will give you the story as I heard it. ‘Two sharp-witted children had seen their parents raise the spirits in a huge dining-room table. The little ones were alone, and they must needs endeavour in the same manner to rub life into an old chest of drawers. Life came—the spirits awoke, but it did not brook the commands of mere children; it reared itself up; there was a creaking in the case; it shot out the drawers, and with its wooden legs put each child in a separate partition; ran off with them out the open door, down the stairs, into the street, towards the canal, into which it flung itself and drowned both the children. The little corpses found Christian burial, but the chest of drawers was taken to the town-hall, tried for infanticide, and burnt alive in the market place.’ I have read it,” the Pharmacist said, “in a foreign paper, and I have not invented the story myself. May the key take me if it is not true! and that is my solemn oath.”

Now the Councillor found that such talk was a little beyond a joke; they two would never agree about the key. The Pharmacist was key-senseless.

The Councillor made some progress in his key-knowledge; the key was his recreation and study.

One evening, the Councillor was just going to bed; he was half-undressed, when a knock was heard at the door. It was the shopkeeper who called at this late hour; he, too, was half-undressed, but he said that he had been struck by a sudden idea, which he feared he should not be able to retain through the night.

“It is my daughter Lotte-Lene I want to speak about. She is a fine girl, and has been confirmed, and I should like to see her well provided for.”

“But I am not as yet a widower!” said the Councillor, and laughed, “and I have no son to offer her.”

“But I want you to understand me, Councillor,” said the resident of the cellar. “She can play the piano, she can sing; you must be able to hear her upstairs. You don’t know what that little girl can do; she can talk and please everybody. She is made for the stage, which is a good sort of living for pretty girls of honest parents; they may chance to marry a count, too, but this is not my idea as regards Lotte-Lene. She can sing, as I have said, she can play the piano; and so, the other day, I took her up to the singing academy. Well, she sang; but she has not got the beer-bass, as I should call it in women—nor those high canary-bird notes which they now-a-days require in singers, and so they quite dissuaded her from that career. Well, thought I, if she cannot become a singer, she may at all events become an actress; for which only the speaking faculty is requisite. Today, I mentioned the thing to the ‘Instructor,’ as they call him. ‘Is she well read?’ he asked. ‘No, not at all,’ said I. ‘Well, but an actress must be well read!’ said he. She has plenty of time for that still, I thought to myself, as I returned homewards. She may go to a reading or circulating library, and read what they have got, I thought. But tonight, as I was undressing, it occurred to me—why hire hooks when you could easily borrow some? Why, the Councillor has plenty of books; let her read them, and she will become a sufficiently well-read person, and that gratis into the bargain.”

“Lotte-Lene is a bonnie lass!” said the Councillor; “a fine girl, too. She shall have books to read. But has she got what they call infusion of the spirit—spirituality—genius? And, what is equally important, has she luck with and about her?”

“She has twice won in the lottery,” quoth the lodger in the cellar: “once she gained a wardrobe, and another time six pair of sheets; that I call good luck, and that she has got.”

“I will ask the key,” said the Councillor. And he placed the key on his right forefinger, and on the right forefinger of the grocer as well, and then the key to swung and gave out letter after letter.

The key said; “Victory and fortune;” and so Lotte-Lene’s future was decided.

The Councillor at once gave her two books to read: Dyveke and Knigge’s Social Intercourse.

From this evening, a somewhat closer acquaintance between Lotte-Lene and the old Councillor was established. She would come upstairs to the family, and the Councillor found her to be a sensible sort of a girl, who believed in him and his key. The Councillor’s wife found something childish and innocent in the frankness with which she would every moment betray her utter lack of experience. Both man and wife, after their own fashion, were fond of her, and Lotte-Lene was fond of them.

“How nice it smells upstairs,” Lotte-Lene would say.

There was, in fact, an odour, a fragrance, an apple-flavour in the passage, where the Mrs. Councillor had located a whole cask of graystone apples. An incense odour of roses and lavender also pervaded all the rooms. “There is something refined in all that!” said Lotte-Lene.

In next place, her eyes were pleased by the many pretty flowers which the Councillor’s wife always had. Even in the depth of winter there bloomed here maidenhair and slips of cherry-tree; the leafless twigs were cut off and put into water, and in the warm room soon bore leaves and flowers.

“One might well think that all life was extinct in naked branches; yet look how it rises from the dead. It never occurred to me before,” said Lotte-Lene, “How charming nature is!”

And the Councillor showed her his “key-book,” where he had written down the most remarkable things which the key had said; even about the half apple-tart which had disappeared from the cupboard on the very evening that the maid-servant had received a visit from her sweetheart.

The Councillor had asked his key, “Who has eaten the apple-tart, the cat or the sweetheart?” and the key replied, “The sweetheart.” The Councillor had, indeed, thought so already, before asking his key; and the maid-servant confessed, “The confounded key knew every mortal thing.”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful!” said the Councillor. “Oh, that key! that key! And about Lotte-Lene it said, ‘Victory and fortune.’ That we shall see; I will swear to it.”

“Well, that is fine, indeed,” said Lotte-Lene.

The Councillor’s wife was not altogether so confident, but in her husband’s hearing she did not express her doubts; but she told Lotte-Lene in confidence afterwards, that her husband, in his younger days, had been madly fond of the theatre. He wanted to go upon the stage, and to that end he wrote a play.

“Now this is a profound secret I am letting you into, dear little Lotte-Lene. The play was not so very bad; it was accepted at the Royal Theatre, and hissed out, and had never been heard of since, for which I am glad. I am his wife, and know him. Now, you seem to be going in for that career. Well, I wish you all that is good, but I fear, it may not turn out as we would desire; I for my part don’t believe in the door-key.”

Lotte-Lene did believe in it, and in that belief she was united with the Councillor. Within their hearts they had a mutual understanding, in all honour and chastity.

For the rest, the girl had many qualifications that the Councillor’s wife valued. Lotte-Lene knew how to make starch from potatoes, make silk gloves from old silk stockings, and renovate the silk covering of her dancing shoes, although she had the means to buy all her things new. She had, as the grocer said, pennies in the table drawer, and credit-notes in her money safe. She was exactly the wife to suit the Pharmacist, Mrs. Councillor would occasionally think; yet she did not say so, and still less did she permit the key to say anything about it.

The Pharmacist was going to settle soon and have his own dispensary in one of the nearest and largest provincial towns.

Lotte-Lene kept on everlastingly reading Dyveke and Knigge’s Social Intercourse. She kept both books for two years, and by then she had learned one, Dyveke, by heart—all the parts, although she wished to make her début only in one, that of Dyveke. She did not want to appear at first in the capital, where so much envy prevails, and where, perhaps, they would not have her: she wanted to begin her artistic career, as the Councillor used to call it, in one of the large provincial towns. Now that happened, wonderfully enough, to be the very place where the young Pharmacist had settled as the newest, though not the only, pharmacist of the place.

The great eventful night approached on which Lotte-Lene had to make her début, and gain “victory and fortune,” as the key had said. The Councillor was not there, for he lay in his bed and Mrs. Councillor was nursing him; he must have warm napkins and camomile tea: the napkins round his body and the tea in his body.

So the couple was absent from the Dyveke performance, but the Pharmacist was there, and wrote a letter about it to his relative, the Councillor’s wife.

“Dyveke’s ruff was the best of the whole thing,” he wrote; “if I had had the Councillor’s door-key in my pocket, I should have pulled it out and used it as a whistle, she deserved it, and so did the key, for its impudent joke to her about ‘victory and fortune.’”

The Councillor read the letter. It was all sheer malice, he said, key-hatred against that innocent girl. And as soon as he was out of bed and felt a man again, he wrote a short but bitter note to the Pharmacist; who in his turn replied as if he had seen only jest and good-humour in the whole epistle.

He thanked him for this and every future contribution to the public revelation of the incomparable worth and significance of keys; next he confided to the Councillor that, apart from his activity as pharmacist, he was busy writing a grand key-novel, in which all the characters were keys, keys exclusively. “Door Key” naturally was the hero, (and the Councillor’s door-key was the pattern) who was endowed with prophetic vision and second-sight; round this all the other keys had to revolve: the old Chamberlain’s key, experienced in the splendour and the festivity of the court; the watch-key, so diminutive, refined, and graceful, at fourpence at the ironmonger’s; the church pew-key, who counts itself amongst the clergy, and which from remaining one night in its keyhole in the church can see ghosts; the keys of the larder, wine cellar, and coal cellar, all appear and bow before and turn around the door-key. The rays of the sun brighten it into silver, and the wind, that spirit of the earth, enters its body, and makes it whistle!

It is the key of all keys, it was the Councillor’s door-key, now it is the key of heaven itself, it is the papal key, and it is infallible.

“All malice,” said the Councillor, “pure, sheer malice.”

The Pharmacist and he never saw each other again—except once, at the funeral of Mrs. Councillor.

She was the first to die. There was grief and lamentation in the house. Even the slips of cherry which had thrown out fresh roots and buds seemed to mourn and fade away; they stood forgotten, for she was not there to tend them.

The Councillor and the Pharmacist walked behind her coffin side by side as the two nearest relations of the departed, and there was neither time nor disposition for any quarrel. Lotte-Lene bound the mourning crape round the Councillor’s hat. She was a resident of the house, long returned without fame and fortune in the career of art. Yet that still might come, for Lotte-Lene had a future before her. The key had said so, and the Councillor had said so.

She went up to him. They talked of the departed and wept together, for Lotte-Lene was tender-hearted; they talked about the art, and Lotte-Lene felt strong. “Life on the stage is charming,” she said, “but there is so much nonsense and envy! I would rather go my own way. Myself first, then art!”

Knigge had told the truth in his chapter about actors; that she was aware of; the key had told a falsehood, yet of this she never talked to the Councillor; she was fond of him.

The Door-key, for the rest, was his comfort and relief, during the whole year of mourning. He gave it questions, and it gave answers. And at the end of the year, as he and Lotte-Lene were sitting together one genial evening, he suddenly asked his key,

“Will I marry? and whom will I marry?’ No one pushed him; he pushed the key, and the key answered: “Lotte-Lene.”

The thing had been said, so Lotte-Lene became Mrs. Councillor.

“Victory and fortune!”

Such were the words that had been prophesied by—the Door-key.

[ 1872 ]

The King’s Quest

—

“What do they perform at the theatre this evening?” I asked. “Oh, a wonderful piece!” said the waiter. “Drei Tage aus dem Leben eines Spielers.” (Three Days in the Life of a Gambler)

I knew that it was a piece with much dramatic effect; it had caused a great sensation throughout Germany, but I thought it could not be more effective than “Cardillac.”

The piece was not divided into acts, but into days, between each of which there was a period of fifteen years. I bore the infliction of two days, but then I could bear it no longer; the audience were kept on the rack of suspense; but only think of me, poor man, almost jolted to death from the journey!

The first day ended with the gambler taking the life of his old father; the second day he shot quite an innocent person: I felt my blood boil, and fully expected that the third day would be devoted to the murder of the spectators also.

I was in a terrible humour. I went home, but I saw everywhere outcasts of humanity, broken-hearted mothers and desperate gamblers. I felt such a disgust for cards, that I immediately burnt a pack of innocent visiting-cards, merely because they bore the name of cards. My mind was in a state of uproar. I tried to calm it by singing lullabys—nay, I even sat down at last to tell myself a child’s story, which you, dear reader, must also hear.

While the Copenhageners are still quite little urchins, and have not been farther out into the world than to the deer-park and Frederiksburg, and their grandmothers or nurses tell them about enchanted princes and princesses, golden mountains and talking birds—then the little head dreams about the beautiful visionary land, and looks over the sea that joins the sky between the Danish and the Swedish coast. It must lie out there, they think, and paint this new world to themselves in such brilliant colours! but they become older, go to school, and get hold of their geography, which at once breaks up the whole of their land of dreams, though it is in that that we must remain.

Here lived, many many years ago—long before anyone dreamt of my authorship, and “Three Days in the Life of a Gambler”—an old silver-haired king, who had such confidence in the world that he could not imagine that any one could tell a lie; nay, a lie was to him such a visionary picture, that he promised one day in council, to give his daughter and half the kingdom to him who could tell him something which he could recognise was a lie.

All his subjects began to study the art of lying, but the good king took all they said for truth. At last he became quite melancholy, wept, and dried his eyes on his royal mantle, as he sighed, “Shall I never be able to say—It is a lie?”

Thus the days glided on, when, one morning, there came a fine well-grown prince, who loved the princess and was beloved again: he had studied lying for nine years, and now hoped to win her and the kingdom. He told the king that he wished to have a situation as gardener, and the king said, “Very well, my boy!” and led him into the garden.

Here the cabbages, in particular, were of a fine growth; but the young prince turned up his nose, and said, “What are those?”

“They are cabbages, my boy!” said the king.

“Cabbages! in my mother’s kitchen-garden they are so large that a regiment of soldiers can stand under every leaf.”

“It is very possible,” said the king; “Nature’s powers are great, and there is an immense difference in the growth of plants.”

“Then I will not be a gardener,” answered the prince; “let me rather be your land-steward.”

The king said, “See, here is my barn; have you ever seen a larger or finer?”

“Larger? yes! If you could but see my mother’s! Only think: when they built it, and the carpenter sat at the top of the roof cutting away with his axe, the head flew out of the shaft, and before it reached the ground a swallow had built its nest in the hole, laid eggs, and hatched young ones. That you surely must believe to be a lie, sir king?”

“No, indeed I do not! human art goes far; why should your mother not have such a barn?”

Thus it went on and on, but the prince got neither the kingdom nor the beautiful princess; so they both pined away with grief and suspense, for the king had sworn, “No one shall have my daughter unless he can tell me a lie!”

His good heart could never believe in such a thing; nay, even when he died—which he did at last—and was placed in the large marble coffin, he got no peace; and they say that he still wanders about the earth as an unblessed spirit, because he never had his desire appeased.

. . . . . . . .

I had got thus far with my story—that is, to the end—when there was a knocking at my door. I cried out, “Come in!” and—imagine my surprise!—there stood the old king before me, with his crown on his head, and his sceptre in his hand.

“I heard you relate my life’s history,” said he, “and that has brought me to you. Perhaps you know a lie that can procure me peace in the grave?”

I endeavoured to recover myself, told him how it was that I had come to relate to myself his life and acts, and then mentioned the terrible play—“Three Days in the Life of a Gambler.”

“Tell it to me!” said he; “I am very fond of the terrible. I am myself a spirit, as you see, terrible in my old age!”

I began to relate the whole to him, went through scene by scene, and showed him that picture of human life. His features cleared up, he seized my hand, and said with enthusiasm, “It is a lie, my son! it is not so in the world! Now I am released! Thanks be to you, who told me this; thanks be to Louis Angely, who brought it out on the stage; but blessed be Victor Ducange, who wrote it. Now I shall have peace in the grave!”—and then he vanished.

•  •  •

When I awoke next morning, the whole of this story appeared to me as a dream.

From: Rambles in the Romantic Regions of the Hartz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, 1831

My Boots

A TRUE STORY.

—

There is a street in Rome which is called Via Purificazione, but we cannot say of it that it is purified. It is an up and down sort of place; cabbage stalks and old broken pots lie strewn round about; the smoke rolls out of the door of the small café, and Signora opposite—nay I cannot help it, but it is true—Signora opposite shakes her sheets out of the window every morning. In this street there are generally many strangers; but this year most of them remained at Naples and Florence, for fear of the fever and pestilential sickness that was in Rome. I lived quite alone in a large house, not even the host or hostess slept there at night It was a large, cold house, with a little wet garden, in which there were only a row of pease and a half-blown gillyflower; yet in the neighbouring gardens, which were at a higher elevation, stood blooming hedge-rows with monthly roses, and trees full of yellow citrons. The latter bore the continual rain well; but the roses, on the contrary, appeared as if they had lain for a week in the sea.

The evenings were so lonesome in the cold, large rooms; the black chimney yawned between the windows, and out of doors were rain and drizzle. All the doors were well secured with locks and iron bars; but of what use were they? The wind whistled and screeched through the crevices in the doors; the few sticks in the chimney blazed up, but they did not throw any warmth into the room; the cold stone floor, the raw walls, and the high ceiling, seemed only to be adapted for the summer season.

If I would make myself comfortable, I was obliged to put on my fur-lined travelling boots, overcoat, cloak, and fur cap; yes, then it was well enough! It is true, that side which was turned toward the fire-place was half roasted: but in this world one must know how to change sides, and so I turned, like a sunflower.

The evenings were somewhat long, but then my teeth began to give some nervous concerts, and it was remarkable how they improved in dexterity. A real Danish toothache is not to be compared to an Italian one. Pain played on the keys of the teeth, as if it were a Liszt or a Thalberg. Sometimes it rumbled in the foreground, and then anon in the background, as when two martial bands answer each other, whilst a large front tooth sang the prima donna’s part with all the trills, roulades, and cadences of torture. There was such harmony and power in the whole, that I at last felt no longer like a human being!

From an evening it slid into a night concert, and it was during such a one, whilst the windows shook with the storm, and the rain poured down without, that I cast a half melancholy look at the night lamp. My writing materials stood by it, and I saw quite distinctly that the pen danced over the white paper, as if led by an invisible hand; but it was not so, it did it of its own accord. It wrote after dictation—and who dictated? Yes, it sounds strange, but it is true. I say it, and you will believe me—it was my boots, my old Copenhagen boots, which, because they were soaked through with the rain, had earned a place in the chimney by the red embers. If I suffered from toothache, they also suffered from water-ache; they dictated their own biography, and this I think will throw a light on the Italian winter of 1840-41.

The Boots said:

“We are two brothers, right boot and left boot. Our first remembrance is, that we were well rubbed in with wax, and then extremely well brushed up and polished. I could see myself in my brother, and he could see himself in me; and we saw that we were one body, a sort of Castor and Pollux, a species of Siamese twins, whom fate had determined should live and die, exist and not exist with each other. We were both born in Copenhagen.

“The shoemaker’s boy carried us in his hand forth into the world, and the first glimpse awakened sweet but false expectations about our destination. He to whom we were consigned immediately pulled us by the ears till we closed round his legs, and then he went down the stairs with us. We creaked with joy. It rained outside, but we still creaked; but only the first day.

“Alas! how much wet there is to get through in this world! We were not born to be water-proof boots, and therefore did not feel ourselves happy. No brush gave us the lustre of our youth; this lustre we possessed when the shoemaker’s boy carried us in his hand through the streets; who can therefore depict our happiness when we one morning heard that we were to travel abroad—yes, to Italy, that sunny, warm land, where we should tread on marble and classic ground, drink in the warm sunbeams, and surely regain our youthful lustre. We travelled. During the longest routes we slept in the portmanteau and dreamed of the warm lands. In the towns, on the contrary, we looked well about us, but it was wet and raw as in Denmark. Our soles got a gangrene; they were obliged to be parted from the body in Munich, and we found ourselves with new soles instead: but they were made as well as if they had been born with us. ‘Were we but over the Alps,’ we sighed; ‘it is fine and mild there.’ And we got over the Alps, but it was not fine and mild there!—it rained and it blew: and if we happened now and then to tread on marble, it was so icy cold, that the marble drew the cold perspiration out of our soles, and the damp traces of them remained where we had trodden.

“It was quite lively in the evening when the waiter numbered all the boots and shoes in the hotel; we were placed in a row amongst these foreign comrades, and heard from them about the places they came from. There was a pair of beautiful red morocco bodies with black feet (I think it was in Bologna), and they told us about the warm summer in Rome and Naples; they told us about their climbing up Vesuvius, where the feet were burnt off them by the subterranean heat; alas! we almost desired to die in such a manner. ‘Were we but over the Apennines! were we but in Rome!’—and we went there! But now we have groveled in rain and sludge week after week! But one must see all things, we suppose, and there will never be an end, either of curiosities or pouring rain! Not a warm ray has refreshed us; the cold wind has gamboled around us! O Rome! Rome! to-night, for the first time, we will drink warmth from the blessed chimney, and we will drink till we burst! The upper leathers are all gone, and our bodies are giving way: they will burst too! But before we die this happy death, we wish this our history to be noted down, and our dead bodies brought to Berlin to rest with him who has had courage and manliness enough to depict ‘Italien wie es ist!’ to the truth-loving Nicolai.”

And having said thus much, the boots fell together.

•  •  •

It was quite still; my night lamp went out; I dozed a little, and when I awoke in the morning, I thought it was a dream; but I looked into the chimney; the boots were quite shrunk up; they stood like mummies amid the cold ashes. I looked at the paper as it lay by my lamp; it was a grey paper full of ink spots; the pen had really passed over it, but the words had all run into each other, for the pen had written the boots’ memoirs on grey paper. I noted down what I still remembered; and the reader will recollect that it is not I, but my boots, who cry “Woe!” to—la bella Italia!

From: A Poet’s Bazaar [travel book], 1842

Luck May Lie in a Pin

—

Now I am going to tell a story about Luck. All of us are acquainted with Luck: there are those that see her all the time, some only at certain times of the year, others only one single day—yes, there are even people that only see Luck once in their lifetime; but all of us do see her.

I suppose I need not tell you that when our Lord sends a little child here, He lays it in a mother’s lap: this may happen in a rich man’s castle, or in a workingman’s nicely ordered room; but then it may happen instead in an open marketplace, where the cold wind blows. But what not every one of you does know, and yet is really true, is that our Lord, when He places a child here, also sends along with it its good Luck, which, however, is never placed nearby, but is hidden in some spot on our globe, where we look for it least; yet it is always found at last, and that is a comfort.

Luck once was placed in an apple; that was for a man whose name was Newton. The apple fell, and thus he found his Luck. If you do not know that story, ask someone to tell it to you. I have another story to tell—a story about a pear.

There once lived a poor man, who was born poor, and had grown up poor, and was poor when he married. He was a turner by trade, and used to turn umbrella handles and umbrella rings, but he only earned enough money by this to live from hand to mouth.

“I shall never find my Luck,” he said.

Now this is a true story, which really happened. I could tell the name of the country and the place where the man lived, but that doesn’t matter. The red and sour mountain-ash berries blossomed and ripened around his house and in his garden, as if they were the choicest fruit, and in the garden stood also a pear tree, but it never had borne a pear, and yet here Luck was placed in an invisible pear.

One night the wind blew a terrible storm. They told in the newspapers that the big stage-coach was lifted off the road and thrown aside like a rag. It could very well happen then that a great branch was broken off the pear tree.

The branch was taken into the workshop, and the man turned out of it, just for fun, a big pear, and another big pear, then a smaller pear, and then several very small pears.

“The tree shall bear pears once at least,” he said, and gave them to the children to play with.

There are some things that are necessities in life, and among these, most certainly in wet countries, are umbrellas. Now the whole family had only one for general use. When the wind blew very hard, the umbrella would turn over, and sometimes it would break; but the man quickly mended it again—that was in his trade. With the button and string that kept the umbrella together, it went worse; it would always break too soon, just as one was folding the umbrella up.

One day, when the button had broken again, and the man hunted in vain for it on the floor, he happened to get hold of one of the smallest pears which he had given to the children to play with.

“I cannot find the button,” said the man, “but this little thing will answer.” He pulled a small cord through it, and the little pear filled the place of the broken button beautifully; it was exactly right, and formed the best of fasteners. The next time that he had to send umbrella handles and rings to the capital, he added to the number a few of the small wooden pears which he had turned. They were fastened to a few new umbrellas, which were sent with a thousand others to America. They have a quick understanding there of what is useful. The little pear was soon found to hold best, and the umbrella merchant gave orders that all the umbrellas to be sent to him after that should be fastened with a little wooden pear. Large orders were to be supplied, thousands of pears to be made—wooden pears on all umbrellas, and our man was kept busy at work. He turned and turned; the whole pear tree was used for little wooden pears, which brought pennies that grew into dollars.

“My Luck was placed in that pear tree,” said the man, and soon after he had a great workshop, with plenty of women and boys to help him. Now he was all the time in good humour, and often used to say, “Luck may lie in a pin.”

So also says he who tells the story; and you should know that it is true, and is a proverb in Denmark, that if you put a white pin in your mouth, you will be invisible; but it must be the right sort of a pin—the one which was given us as a lucky gift by our Lord. I have had one of them; and whenever I come to America, the land of the New World, which is so far off, and yet so near me, I shall always carry that pin with me. I can send my greeting over in a few minutes; the ocean rolls over to its shores, there the wind blows; any day I can be there when my stories are read, and perhaps see the glittering gold, receive the ringing gold—the gold that is best of all, which shines in the eyes of children, and comes ringing from their lips, and the lips of their parents. I am in the very room with my friends—and yet I am invisible. I have the white pin in my mouth.

Yes, Luck may lie in a pin.

[ 1869 ]

Hidden but Not Forgotten

—

There was an old house with muddy ditches round it; the drawbridge was more often up than down, for not all strangers are welcome. Under the jutting eaves were loopholes for shooting out arrows, and heaving out boiling water—and sometimes molten lead—down upon the enemy if he came too near. Within doors the rafters stood high aloft, and left room for the smoke that went rolling up out of the large damp logs upon the hearth. On the walls hung pictures of men in armour, and proud ladies in stiff robes; but the stateliest of them all was living here still; she was called Meta Mogens, and she was the Lady of the Manor.

At eventide there came robbers; they slew three of her men, and the watch-dog to boot, and bound Lady Meta with the dog-chain in the dog-kennel, and seated themselves in the hall above, and drank the wine out of her cellars, and all the good ale.

Lady Meta was chained up like a dog, and she could not even bark at them.

Then came the robbers’ horse-boy; he stole out on tiptoe; he knew that he must not be seen, or he would die the death.

“Lady Meta Mogens,” said the horse-boy, “do you still remember how my father, when your husband was still alive, had to ride on the wooden horse? You pleaded for him to be spared, but it was no good, he was to ride until his limbs were paralysed; but you stole down to him, as I steal now to you. You yourself put little stones under each of his feet that he might have support; nobody saw it, or they pretended not to see it, for you were then the young gracious mistress. My father has told me this, and I have not forgotten it! Now I will free you, Lady Meta Mogens.”

Then they took horses from the stable, and rode through wind and weather, and got help.

“That was great help for a small service to the old man so long ago!” said Lady Meta Mogens.

“Hidden is not forgotten,” said the horse-boy.

As for the robbers, they were hanged.

•  •  •

There stood an old house—it is still standing—not the house where Lady Meta Mogens dwelt; but belonging to another noble old family.

We are now in the present time. The sun shines on the gilded turret spires, little wooded islands lie like bouquets on the lake, and the wild swans are swimming around them. Roses are growing in the garden; the lady of the house is herself the finest rose-leaf, shining with gladness—the gladness of good deeds; not outwardly in the wide world, but inwardly in the hearts of men: her image is there kept close, but not forgotten.

She now goes forth from the great house to an outlying cottage in yonder field. Within it dwells a lonely woman, crippled with aches and pain. The window of her little room opens to the north; no sun comes there; and her only view, the patch of meadow, is hidden by a high fence. But today sunshine is there: God’s beautiful warm sun is in the cottage; it comes from the south through the new window, where till now there was only wall.

The old woman sits in the warm sunshine, and sees wood and water; the world has become wide and beautiful, and all at a single word from the kind mistress of the mansion.

“The word was so easy, the service so small!” she said; “and the gladness I gained was unspeakably great and blessed.”

And that is why she performs so many a service, and thinks of all around her in the poor houses, and in the rich ones too—for these are not without their mourners. Her good deeds are concealed and hidden, but God does not forget it.!

•  •  •

There was an old house in the middle of the great bustling town. There were halls and chambers in it, but we will not enter them; we remain in the kitchen. It is snug and bright, and everything is clean and tidy. The pots and kettles shine, the table gleams as though polished with beeswax, the floor is like a fresh-scrubbed larding-board. All this has been done by a maid-of-all-work, who has still found time to put her best things on, as if she were going to church. There are ribbons on her cap—black ribbons—that betoken mourning. Yet she has no kith or kin to mourn, neither father nor mother nor sweetheart; she is a poor solitary serving-maid. Once indeed she was betrothed to one who was just as poor, and they loved each other dearly.

One day he came to her. “We have nothing, we two,” he said; “and the rich widow over the way has been making up to me. I would be well off with her; but you are in my heart. What would you have me do?”

“I advise you to do what you think will turn out to your happiness,” said the girl. “Be kind and good to her, but remember this: from the hour we part, we two must never meet again.”

A few years had gone by, when she met him in the street, her former friend and sweetheart. He looked sickly and miserable. Then she could not hold back—she was forced to ask him, “How are you getting on?”

“Right well, in every way!” said he. “My wife is honest and true, but you are in my heart. I have fought my fight; it will soon be over. We meet for the last time now, till our Father calls us.”

A week had passed. Yesterday’s newspaper told that he was dead; that is why the maid wears mourning. Her sweetheart has left a widow and three step-children, the paper said; that rings badly, yet the metal is pure.

The black ribbons betoken mourning; the maid’s face betokens it still more. It is kept secretly in her heart, and it will never be forgotten.

•  •  •

See, there are three stories; three leaves upon one stalk. Do you wish for more such clover leaves? There are many in the book of the heart, secret and hidden, but not forgotten.

[ 1866 ]

The Little Match Girl

—

It was so terribly cold; it snowed, and it was almost dark on this, the last evening of the year. In the cold and darkness a poor little girl, with bare head and naked feet, went along the streets. When she left home, it is true, she had had slippers on, but what was the use of that? They were very large slippers; her mother had worn them till then, so big were they. And the little girl lost them as she hurried across the street, to get out of the way of two carts driving furiously along. One slipper was not to be found again, and a boy had caught up the other and run away with it. He said he could use it for a cradle when he had children of his own. So the little girl had to go walking about in her little bare feet, which were red and blue with cold. She carried a lot of matches in an old apron and a box of them in her hand. No one had bought any from her the whole day; no one had given her a halfpenny.

Hungry and shivering, she went along, poor little thing, a picture of misery.

The snowflakes fell on her long yellow hair, that curled so prettily on her neck, but she did not think of that now. Lights were shining in all the windows, and there was a tempting smell of roast goose, for it was New Year’s Eve. Yes, she was thinking of that.

In a corner formed by two houses, one of which projected a little beyond the other, she sat down and huddled herself together. She had tucked her little feet under her, but she felt colder and colder. She dared not go home, for she had not sold any matches nor earned a single penny: her father would beat her, and it was cold at home, too; they had only the roof above them, through which the wind whistled, although the largest cracks had been stopped up with straw and rags.

Her little hands were almost numb with cold. Ah! One little match might do her good! If she dared take only one out of the box, strike it on the wall, and warm her fingers! She took one out. R-r-atch! How it sputtered and burned!

It was a warm, bright flame, like a little candle, when she held her hands over it. It was a wonderful little light, and it really seemed to the child as though she was sitting in front of a great iron stove with polished brass feet and brass ornaments. How the fire burned up, and how it warmed! The little girl was already stretching out her feet to warm these too, when—out went the little flame, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the burned match in her hand.

She struck a second one on the wall; it burned, and gave a light, and where this fell upon the wall it became transparent, like a veil—she could see right into the room. A white tablecloth was spread upon the table, which was decked with shining china dishes, and there was a lovely smell of roast goose stuffed with apples and prunes. And what pleased the poor little girl more than all was that the goose hopped down from the dish and, with a knife and fork sticking in its breast, came waddling across the floor straight towards her. Just at that moment out went the match, and only the thick, damp, cold wall was to be seen.

So she lighted another match. And there she was sitting under the beautiful Christmas tree; it was much larger and better dressed than the one she had seen through the glass doors at the rich merchant’s. The green boughs were lit up with thousands of candles, and gaily painted figures, like those in the shop-windows, looked down upon her. The little girl stretched her hands out towards them and—out went the match. The Christmas candles rose higher and higher, till they were only the stars in the sky; one of them fell, leaving a long fiery trail behind it.

“Now, someone is dying,” said the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had ever been good to her, and who was now dead, had said that when a star falls, a soul goes up to heaven.

She struck another match on the wall; it was alight at once, and in its glow stood her old grandmother, so dazzling and bright, and so kind and loving.

“Grandmother!” cried the little girl. “Oh, take me with you! I know that you will go away when the match is burned out; you will vanish like the warm stove, like the beautiful roast goose and the big splendid Christmas tree.” And she quickly lighted the whole box of matches, for she did not wish to let her grandmother go. The matches burned with such a blaze that it was lighter than day, and the old grandmother had never appeared so beautiful or so tall before. Taking the little girl in her arms she flew up with her in brightness and joy, high, so high; and there was no cold, nor hunger, nor sorrow—for they were with God.

But in the corner by the houses, in the cold dawn, the little girl was still sitting, with red cheeks and a smile upon her lips—frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year’s sun shone on the little body. The child sat up stiffly, holding her matches, of which a box had been burned. “She must have tried to warm herself,” someone said. No one knew what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her grandmother on the joyous New Year.

[ 1846 ]

The Candles

—

There was a great Wax-candle which knew its own importance quite well.

“I am born in wax, and moulded in a form,” it said. “I give more light, and burn a longer time than any other light. My place is in the chandelier, or silver candlestick.”

“That must be a delightful life!” said the Tallow-candle. “I am only made of tallow—only a tallow dip; but then, I comfort myself, it is always better than to be a mere taper, that is dipped only two times: I am dipped eight times, to get a decent plumpness. I’m satisfied. It would, to be sure, be finer and luckier still to have been born in wax, and not in tallow; but one can’t choose how he is born. They are put in great rooms, and in glass candlesticks. I live in the kitchen—but that is a good place, too; they get up all the food in the house there.”

“There is something that is more important than eating!” said the Wax-candle. “Good company—to see them shine, and shine yourself. There is a ball here this evening. Now I and all my family are soon to be sent for.”

Scarcely was this said, when all the Wax-candles were sent for—but the Tallow-candle too. The mistress took it in her delicate hand, and carried it out into the kitchen; there stood a little boy with a basket that was full of potatoes, and a few apples were in it too. The good lady had given all these to the little poor boy.

“Here is a candle for you, my little friend,” said she. “Your mother sits up and works far into the night—she can use this.”

The lady’s little daughter stood by her; and when she heard the words “far into the night,” she said, eagerly, “And I’m going to sit up till night, too! We’re going to have a ball, and I’m to wear big red bows.”

How her face shone! yes, that was happiness! no wax-candle could shine like the child’s eyes.

“That is a blessed thing to see,” thought the Tallow-candle. “I shall never forget it, and I shall certainly never see it again.” And so the Candle was laid in the basket under the cover, and the boy took it away.

“Where am I going to now?” thought the Candle. “I shall be with poor folks, perhaps not once get a brass candlestick; but the Wax-candle is stuck in silver, and sees the finest folks! What can there be more delightful than to be a light among fine folks? That’s my lot—tallow, not wax.”

And so the Candle came to the poor people—a widow with three children, in a little, low studded room, right over opposite the rich house.

“God bless the good lady for what she gave!” said the mother; “it is a splendid candle—it can burn till far into the night.”

And the Candle was lighted.

“Pugh!” it said. “That was a horrid match she lighted me with. One hardly offers such a thing as that to a wax-light, over at the rich house.”

There also the wax-candles were lighted, and shone out over the street. The carriages rumbled up to the rich house with the guests for the ball, dressed so finely; and the music struck up.

“Now they’re beginning over there,” said the Tallow-candle, and thought of the little rich girl’s bright face, that was brighter than all the wax-candles. “That sight I never shall see any more.”

Then the smallest of the children in the poor house came—she was a little girl—and put her arms round her brother and sister’s necks; she had something very important to tell, and must whisper it.

“We’re going to have this evening—just think of it—we’re going to have this evening—hot potatoes!” and her face beamed with happiness. The Candle shone right at her, and saw a pleasure, a happiness, as great as was in the rich house, where the little girl said, “We are going to have a ball this evening, and I shall wear some big red bows.”

“Is it such a great thing to get hot potatoes?” thought the Candle. “Well, here is just the same joy among the little things!” and it sneezed [95] at that—that is, it sputtered—and more than that no tallow-candle could do. The table was spread, the potatoes were eaten. Oh, how good they tasted! it was a real feast; and then each got an apple besides, and the smallest child sang the little verse:

“Now thanks, dear Lord, I give to Thee,

That Thou again hast nourished me. Amen.”

“Was not that said prettily?” asked the little girl.

“You mustn’t ask that, or say it,” said the mother. “You should only thank the good God, who has fed you.”

And the little children went to bed, gave a good-night kiss, and fell asleep right away; and the mother sat till far into the night, and sewed, to get a living for them and herself; and from the rich house the lights shone, and the music sounded. The stars twinkled over all the houses, over the rich and over the poor, just as clear, just as kindly.

“That was truly a rare evening,” thought the Tallow-candle. “Do you think the wax-candles had any better time in their silver candlesticks? that I’d like to know before I am burnt out!”

And it thought of the happy children’s faces, the two alike happy—the one lighted by wax-candle, the other by tallow-candle.

Yes, that is the story.

[ 1870 ]

The Last Dream
of the Old Oak Tree

—

There stood in the wood, high up on the slope, by the open shore, a good old Oak Tree that was just exactly three hundred and sixty-five years old; that long time was for the tree no more than the same number of days would be for us human beings. We are awake in the daytime and sleep at night, and then it is that we have our dreams; but with the tree it is different. The tree is awake for three of the seasons, and it is only towards winter that it gets its sleep. Winter is its sleeping-time, its night, after the long day that we call Spring, Summer and Autumn.

For many a warm summer day had the Day-fly danced about the tree’s top; it had lived and hovered about and enjoyed itself, and when for an instant the little creature rested itself, in quiet happiness, on one of the big green oak leaves, the Tree would always say: “Poor little thing, a single day is the whole of your life! How short that is! It is very sad.”

“Sad!” the Day-fly would answer. “What do you mean by that? Everything is bright and warm and lovely as it can be, and I am very happy.”

“But think, only one day and it is all over.”

“Over?” said the Day-fly. “What’s over? Are you ‘over’, too?”

“No, I shall live for perhaps thousands of your days, and my day lasts for three whole seasons. That means a time so long that you can’t reckon it up.”

“No, I can’t, for I don’t understand you. You have thousands of my days, perhaps, but I have thousands of moments to be glad and happy in. Will all the beauty of the world come to an end when you die?”

“Ah, no!” said the Tree. “It will certainly last longer, infinitely longer than I can imagine.”

“Why, then, we both have the same amount, only we reckon it differently.”

And the Day-fly danced and played in the air and rejoiced in its delicate fine-wrought wings with their silk and velvet, and in the warm air that was spiced with the scent of the clover fields and the wild roses in the hedge, of elder and honeysuckle, not to speak of woodruff and cowslips and wild mint. So strong was the perfume that the Day-fly thought it must have made him a little drunk. Long and lovely was the day, full of happiness, and the little fly always felt comfortably tired after all the pleasure. His wings wouldn’t carry him any longer, and quite gently he settled down on a soft swaying blade of grass, nodded his head after his own fashion, and fell happily to sleep; and the sleep was death.

“Poor little Day-fly,” said the Oak, “that really was a short life!”

And every summer day the same dance went on again. There was the same question and answer and the same sleeping away to death. It repeated itself through whole generations of Day-flies, and they were all equally gay and happy. The Oak stood there awake through the morning of spring, the noon of summer, and the evening of autumn, and now its hour of sleep, its night, was at hand: winter was coming.

Already the great winds were singing: “Good night! Good night! Here falls a leaf! There falls a leaf! We are plucking, plucking! Look out for your sleep! We are singing you to sleep, rustling you to sleep, but it’s good for the old branches, eh? They creak with the pure pleasure of it. Sleep well, sleep well! This is your three hundred and sixty-fifth night: you’re really only a yearling now. Sleep well. The clouds will drop snow, and there’ll be a whole blanket of it, a snug coverlet about your feet. Sleep well, and pleasant dreams to you!”

And the Oak Tree stood stripped of all his leaves, ready to go to bed for the whole winter long and to dream many a dream: and his dreams, like ours, were always of something he had experienced.

Once he too had been little; yes, an acorn had been his cradle. Now, according to our counting, he was in his fourth century. He was the largest and most vigorous tree in the wood: his crown soared high over all the other trees and was seen far out at sea—a landmark for ships: little thought he how many eyes there were that looked only for him. High up in his green crown the wood-pigeons built, and the cuckoo called there, and in autumn, when his leaves shone like plates of beaten copper, the migrant birds came and rested there before they flew away over the sea: but now it was winter, and the tree stood leafless. It was plain to be seen how bent and gnarled his branches spread. Crows and jackdaws came and sat there by turns and talked about the hard times that were setting in and how difficult it was to get food in winter.

It was just the holy Christmas-time when the tree had his most beautiful dream: and that is what we are to hear.

The Tree had a clear perception that it was a holiday time. He seemed to hear all the church bells of the countryside ringing: and yet it was mild and warm as on a beautiful summer day. He spread out his mighty crown all fresh and green. The sunbeams played between leaf and branch, the air was full of the scent of plants and bushes: spangled butterflies played hide-and-seek, and the Day-flies danced as if everything were only arranged for them to dance and enjoy themselves. All that the Tree had lived through and seen round him in all the years passed by as in one great pageant. He saw knights and ladies of the olden time ride through the wood with plumed hats and hawk on hand. The hunting-horn sounded and the hounds bayed. He saw the enemy’s troops, with bright weapons and gay clothing, with spear and halberd, pitch their tents and strike them; the watch fires blazed up and there was singing and sleeping under the Tree’s spreading branches. He saw lovers meet in the moonlight in quiet happiness and cut their names, or the first letters of them, on his grey-green bark. Once—years ago, it was—lutes and Aeolian harps had been hung up on the boughs of the Oak by merry ’prentices off on their journeys: now again they hung there, and rang out once more to delight him. The wood-pigeons cooed as if they wanted to express all that the tree felt, and the cuckoo cuckooed to tell how many a summer day he was to live.

Then it seemed as if a new current of life was thrilling through the Tree, down into his tiniest root, up into his topmost twig, and out into all his leaves. The Tree felt that he was stretching himself. He was conscious in his roots how even down in the earth below there was life and warmth: conscious that his strength was increasing, that he was growing higher and higher. Up rose his trunk, there was no pause: more and more he grew—his crown waxed fuller, spread out, spread upward—and as the tree grew his vigour grew too—his exhilarating desire to reach even higher, right up to the bright warm sun.

Already he had grown far up above the clouds which sailed away below him like dark skeins of migrant birds or great white flights of swans. And every one of his leaves could see, as if it had eyes. The stars became visible in the daylight, all large and bright; each of them shone like a pair of eyes, so kind, so clear, they reminded him of eyes he had known, loving eyes, eyes of children, of lovers, when they met beneath the tree.

A pleasant sight it was and a joyful, and yet with all the joy he felt a longing, a yearning. If only all the other trees of the wood down below, all the bushes, the weeds, the flowers, could rise along with him and feel and drink in all this light and gladness! The mighty Oak in the midst of his dream of glory was yet not completely happy unless he had them all with him, small and great; and this feeling penetrated through every branch and leaf as deeply and as strongly as in a human breast.

The Tree moved his crown as if seeking something he could not find. He looked downward, and then—then there came to him a scent of woodruff, and upon that, stronger still, a scent of honeysuckle and violet: he thought he could hear the cuckoo call and answer itself. Yes, through the clouds the green top of the wood was peeping up. The Oak saw beneath him the other trees growing and rising like himself: bushes and weeds shot high into the air—some tore themselves loose, root and all, and flew up more quickly. Swiftest of all was the birch; like a white flash of lightning its slender trunk flickered upward, its branches waving like green pennants and flags. The whole growth of the wood, down to the brown-plumaged reeds, was springing together, and the birds kept it company and sang, and in the grass, which flew and floated wide like a long green silken thread, sat the grasshopper playing on his shinbone with his wing: May beetles boomed and bees hummed, every bird sang full-throated, everything was music and gladness right up into the heaven.

“But the little red flower by the waterside, that should be here too,” said the Oak, “and the blue cuckoo-flower and the little daisy”—for the Oak would have them all together with him.

“We are here! We are here!” Voices rang and sang in answer. “But the pretty woodruff of last summer—and the year before there was a bed of lilies of the valley—and the wild apple tree, how pretty it was! And all the beauty of the wood for years past, many years—had it but lived and lasted till now, it could have been with me too.”

“We are with you,” rang the voices from yet higher up; it seemed as if they had flown on before.

“No, but this is too beautiful to be believed!” the old Oak cried joyfully. “I have them all together, big and small! not one is forgotten! How can such happiness be possible or thinkable?” “In heaven it can be imagined, and is possible,” rang the voices.

Then the Tree, which was still growing, felt that his roots were tearing themselves from the earth.

“Now this is best of all,” said he. “Now no bond holds me. I can soar up to the brightest of all in light and brightness, and I have all my dear ones with me, great and small—all together! All!”

•  •  •

That was the dream of the Oak tree: and while he dreamed, there passed a mighty storm far over land and sea on the holy eve of Christmas. The sea rolled heavy billows against the beach, the tree creaked, cracked, was torn up by the roots. Just as it was dreaming that its roots were loosening themselves, it fell. Its three hundred and sixty-five years were now as the single day of the Day-fly.

On Christmas morning, when the sun rose, the storm had laid itself to rest. All the church bells were chiming for the holy day, and from every chimney, even the least, on the cottager’s roof, the smoke rose blue, as from the altar at the Druid’s feast—the smoke of the thank-offering. Calmer and calmer grew the sea, and on a great ship that stood off the land and had bravely fought out the hard weather of last night, every flag was being run up, in gay Christmas fashion.

“The Tree is gone, the old Oak that was our landmark!” said the sailormen. “It’s fallen in last night’s storm! Who’ll find us such another? Why, nobody!”

That was the funeral sermon that the tree got—(short it was, but well meant) as it lay stretched on the carpet of snow on the shore—and far over it rang the sound of a hymn from the ship—a song of the joy of Christmas and of the redemption of man’s soul by Christ, and of the life everlasting.

Unto the clouds, O flock of God

Your voices raise. Hallelujah!

So all mankind contenting

This joy hath no repenting.

Hallelujah!

So ran the old hymn, and everyone on the ship out there was uplifted after his own fashion by it, and by the prayer, just as the old tree had risen upward in its last and fairest dream on Christmas Eve.

[ 1858 ]

The Bell

—

Towards evening, in the narrow streets of the big town, when the sun was setting, and the clouds shone like gold high up among the chimneys, there was often heard, sometimes by one person, sometimes by another, a wonderful sound like the toll of a church bell. But it was only for an instant that it was heard, for there was such a rumbling of carts and such a clamour of voices—and that distracts one. People would say: “There’s the evening bell ringing! The sun’s setting now.”

Those who went out of the town, where the houses stand farther apart, with gardens and little fields about them, saw the evening sky in yet greater beauty and heard the sound of the bell far louder. It seemed to come from a church hidden deep in the still, fragrant wood; and people looked that way and became quite serious.

Well, a long time went by, and one would say to another: “Can there be a church out there in the wood? That Bell has a strange beautiful sound; hadn’t we better go out there and look into the thing?” So the rich folk set off, driving, and the poor folk, walking; but they found the way uncommonly long, and when they got as far as a clump of willows that grew on the outskirts of the wood, they sat down there and gazed up into the tall boughs, and thought they had got right into the good green wood. A confectioner came out there from the town and put up a booth, and then another confectioner came too; and he hung up a bell, right over his booth; and a bell, moreover, that was tarred outside so as to stand the rain, and had no clapper. And when the people got home again they said how romantic it had all been—and that has a meaning of its own—quite apart from tea. Three people there were who insisted that they had forced their way through the wood, to the very end of it, and all the while they had heard the strange sound of the bell; but to them it seemed as if it came from within the town. One of them wrote a whole poem about it, and told how the bell rang like the voice of a mother singing to the dearest and best of children: no music was more lovely than the sound of the bell.

The Emperor of the country, too, had his attention drawn to the matter, and promised that the man who could really find out where the sound came from should have the title of “World’s Bellman” given to him, even if it proved not to be a bell at all.

A great many people now took to going to the wood for the sake of the excellent victuals they got there, but there was only one who came back with any sort of explanation. No one had been far enough into the wood; neither had he for that matter, but still he said that the bell-sound came from a very large owl in a hollow tree. It was a real bird of wisdom, and it kept on beating its head against the tree, but whether the sound came from its head or from the tree he could not say even now with certainty. So he was appointed “World’s Bellman”, and every year he wrote a little book about the owl, but the world was no wiser than before.

Now there chanced to be a confirmation day. The priest had spoken beautiful and moving words. The confirmands had been deeply touched; it was a momentous day for them; from being children they were all at once become grown people; their child-soul must now pass over, so to say, into a being of more discretion. It was a day of the loveliest sunshine; the confirmands went out of the town, and out from the wood there rang with marvellous clearness the great unknown bell. Instantly a great desire came upon them to go thither—all of them except three. One of these had to go home and try on her ball-dress, for the dress and the ball were the whole occasion of her being confirmed this time, otherwise she wouldn’t have come with the rest. The second was a poor boy, who had borrowed a coat and boots, to be confirmed in, from the innkeeper’s son, and he had to return them by a certain time. The third said that he never went to any strange place without his parents, and that he had always been a good boy, and so he would continue to be, even when he was confirmed; and that isn’t a thing to make game of. But they did make game of him all the same.

So three of them didn’t go with the rest; the others trotted off. The sun shone and the birds sang, and the young people sang too, and held each others hands—for why? They hadn’t yet got situations and were all confirmands in the sight of God.

But, soon, two of the smallest got tired, and they turned back to the town. Two little girls sat themselves down and began making wreaths, so they got no farther; and when the rest came to the willow trees, where the confectioner lived, they said: “Look here, we’ve got to the place; there isn’t really any bell, it’s just a sort of thing people fancy to themselves.”

At that moment, in the depth of the wood, the bell sounded out, so sweet and solemn that four or five made up their minds that they would after all go a little farther into the wood. It was so thick and leafy that it was really hard work to get through it; the woodruff and the anemones were almost too tall, flowering convolvulus and brambles hung in long festoons from tree to tree, where the nightingale sang and the sunlight played. Oh, it was beautiful!—but it was no place for the girls to make their way through, they would soon have their frocks torn to rags. There stood great masses of rock grown all over with moss of all colours, and the fresh spring water came babbling out and talked in a strange fashion. “Cluck! Cluck!” it said.

“That can’t be the bell, can it?” said one of the young people; and he lay down and listened to it. “This must be looked into properly.” So there he stayed and let the rest go on.

They came to a hut of bark and branches; a big crab apple tree leant down over it as if it would shake all its wealth of blossom over the roof, which was gay with roses; the long boughs stretched straight towards the gable, and on it hung a little bell. Could that be the one they had heard? Yes! They were all agreed about it, except one. He said that the bell was far too small and shrill to be heard so far off as they had heard the other, and that those were quite different sounds that so moved people’s hearts. The one who said this was a king’s son, so the others said: “That sort, of course, must always be cleverer than anybody else!”

So they let him go on alone, and as he went his heart filled more and more with the forest loneliness; but still he heard the little bell with which the others had been so delighted, and now and again, when the breeze came from the confectioner’s way, he could hear as well how the people sang at their tea. But the deep stroke of the bell still sounded louder; it was as if an organ was playing, too, and the sound came from the left, from the side where the heart is set.

Suddenly there was a rustling in the bushes, and there before the king’s son stood a little boy, a boy in wooden shoes and a jacket so short that you could see exactly how long his wrists were. They recognized one another. The boy was that very one who hadn’t been able to come with the rest because he had had to go home and give back the coat and boots to the innkeeper’s son. He had done that, and then, in his wooden shoes and his shabby clothes, he had started off alone, for the bell rang so loud and so deep that out he must go.

“Ah, now we can go on together,” said the King’s son; but the poor boy with the wooden shoes was quite embarrassed. He pulled at his short sleeves and said he was afraid he couldn’t get along so fast, and besides he thought the bell ought to be looked for on the right, for everything that is great and noble is on that side.

“Well, at that rate we shan’t meet again,” said the King’s son; and he nodded to the poor boy, who plunged into the darkest and thickest part of the wood, where the thorns tore his shabby clothes to bits, and scratched his face and hands and feet till the blood came.

The King’s son, too, got a good few scratches; but the sun shone on his path, and he is the one we will follow, for a brisk lad was he.

“I must and will find the bell,” said he, “if I have to go to the world’s end for it.”

The ugly baboons, sitting in the trees, grinned at him with every tooth in their heads. “Shall we smash him?” said they. “Shall we thrash him? He’s a king’s son!”

But on he went, undaunted, deeper and deeper into the wood, where grew the strangest flowers. There stood white star lilies with blood-red stamens, sky-blue tulips that glistened in the breezes, and apple trees whose apples, one and all, looked like great shining soap bubbles—just think how those trees must have shone in the sunlight! Round the most beautiful green glades, where hart and hind played on the turf, grew splendid oaks and beeches, and whenever one of the trees had had its bark split, grass and long tendrils had grown in the cleft. There, too, were great glens with calm lakes, on which white swans swam and flapped their wings. Often did the King’s son stop and listen; often he thought that it was from one of those deep lakes that the bell rang upward to him; but then he was aware that it was not there, but from a further depth of the forest, that the bell sounded.

And now the sun was sinking and the sky shone red as fire, and a great stillness was over all the forest. He sank on his knees and sang his evening hymn, and said: “Never shall I find that which I seek! Now the sun is sinking. Now night, dark night is coming on; yet once again, perhaps, I may see the round red sun before it sinks wholly behind the earth. I will climb this cliff that stands there, with the great trees on the top.”

And he clutched at creepers and roots and clambered up towards the wet rocks, where the water snakes twined into knots, and the toads seemed really to bark at him—yet up he got before the sun, seen from that height, was quite down. Oh, what splendour! The sea, the great majestic sea, that rolled its long billows toward the coast, stretched out before him, and the sun stood like a huge shining altar, far out, where sea and sky met, all fused together in glowing colours. The forest sang, and the sea sang, and his heart sang with them. All nature was a vast solemn cathedral, wherein the trees and floating clouds were the columns, the flowers and grass the woven hangings of silk, the heaven itself the mighty dome. Up there the red hues were dying as the sun disappeared. But millions of stars were being lit, millions of diamond lamps shone there, and the King’s son stretched out his arms towards the heavens, the sea, the forest—and just then there came from the path on the right the poor boy with the scanty coat-sleeves and the wooden shoes. He had come there just as soon, come by his own way; and they ran to meet each other, and caught each other by the hand in the great cathedral of Nature and of song.

And above them rang out the unseen solemn bell, and about it happy spirits hovered, circling in a joyful song of praise to God.

[ 1845 ]

The Uttermost Parts of the Sea

—

Large ships were sent high up to the North Pole, in order to find out the uttermost limits, the last seashores, and to try how far it was possible for men to advance up there.

They were already sailing for a long, long time, through fogs and ice, and their crews had to bear many hardships; at last the winter had come and the sun had disappeared from those regions; they knew there would now be a night many, many weeks long. As far as the eye could reach it was one single ice block; the ships were anchored to it. The snow was piled up in large heaps, and huts were made of it in the shape of beehives—some as large as the old barrows, some only big enough to accommodate two or four men. It was, however, not quite dark; the northern lights were shining red and blue in an endless magnificent firework. The snow glittered and sparkled, so that the night was one single long twilight.

When it was brightest, the natives came in troops, wonderful to look at in their hairy, rough fur clothing; they came in sleighs, consisting of ice-blocks, and brought large bundles of hides and skins with them; thus the snow huts received warm foot-rugs and bed coverings. The sailors made up their beds under the snow roofs; while it froze outside till it creaked, very much harder than it freezes with us in the winter.

But the sailors remembered that at home it was still autumn, and they thought of the warm sunbeams and the leaves still clinging to the trees in glories of crimson and gold. Their watches told them it was evening, and time for rest, and in one of the snow houses two sailors had already lain down to sleep. The younger of these had with him his best home-treasure, the Bible that his grandmother had given him at parting. Every night it lay under his pillow; he had known its contents from childhood, and every day he read a portion; and often as he lay on his couch, he recalled to mind those holy words of comfort, “If I should take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, even there should Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand should hold me.”

These sublime words of faith were on his lips as he closed his eyes, when sleep came to him, and dreams came to him—busy, swift-winged dreams, proving that though the body may rest, the soul must ever be awake.

First he seemed to hear the melodies of songs dear to him in his home; a mild summer breeze seemed to breathe upon him, and a light shone upon his couch, as though the snowy dome above him had become transparent; he lifted his head, and behold! the dazzling white light was not the white of a snow wall: it came from the large wings of an angel stooping over him, an angel with eyes beaming with love. The angel’s form seemed to spring from the pages of the Bible, as from the pitcher of a lily-blossom; he extended his arms, and lo! the narrow walls of the snow hut sank back like a mist melting before the daylight. Once again the green meadows and autumn-tinted woods of the sailor’s home lay around him, bathed in quiet sunshine; the stork’s nest was empty, but the apples still clung to the wild apple tree; though leaves had fallen, the red hips glistened, and the blackbird whistled in the little green cage that hung in the lowly window of his childhood’s home; the blackbird whistled the tune he had taught him, and the old grandmother wound chickweed about the bars of the cage, just as her grandson had always done. And the smith’s pretty young daughter stood drawing water from the well, and as she nodded to the grandmother, the latter beckoned to her, and held up a letter to show her, a letter that had come that morning from the cold northern lands, from the North Pole itself, where the old woman’s grandson now was—safe under God’s protecting hand. And the two women, old and young, laughed and wept by turns—and he all the while, the young sailor whose body was sleeping amid ice and snow, his spirit roaming in the world of dreams, under the angel’s wings, saw and heard it all, and laughed and wept with them. And from the letter, these words were read aloud: “Even in the uttermost parts of the sea, His right hand shall hold me fast.” A sweet, solemn music was wafted round him, and the angel spread his wings like a soft protecting veil over the sleeper.

The dream was ended; all was darkness in the little snow hut, but the Bible lay under the sailor’s head, faith and hope dwelt in his heart. God was with him, and his home was with him, “even in the uttermost parts of the sea.”

[ 1855 ]

Grandmother

—

Grandmother is very old; she has many wrinkles, and her hair is quite white; but her eyes, which are as bright as two stars and still more beautiful, look at one in a kind and friendly way, and it does one good to gaze into them. Then, too, she can tell the most charming stories, and she has a gown with great big flowers worked upon it, and made of a good heavy silk that rustles. Grandmother knows a great deal, for she was born long before father and mother, that’s quite certain. Grandmother has a hymn-book with great silver clasps, and very often reads out of it; in the middle of it lies a rose, quite flat and dry. It is not so beautiful as the roses she has standing in the glass, and yet she smiles at it more pleasantly than at the others, and it even makes tears come into her eyes. I wonder why Grandmother looks at the faded flower in the old book like that! Do you know? Every time that Grandmother’s tears fall upon the flower the colour becomes fresh again; the rose swells up and fills the whole room with its fragrance; the walls sink as if they were only mist, and all around her is the glorious greenwood, where the sun shines through the foliage of the trees; and Grandmother—why, she is quite young, she is a charming girl with fair curls, with full rosy cheeks, pretty and graceful, and fresher than any rose; but the eyes, those gentle, happy eyes—yes, they still belong to grandmother. At her side sits a young man, tall and strong; he hands her the rose and she smiles—Grandmother doesn’t smile like that though—yes, she does! at this very minute. But he has vanished, and many thoughts, many forms float by; the handsome young man is gone, the rose lies in the hymn-book, and Grandmother—well, she sits there again as an old woman, and gazes at the faded rose lying in the book.

Now Grandmother is dead. She was sitting in her armchair telling a beautiful long, long story; then she said that the story was ended, and that she was tired, so she leaned her head back to sleep a little. Her breathing could be heard as she slept; but it became lighter and lighter, and her face was full of happiness and peace. It seemed as if sunshine rested on her features; she smiled again, and then they said she was dead.

She was laid in the black coffin; there she lay shrouded in white linen, looking gentle and beautiful, though her eyes were closed; but every wrinkle had vanished, and she lay there with a smile upon her lips. Her hair was silver-white and venerable, and we were not afraid to look upon her who was still our dear, kind-hearted Grandmother. And the hymn-book was placed under her head, as she had herself wished, and the rose lay in the old book. Then they buried Grandmother.

On the grave, close to the church wall, they planted a rose-tree. It was full of roses, and the nightingale flew singing over the flowers and the grave. On the organ inside the church were played the most beautiful psalms that were contained in the old book under the head of the dead. The moon shone down upon the grave, but the dead one was not there; every child could go there safely at night and pluck a rose from the churchyard wall.

One who is dead knows more than all we living ones. The dead know what terror would come over us if such a strange thing were to happen as their appearance among us; the dead are better than all of us—they return no more. The earth has been heaped upon the coffin, and in the coffin there is earth too; the leaves of the hymn-book are dust, and into dust crumbled the rose with all its recollections. But above there bloom fresh roses; there the nightingale sings and the organ peals, and there lives the remembrance of the old Grandmother with the gentle, ever-youthful eyes. Eyes can never die. Ours will one day behold Grandmother again, young and beautiful, as when for the first time she kissed the fresh red rose that is now dust in the grave.

[ 1845 ]

What the Whole Family Said

—

What did the whole family say? Well, listen first to what the little Marie said.

It was the little Marie’s birthday—the most beautiful of all days, she thought. All her small girl-friends and boyfriends came to play with her, and she wore her finest frock: this had been given to her by Grandmother, who was now with the good God; but Grandmother had cut it, and made it herself before she went up into the bright beautiful heavens. The table in Marie’s room was shining with presents: there was the prettiest little kitchen, with all the belongings of a kitchen; and a doll that could twist its eyes, and cry “Ugh!” when you pinched its stomach; ah! and there was a picture-book too, full of the prettiest stories, to be read when somebody could read. But it was more beautiful than all the stories in the world to live to see many birthdays.

“Oh, it is so beautiful to live!” said the little Marie. “Godfather said that was the most beautiful fairy tale.”

In the room next her were both her brothers; they were big boys, one of them nine years old, and the other eleven They thought it beautiful to live too, to live in their way; not to be babies like Marie, but thorough-going school boys; to get their high mark in class, to fight their school-fellows, and like them all the better for it; to skate in the winter, and ride bicycles in summer; to read of baronial castles, with draw-bridges and dungeons, and to read of discoveries in Central Africa, On this subject, though, one of the boys had a misgiving—that all might be discovered before he was grown a man: then he was to go out on adventures. Life is the most beautiful fairy tale, said Godfather, and one takes a part in it oneself.

It was on the parlour-floor these children played and lived. In the flat above them dwelt another branch of the family. And here too were children, but they had slipped their leading strings—they were so big: one son was seventeen, and an other twenty; but one of them was very old indeed, said little Marie: he was twenty-five, and engaged to be married. All of them were well off; had good parents, good clothes, good attainments; and they knew their own minds.

“Clear the way! down with the old hoardings!” said they; “a free view into the wide world: that is the finest thing we know of! Godfather is right; life is the most beautiful fairy tale of all!”

Father and mother, both elderly people (older than the children, naturally) said with smiles on their lips, in their eyes, and in their hearts, “How young they are, the young folk! things won’t go on in the world just as they fancy; still, they will go on! Life is a wonderful, beautiful fairy tale!”

Higher up—a little nearer the sky, as we say when people occupy the attics—lived Godfather. He was old, and yet so young in mind; always in good spirits. He could tell many a long story. He had been far and wide in the world, and pretty tokens from all the lands of the world were standing in his room. There were pictures from floor to ceiling, and some of the windowpanes were of red or yellow glass: if one looked through them, the whole world lay in sunshine, however grey it might be outside. There were green plants growing in a great glass case, and in a globe attached to it there were goldfish swimming—they looked at one as if they knew many things they would not talk about. There was a sweet smell of flowers here always, even in the winter; and in wintertime a great fire blazed on the hearth; it was so amusing to sit looking into it, and to hear how it cracked and crackled.

“It reads old memories out loud to me,” said Godfather: and it seemed as well to little Marie as if many pictures showed themselves in the fire. But in the large carved bookcase close by stood the real books: and the one which Godfather read oftenest he called the Book of books; it was the Bible. There was pictured the history of the world, and all mankind; of the Creation, the Flood, the Kings, and the King of kings.

“All that has happened, and all that will happen, is written in this book!” said Godfather. “So infinitely much in one single book! Aye, and all that man has to pray for, is entered there, in the prayer, ‘Our Father.’”

“It is the drop of mercy!” said Godfather; “it is the pearl of comfort from God. It is laid as a gift on the child’s cradle—is laid on the child’s heart. Little child, keep it carefully! never lose it, however big you may grow; and you will not be forsaken on life’s changeful way—it will beam bright within you—and you will never be lost.”

Godfather’s eyes were brightened by it, till they shone with joy. Once in his years of youth they had wept, and “that, too, was good,” he said. “That was the time of trial: then all looked dark: now I have sunshine within and around me. The older one grows the clearer one sees, in adversity and prosperity, that our Lord is in it all, that life is the most beautiful fairy tale: that this only He can give us, and that this goes on into eternity!”

“It is beautiful to live!” said the little Marie; so, too, said the small and big boys, father and mother, the whole family, and, most of all, Godfather: he had experience; he was the oldest of them all; knew all stories: and he said, “Life is the most beautiful fairy tale.”

[ 1870 ]

The Silent Book

—

In the highroad which led through a wood stood a solitary farm-house; the road, in fact, ran right through its yard. The sun was shining and all the windows were open; within the house people were very busy. In the yard, in an arbour formed by lilac bushes in full bloom, stood an open coffin; thither they had carried a dead man, who was to be buried that very afternoon. Nobody shed a tear over him; his face was covered over with a white cloth, under his head they had placed a large thick book, the leaves of which consisted of folded sheets of blotting-paper, and withered flowers lay between them; it was the herbarium which he had gathered in various places and was to be buried with him, according to his own wish. Every one of the flowers in it was connected with some chapter of his life.

“Who is the dead man?” we asked.

“The old student,” was the reply. “They say that he was once an energetic young man, that he studied the dead languages, and sang and even composed many songs; then something had happened to him, and in consequence of this he gave himself up to drink, body and mind. When at last he had ruined his health, they brought him into the country, where someone paid for his board and residence. He was gentle as a child as long as the sullen mood did not come over him; but when it came he was fierce, became as strong as a giant, and ran about in the wood like a chased deer. But when we succeeded in bringing him home, and prevailed upon him to open the book with the dried-up plants in it, he would sometimes sit for a whole day looking at this or that plant, while frequently the tears rolled over his cheeks. God knows what was in his mind; but he requested us to put the book into his coffin, and now he lies there. In a little while the lid will be placed upon the coffin, and he will have sweet rest in the grave!”

The cloth which covered his face was lifted up; the dead man’s face expressed peace—a sunbeam fell upon it. A swallow flew with the swiftness of an arrow into the arbour, turning in its flight, and twittered over the dead man’s head.

What a strange feeling it is—surely we all know it—to look through old letters of our young days; a different life rises up out of the past, as it were, with all its hopes and sorrows. How many of the people with whom in those days we used to be on intimate terms appear to us as if dead, and yet they are still alive—only we have not thought of them for such a long time, whom we imagined we should retain in our memories for ever, and share every joy and sorrow with them.

The withered oak leaf in the book here recalled the friend, the schoolfellow, who was to be his friend for life. He fixed the leaf to the student’s cap in the green wood, when they vowed eternal friendship. Where does he dwell now? The leaf is kept, but the friendship no longer exists. Here is a foreign hothouse plant, too tender for the gardens of the North. It is almost as if its leaves still smelled sweet! She gave it to him out of her own garden—a nobleman’s daughter.

Here is a water-lily that he had plucked himself, and watered with salt tears—a lily of sweet water. And here is a nettle: what may its leaves tell us? What might he have thought when he plucked and kept it? Here is a little snowdrop out of the solitary wood; here is an evergreen from the flower-pot at the tavern; and here is a simple blade of grass.

The lilac bends its fresh fragrant flowers over the dead man’s head; the swallow passes again—“twit, twit;” now the men come with hammer and nails, the lid is placed over the dead man, while his head rests on the silent book—so long cherished, now closed for ever!

[ 1851 ]

A Picture from the Rampart

—

It is autumn. We stand on a rampart and look out on the sea; we see the many ships and the Swedish coast on the other side of the Sound which, in the light of the sinking sun, rise high above the surface of the sea; behind us the wood limits our view; stately trees surround us, and the yellow leaves flutter down from the branches. Below, at the foot of the rampart, stand gloomy buildings, surrounded by high walls, within it is very narrow and dismal, but it is much more dismal beyond that grating in the wall; there sit the prisoners, the worst criminals.

A ray of the sinking sun enters the bare cell of one of these prisoners. The sun shines alike upon the good and the evil. The sullen stubborn felon throws a glance of disgust on the cold ray. A little bird flies towards the grating. The little bird twitters to the unjust as well as to the just. It only cries, “twit, twit,” perches on the wall, flutters its wings, and plucks a feather from one of them, puffs itself up, and ruffles the feathers on its neck and breast.

And the wicked man on the chain looks at it; his hardened face assumes a milder expression; a thought rises in his breast which he cannot himself explain, but this thought is connected with the sunbeam and the fragrance of the violets which in spring grew plentifully along the wall. Now the bugles of the home-bound hunters sound sweet and full. The little bird flies away, frightened; the sunbeam gradually vanishes and it becomes dark again in the cell, dark in the wicked man’s heart; but the sun has shone into it, the twittering of the little bird has touched it! Continue to sound, ye bugles of the hunters, continue to sound! the evening is mild, and the sea gently rocks its smooth surface.

[ 1847 ]

The Comet

—

Now the comet came with its shining nucleus and its nebulous tail. At the great castle they gazed at it, and from the poor shanty; the crowd in the street stared at it, and the solitary man, that went his way over the pathless heath. Everyone had his own thoughts. “Come and look at the vault of heaven; come out and look at the wonderful sight,” they cried, and all hastened to look. But inside the room there sat yet a little boy and his mother. The tallow candle was burning, and the mother thought that there was a moth in the light; the tallow formed in ragged edges around the candle, and ran down the sides; this, she believed, betokened that her son should die very soon—the shining little moth was turning toward him.

This was an old superstition in which she believed. The little boy was destined to live many years here on earth, and, indeed, lived to see the comet again, when it returned sixty years after.

The boy did not see the candle-moth in the light, and thought not of the comet, which then, for the first time in his life, looked brightly down from the skies. He sat quietly with an earthen dish before him; the dish being filled with soap-water, in which he dipped the head of a clay pipe, and then put the stem in his mouth, and made soap-bubbles, big and small. They quivered and fluttered in their beautiful colours; they changed from yellow to red, from red to purple and blue; then they coloured green, like the leaves when the sun is shining through them. “May God give thee many years to live here on earth, as many as the bubbles thou art blowing.”

“So many, so many!” cried the little fellow. “I can never blow all the soap-water into bubbles. There flies one Fear, there flies another!” he exclaimed, when a new bubble broke loose from the pipe and flew off. Some of them flew into his eyes: they burned and smarted, and caused tears to flow. In every bubble he saw a picture of the future, glimmering and glittering.

“This is the time to see the comet!” exclaimed the neighbours; “come out of doors, and don’t sit in the room.”

And the mother took the boy by the hand; he had to lay the clay pipe aside, and leave his play with the soap-bubbles, the comet was here.

And the boy saw the brilliant fire-ball, and the shining tail. Some said it was three yards long, others insisted it was several millions of yards long—only a slight difference.

Most of the people who had said that, were dead and gone when the comet came again; but the little fellow, toward whom the candle-moth had been turned, of whom the mother thought, “He will die soon,” he still lived, had become old and white-haired. “White hairs are the flower of old age,” says the proverb; and he had a good many of such flowers. He was now an old schoolmaster. The school-children said that he was very wise, and knew so very much; he knew history, and geography, and all that was known about heaven and its stars.

“Everything comes again,” said he; “only pay attention to persons and events, and you will learn that they always return; there may be a hundred years between, or many hundred years, but then we shall have the same persons again, only in another coat, and in another country.” And the schoolmaster told them about William Tell, who was compelled to shoot an apple from his son’s head; but before he shot the arrow, he hid another one in his bosom, to shoot into the breast of the wicked Gesler. This took place in Switzerland. But many years before that happened, the same event occurred in Denmark with Walraloke; he was also obliged to shoot an apple from his son’s head, and he also hid an arrow in his bosom, to avenge the cruelty. And several thousand years before that, the same story was written down in Egypt. This is a story, and a true one; it came again, and will come again, like the comet, that returns, “flies away through space, stays away, but returns.” And he spoke of the comet that was expected, the same comet that he had seen when yet a boy.

The schoolmaster knew what took place in the skies, but he did not therefore forget history and geography. His garden was laid out in the shape of a map of Denmark. Here were herbs and flowers, which belong to different parts of the land.

“Fetch me herbs,” said he, and they went to the bed that represented Laaland; “fetch me buckwheat,” and they went to Langeland. The beautiful blue gentian was found in Skagen. The shining Christ-thorn at Silkeborg. Towns and cities were marked with images. Here stood St. Knud, with the dragon, which meant Odense; Absalon, with the Bishop’s staff, meant Sorö. The old boat with the oars was a sign that there stood Aarhuus. From the schoolmaster’s garden you could learn the geography of Denmark; but one had to be instructed by him first, and that was a great pleasure.

Now the comet was expected again, and of that he spoke; and he related what people had said in the olden times, when it appeared last; they had said that a comet year was a good wine year, and that one could mix water with that wine, without its being detected. Therefore the merchants thought so much of a comet year.

The sky was overcast for two weeks, they could not see the comet, and yet it was there. The old schoolmaster sat in his little chamber adjoining the school-room. The old Bornholm clock of his grandfather’s time stood in the corner; the heavy lead weights did neither ascend nor descend, the pendulum did not move. The little cuckoo, that used to come forward in past times to cuckoo the passing hours, had for many years ceased to do his duty. Everything was dumb and silent; the clock was out of order.

But that old clavichord nearby, made in his father’s time, had yet a spark of life left. The strings could yet ring; true, they were a little hoarse, but they could ring the melodies of a whole lifetime. With these, the old man remembered so much, both joyful and sorrowful, that had happened in the long series of years that had passed by since he, a little boy, saw the comet; and now, when that comet had come again, he renumbered what his mother had said about the moth in the light; he remembered the beautiful soap-bubbles that he blew, each of them representing a year of his life, as he had said, shining and sparkling in wonderful hues. He saw in them all his pleasures and sorrows, everything beautiful and sorrowful. He saw the child and its plays, the youth and his fancies, the whole world, in wavy brightness, opening before his gazing eyes; and in that sunlight he saw his future grow. These were the bubbles of coming time; now, an old man, he heard from the clavichord’s strings the melodies of passing time, mind’s bubbles, with memory’s variegated colours. And he heard his nurse’s knitting song:

“For sure no Amazone

Did ever stockings knit.”

And then the strings sang the song the old papa of the house would sing to him, when he was a child—

“In truth full many dangers

Will grow up here below,

For him, that yet is young,

And doth not fully know.”

Now the melodies of the first ball were ringing the minuet and molinasky; then the melancholy notes of the flute passed by: bubble after bubble they hurried on, very much like those that he blew with soap-water, when a little boy.

His eyes were turned toward the window: a cloud in the sky was gliding by, and, as it passed, revealed the comet to his gaze, the sparkling nucleus, the shining tail.

It seemed as if it had been only yesterday evening that he had seen that comet, and yet a whole eventful lifetime lay between that evening and this. Then he was a child, and looked through the bubbles into the future; now the bubbles pointed back in the past.

Once more he had a child’s feeling and a child’s trust; his eyes sparkled, and his hands sank down upon the keys. There came a sound as of the breaking of a string.

“Come out and see!” shouted the neighbours; “the comet is here, and the sky is so clear; come out and look!”

The old schoolmaster answered not; he had gone where he should see more clearly: his soul was upon a journey far greater than the comet’s, and into a wider space than the comet has to fly through.

And the comet was again seen from the rich castle, and from the poor shanty; the crowd in the street gazed at it, and the solitary man that walked through the pathless heath. But the schoolmaster’s soul was seen by God, and the dear ones that had preceded, and whom he so much longed for.

[ 1869 ]

Something

—

“I will become Something,” said the eldest of five brothers. “I mean to be of some use in the world; let it be ever so humble a position, so long as what I produce is good, that’s something. I’ll make bricks: they are things people can’t do without. Then I shall have done something.”

“But something not nearly big enough,” said the second brother. “What you’ll do is as good as nothing: it’s mere manual work, it can be done with a machine. No! Better be a bricklayer, that’s something. That’s what I’ll be, it’s a craft: you enter into a corporation, you become a citizen, you have your guild-banner, and your own special inn. Why, if things go right, I can employ labourers and be called Master, and my wife Mistress. That will be Something.”

“It’s nothing at all,” said the third. “It’s not within the classes, and there are lots of classes in a town, above the masters. You may be a respectable man, but even as a master you’re only what is called ‘Lower Class’. No, no. I know something better than that. I shall be an architect, and go in for the artistic side, the thinking side, and get up to the higher levels in the realm of the mind. Of course, I shall have to begin at the bottom. Yes, I don’t mind putting it into plain language—I shall have to begin as a builder’s boy, and wear a cap—though I’m accustomed to a silk hat—and run about and fetch beer and brandy for the ordinary journeymen, and they will say ‘thou’ to me, which is annoying, but I shall pretend to myself that it is all a masquerade, and these are the liberties that belong to it. Tomorrow, I mean, when I’ve got to being a journeyman, I shall go my own way, and the rest of them won’t concern me. I shall go to the college, and learn to draw and be called an architect. That’s something, nay, that’s a great deal. I may become ‘Your Excellency’ and ‘well-born’—may have a tail to my name as well as a title in front—and build and build like the rest of them before me: that’s always something to reckon on. Yes, that will be Something!”

“But it is Something I don’t care a rap about,” said the fourth. “I won’t sail in the wake, I won’t be a copy of someone else; I shall be a genius, and become better than all the lot of you. I shall create a new style, and frame the conception of a building that shall be in accord with the climate and materials of the country, with our nationality, with the evolution of this age of ours; yes, and pile an extra story on by my own genius.”

“But suppose the climate and the materials are no good?” said the fifth. “That’ll be a bad job: it will affect the whole: besides, nationality may easily become so diluted that it becomes an affectation; and the evolution of the age may make you run off the rails, as often happens in youth. No, I see none of you will really attain to being something, whatever you may think. However, do as you please, I won’t be like you. I shall take up a detached position. I shall criticize what you produce. There’s always something wrong in everything, and I shall pick it out and discuss it: that’s Something.”

And so he did, and people said of that fifth brother: “There’s something to him, he’s a good head of his own. But he doesn’t do anything!” Which of itself made him Something.

Well now, that’s only a bit of a story, and yet it never will come to an end so long as the world stands.

But, did nothing more happen to these five brothers? That wouldn’t have been something. You must go on listening, for there is a whole tale to come.

The eldest brother, who took to brick-making, found that out of every brick when it was finished there rolled a little coin—only a copper, to be sure, but a great many little copper coins when they are put together turn into a bright dollar, and whenever you knock on the door with that, at the baker’s, the butcher’s, the tailor’s, or all of them together, the door flies open and you get what you want. So you see that was what the bricks gave him. Some of them, to be sure, fell to bits or broke in the middle, but a use was found for them too.

Up on the dike, old mother Margaret, the poor woman, wanted very much to build herself a little house, and she was given all the broken bricks, and some whole ones into the bargain; for the eldest brother had a good heart, even though in practice he only used it to make bricks. The poor woman built her house herself. It was very little, and the only window was put in crooked. The door was much too low, and the thatched roof might have been much better. But there was shelter and dwelling there, and a wide view from it over the sea, which when it was high broke against the dike. The salt spray spurted all over the house. It was still standing when the man who had made the bricks of it was dead and gone.

The second brother—ah, he could lay bricks after another fashion, and he was trained up to it. When his labourer’s time was up, he buckled his knapsack and struck up the ’prentice’s song

I travel can whilst I am young

and the rest of it, and so he did. In the town, when he came back and became a master, he built house after house, a whole street of them. And when they were up, and looked well, and made an ornament for the town, why, the houses built him a little house, for his very own. But how could the houses build? Well, you may ask them and they won’t say anything, but the people will answer and tell you: “Why, certainly the street built his house for him.” It was small, and it had a clay floor, but when he and his bride danced over it, the floor grew bright and polished, and out of every brick in the wall there burst a blossom, and that was every bit as good as an expensive paper. It was a pretty little house, and they were a happy couple. The guild-flag fluttered outside it, and the ’prentice boys and the men shouted “Hurrah!” That was Something. And then he died, and that too was Something.

Next came the architect, the third brother, who had begun as a carpenter’s apprentice, worn a cap and run errands in the town, and now from the college had risen to be Director of Buildings, “illustrious” and well-born. Indeed, if the houses in the street had built a house for the brother who was a master bricklayer, the street itself was named after this brother, and the prettiest house in the street was his. That was Something, and he was Something—yes, and with a long title before his name and after it. His children were called gentry, and when he died his widow was a widow of Position. That’s Something, and his name stood permanently at the corner of the street, and was in people’s mouths, being the name of the street, and I say that is Something.

Then came the genius, the fourth brother, who meant to hit on something new, something original, with an extra story on top. But it broke down with him, and he tumbled down and broke his neck. Still, he had a beautiful funeral with guild banners and a band and flowers on the posters and in the street, right across the pavement: and there were three funeral orations spoken over him, every one of them longer than the one before it, and that would have pleased him, for he enjoyed being talked about. There was a monument, too, put upon his grave; only one story to it, but still, that’s Something.

So now he was dead like the three other brothers; but the last, the one who criticized, outlived them all, which was very proper, for in that way he got the last word, and it was of great importance to him to have the last word. He was the one with the good head to him, people said, and now his hour struck too, and he died and arrived at the gate of heaven. People always come there in pairs, and here stood he with another soul who also wanted to enter in: and who should it be but old mother Margaret of the house on the dike!

“No doubt it is for the sake of the contrast that I and this poor creature are made to come here together,” said the critic. “Well, and who are you, my good woman? Are you by way of coming in here too?” he asked.

The old woman curtsied as well as she knew how, for she thought it was St. Peter himself who was speaking. “I’m a poor old body, without any belongings, Old Margaret, from the house on the dike.”

“Well, and what did you do or produce down there?”

“Really, I didn’t do nothing at all in the world, nothing as can open the door for me here. It ’ud be a real mercy if I could get leave to come inside of the door.”

“And in what sort of way did you leave that world?” he asked—just in order to be saying something, for it bored him to stand there waiting.

“How did I leave it? Well, I’m sure I don’t know. Very sick and poorly I was in the last few years, and really I hadn’t the strength to creep out of my bed and go into the frost and cold outside. It’s a hard winter—but I’ve won through it now. For a couple of days it was dead still, but bitter cold, as your reverence knows well enough. The ice was along the shore and as far out as eye could see. All the people in the town were gone out on the ice, there was what they call skating and dancing. I believe there was a big band and refreshments out there. I could hear it indoors where I lay in my poor little room, and it had got towards evening time: and the moon was risen though ’twasn’t yet full, and from my bed I could look from the window right out over the shore: and there, right in the corner betwixt the sky and the sea, there came a strange white cloud. I lay and looked at it, and I looked at the black spot in the middle of it, and it grew bigger and bigger, and then I knew what that meant. I’m old and weatherwise: though it’s not often one sees that sign, I knew it, and it gave me a turn. Twice afore in my lifetime I’ve seen that same thing, and I knew there’d be a terrible tempest with a spring tide, as would come right over those poor people out there that was drinking and dancing and making merry.

“Young and old, the whole town was out there, and who was to warn ’em if nobody that was there saw and knowed what I did? I was that frightened that I got more strength than I’d had in a long time. Out of my bed I got and over to the window, I couldn’t manage no further. However, I got the window open, and I could see the people running and jumping out there on the ice, and all the gay flags, and hear the boys shouting out ‘Hurrah!’ and the girls and the lads singing, all as merry as could be, and still that white cloud with the black bag in it climbed up higher and higher. I screamed out as loud as I could, but nobody heard me, I was too far away. Very soon the tempest would break loose and the ice go to pieces, and everybody that was on it go down through it, and no one to save ’em! Hear me they could not, and get out to them I could not: how could I manage to get ’em to shore? Just then our good God put it in my mind to set fire to my bed and let the house burn down, sooner than all them people should die in that dreadful way. I got a light and I see the red flames—yes, and I managed to get outside the door; but there I lay, I couldn’t do no more. The fire come after me out of the window, and up over the roof. Then they saw it from out there, and all of ’em ran as hard as they could to help me, the poor old body they thought was burning to death inside. There wasn’t one but what ran. I heard ’em coming, and I heard besides how all at once there came a rushing in the air. I heard it thundering like great guns fired off, and the spring tide heaved up the ice and it broke in two. But they got to the dike where the sparks was flying all about me. I got ’em every one into safety. But I couldn’t get over the cold and the fright, and so I came up here to the gate of heaven. They say that’s opened for poor bodies like me, and now I haven’t got my house on the dike no more, though to be sure that don’t give me the right to get in here.”

At that moment the gate of heaven opened, and the Angel led the old woman in. She let fall a straw outside, one of the straws that had been in her bed, the bed she had set on fire to save all those people, and it had turned into pure gold, a sort of gold that grew and twined itself into the loveliest tendrils.

“Look, that is what the poor woman has brought,” said the Angel. “What are you bringing? Yes, I know. You have produced nothing, not even made a brick: if you could only go back again and bring back at least so much as that! It wouldn’t have been much of a one if you had made it. Still, if made with a good intent, it would always have been Something. But you cannot go back, and I can do nothing for you.”

Then the poor soul, the woman from the house on the dike, pleaded for him: “It was his brother who made and gave me all the bricks and bits I built my poor little house with. That was a great thing for a poor body like me. Now can’t all them bits and pieces count as one brick for him? That ’ud be an act of mercy, and he wants one now, and this is the place of mercy.”

“Your brother, the one whom you called the least of you,” said the Angel, “he whose calling with all its honesty seemed lowest of all to you, he is now giving you his heavenly mite. You shall not be turned away, you shall be permitted to stand out here and think over your life on earth, and try somehow to raise it up. But you shall not come in till you have performed one good deed of repentance, which for you will indeed be something.”

“I could have expressed that better,” thought the critic, but he did not say it aloud, and that was something to begin with.

[ 1858 ]

The Loveliest Rose in the World

—

There lived once a Queen, who possessed a garden in which one could find at all seasons of the year the choicest flowers from all parts of the globe. But roses were the favourite flowers of this Queen, and therefore she had all possible varieties of them, from the common briar with its fragrant leaves to the finest Provence rose; they grew along the walls of the castle, wound themselves round the pillars and window-frames, climbed up into the passages, and covered the ceilings of the halls; there one could see roses of every fragrance, shape, and colour.

But sorrow and mourning dwelt in the castle; the Queen lay on the sick-bed, and the physicians declared that she must die.

“There is after all one thing that would save her,” said the wisest of them. “If you brought the loveliest rose in the world, the one that is the expression of the greatest and purest love, and showed it to her, before her eyes lose their power, she will not die.”

Then people came from everywhere and brought with them the finest roses that grew in their gardens; but nobody had the right one; the rose that could save her, had to be fetched out of the garden of love; but which of the many roses there was the one that expressed the highest and purest love?

The poets sang of the loveliest rose in the world; every one of them described another as possessing this quality. A message was sent to every loving heart of every class, age, and station in life in the whole country to ask for this wonderful rose.

“Nobody has yet named the flower,” said the wise physician; “nobody has pointed out the place where it is thriving in its marvellous splendour. It is not a rose from the coffins of Romeo and Juliet, nor from the grave of Walburg, although these roses will live forever in song; it is not a rose that sprang forth from the breast of Winkelried pierced by lances, from the sacred blood running out of the breast of the hero dying for his own country, although no death can be sweeter, no rose more red than the blood that flows for such a sacred cause. Nor is it the wonderful, magic flower of knowledge, to the growing of which many a man devotes many days and sleepless nights of his young life in zealous studies.”

“I know where it grows,” said a happy mother, coming with her tender child to the queen’s bed. “I know where one can find the loveliest rose in the world. The rose, which is the expression of the highest and purest love, grows on the rosy cheeks of my sweet child, when refreshed by sleep he opens his eyes and lovingly smiles at me.”

“This is a lovely rose, but there is still one much lovelier,” said the wise man.

“Indeed,” said one of the women, “I have seen one much more beautiful, I am sure no rose more sacred can bloom anywhere; but it was pale, as pale as the petals of the tea-rose. I saw it on the Queen’s cheeks; she had taken off her royal crown, and in the long sorrowful night she carried her sick child about, crying and kissing it, and praying to God for its life, as only a mother can pray in her anguish.”

“Sacred and wonderful is this white rose of mourning in its power, but it is not the right one.”

“No,” said the pious old bishop, “I have seen the loveliest rose before the table of our Lord. I saw it shining like an angel’s face. The young maidens came to the Lord’s table to renew the vow made at their baptism, and on their fresh cheeks were pale and red roses; one was among them who looked up to God with all the purity and love of her soul; I think her face then had the expression of the purest and highest love.”

“May God bless her,” said the wise man, “but nobody has yet named the loveliest rose in the world.”

Just then a child came into the room—he was the Queen’s little son; his eyes were full of tears, and tears glittered on his cheeks; he carried a large book bound in velvet with silver clasps, which was open.

“Mother, dear,” cried the boy, “Oh, listen to what I have read!” He sat down near the bedside, and began to read in the book of Him who gave his life on the cross to save mankind, not only those alive but also those yet unborn.

“There is no greater love than this.”

The Queen’s cheeks coloured and her eyes were beaming, for she saw before her eyes the loveliest rose rising from the leaves of the book, the rose which grew out of the Saviour’s blood at the foot of the cross.

“I see it,” she said; “he who beholds this rose, the loveliest in the world, will never die.”

[ 1852 ]

The Last Pearl

—

We are in a house where all is riches and happiness. The master and mistress, the servants, and even the friends of the family—all feel happy and full of joy, for on this day a son and heir had been born, and mother and child were both doing excellently.

The burning lamp in the bedroom had been shaded, and before the windows heavy silken curtains of costly materials had been drawn, the carpet was as thick and soft as moss. Everything invited to slumber and was charmingly devised for repose. And so thought the nurse, for she slept; and here she might sleep, for everything was good and blessed. The Guardian Spirit of the house leaned against the head of the bed. Over the child at the mother’s breast there spread itself, as it were, a net of shining stars in endless number, and every star was a pearl of happiness. All the lucky stars of life had brought the newborn child their gifts; here sparkled health, wealth, happiness and love—in fact everything that man can wish for on earth. “Everything has been presented here,” said the Guardian Spirit.

“No, not everything,” said a voice near him, the voice of the child’s good Angel. “There is one fairy who has not yet brought her gift; but she will do so someday. Even if years shall have passed, she will bring it; the last pearl is still wanting.”

“Still wanting! There must be nothing wanting here, and if it should really be the case, let us go at once to seek the powerful fairy. Come, let us go!”

“She will come, she will come, someday, uninvited. Her pearl may not be wanting; it must be there to complete the wreath.”

“Where is she to be found? Where does she dwell? Tell me, I will get the pearl.”

“If you really wish it,” said the child’s guardian Angel, “I will lead you to her at once, wherever she may be. She has no fixed place of abode; at one time she rules in the emperor’s castle, at another you will find her in the peasant’s humble cot. She passes no one without leaving her trace; to all she brings her gift, be it a world or a toy. To this child also must she come. You think the time is equally long, but not equally profitable. Well, then we will fetch this pearl, the best pearl in all this wealth.”

Hand-in-hand they floated to the palace, where the fairy was now lingering.

It was a large house with gloomy corridors and empty rooms, and a strange stillness reigned therein; a whole row of windows stood open, so that the raw air might enter to its heart’s content, the long white curtains moving to and fro in the wind.

In the middle of the room stood an open coffin, and in this lay the body of a beautiful woman, still in the bloom of youth. Fresh roses were strewn upon her, leaving visible only the delicate folded hands and the noble face—glorified in death by the solemn look of inspiration and the return to its Maker.

Around the coffin stood the husband and the children, a whole troop. The youngest child was in its father’s arms, and all were taking a last farewell of their mother. The husband kissed her hand, which was now like a withered leaf, but which, till only a short time ago, had worked and striven in diligent love for them all. Tears of sorrow rolled down their cheeks and fell in heavy drops upon the floor; but not a word was spoken. The silence that reigned here covered a world of grief. With silent steps they left the room sobbing.

A candle is burning in the room, and the long red wick stands out far above the flame which flickers in the draught. Strangers come in and place the lid upon the coffin over the body; they drive the nails firmly in, and the blows of the hammer resound through the whole house, re-echoing in hearts that bleed.

“Whither are you leading me?” asked the Guardian of the household. “Here dwells no fairy, whose pearls might be counted amongst the best gifts of life.”

“She is here, at this sacred hour,” said the child’s Angel, pointing to a corner of the room. There, where in her lifetime the mother sat amid flowers and pictures; there, whence she, like a beneficent fairy of the house, had greeted husband, children and friends, whence, like a sunbeam, she had spread joy and cheerfulness, and been the centre and heart of all—there now sat a strange woman, clad in long garments. It was Sorrow, now mistress and mother in the place of her who was gone. A hot tear rolled down into her lap and formed itself into a pearl, glittering with all the colours of the rainbow. The angel seized it, and the pearl shone like a star of sevenfold radiance.

The Pearl of Sorrow—that is the Last Pearl, which must not be lacking! for it enhances the splendour and the value of all the others.

Do you see the shimmer of the rainbow, that rainbow that unites heaven and earth? It is indeed a bridge from here to the world beyond. We gaze upward through the earthly night to the stars, looking forward to perfection. Gaze upon it, the Pearl of Sorrow, for it conceals within it the wings that shall carry us hence.

[ 1854 ]

The Angel

—

“Whenever a good child dies, an angel from heaven comes down to earth and takes the dead child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies away over all the places the child has loved, and picks a large handful of flowers, which he carries up to the Almighty, that they may bloom in heaven more brightly than on earth. And the Father presses all the flowers to His heart; but He kisses the flower that pleases Him best, and the flower is then endowed with a voice, and can join in the great chorus of praise!”

This is what an Angel said, as he carried a dead child up to heaven, and the Child listened as if in a dream. They passed over the places where the little Child had played, and came through gardens with beautiful flowers.

“Which of these shall we take with us to plant in heaven?” asked the Angel.

Close by grew a slender, beautiful, rose-bush, but some wicked hand had broken the stem, and the half-opened rosebuds hung faded and withered on the trailing branches.

“The poor rose-bush!” said the Child. “Take it, so that it may bloom up yonder.”

And the Angel took it, and kissed the Child, and the little one half opened his eyes. They plucked some of the rich flowers, but also took with them the wild pansy and the despised dandelion.

“Now we have flowers enough,” said the Child.

And the Angel nodded, but he did not yet fly upward to heaven. It was night, and quite still in the great town. Here they remained, and the angel hovered over a small, narrow street, in which lay a large heap of straw, ashes, and sweepings from the houses of people who had moved. There lay fragments of plates, pieces of plaster, rags, old hats, and other rubbish not pleasant to see. Amidst all this confusion, the angel pointed to the pieces of a broken flower-pot, and to a lump of earth which had fallen out of it. The earth had been kept from falling to pieces by the roots of a withered field-flower, which had been thrown amongst the rubbish.

“We will take that with us,” said the Angel. “I will tell you why, as we fly along.

“Down in that narrow lane, in a low cellar, lived a poor sick boy; from his childhood he had been bedridden. When he was at his best he could go up and down the room a few times, leaning on crutches; that was the utmost he could do. For a few days in summer the sunbeams would penetrate for a few hours to the floor of the cellar. In this spot the poor sick boy would sit warming himself in the sunshine, and watching the red blood through his delicate fingers as he held them before his face. Then he would say he had ‘been out.’ He knew nothing of the wood with its beautiful spring green, till a neighbour’s son brought him a green bough from a beech tree; he held that up over his head, and dreamed he was in the beech wood, where the sun shone and the birds sang. One spring day the neighbour’s boy brought him some field flowers, and among them was, by chance, one which had kept its root, and so it was planted in a flower-pot, and placed on the windowsill close to the bed. The flower had been planted by a fortunate hand; and it grew, threw out new shoots, and bore flowers every year. It became a splendid flower garden to the sickly boy—his little treasure here on earth. He watered it, and tended it, and took care that it had the benefit of every ray of sunlight, down to the latest that struggled in through the narrow window; and the flower itself was woven into his dreams, for it grew for him and gladdened his eyes, and spread its fragrance about him; and toward it he turned in death, when the Father called him. He has now been with the Almighty for a year; for a year the flower has stood forgotten in the window, and is withered; and thus, at the removal, it has been thrown out into the dust of the street. And this is the poor flower which we have taken into our nosegay; for this flower has given more joy than the richest in a queen’s garden.”

“But how do you know all this?” asked the Child.

“I know it,” said the Angel, “for I myself was that boy who walked on crutches. I know my own flower well.”

Then the Child opened his eyes and looked into the glorious, happy face of the Angel; and at that moment they entered the regions where there is peace and joy. And the Father pressed the dead Child to His bosom, and then it received wings like the Angel, and flew hand in hand with him. And the Almighty kissed the dry withered field flower, and it received a voice and sang with all the angels hovering around—some near, and some in wider circles, farther and farther away into the infinite, but all equally happy. And they all sang—little and great, the good, happy Child, and the poor field flower that once lay withered and cast away on a heap of rubbish in a narrow dark lane.

[ 1844 ]

A Vision of the Last Day

—

Of all the days of our life the greatest and most solemn is the day on which we die. Hast thou ever tried to realize that most sure, most portentous hour, the last hour we shall spend on earth?

There was a certain man, an upholder of truth and justice, a Christian man and orthodox, so the world esteemed him. And, in sooth, it may be that some good thing was found in him, since in sleep, amid the visions of the night, it pleased the Father of spirits to reveal him to himself, making manifest to him what he was in truth, namely, one of those who trust in themselves that they are righteous and despise others.

He went to rest, secure that his accounts were right with all men, that he had paid his dues and wrought good works that day; of the secret pride of his heart, of the harsh words that had passed his lips, he took no account at all. And so he slept, and in his sleep Death stood by his bedside, a glorious Angel, strong, spotless, beautiful, but unlike every other angel, stern, unsmiling, pitiless of aspect.

“Thine hour is come, and thou must follow me!” spake Death. And Death’s cold finger touched the man’s feet, whereupon they became like ice, then touched his forehead, then his heart. And the chain that bound the immortal soul to clay was riven asunder, and the soul was free to follow the Angel of Death.

But during those brief seconds, while yet that awful touch thrilled through feet, and head, and heart, there passed over the dying man, as in great, heaving ocean-waves, the recollection of all that he had wrought and felt in his whole life; just as one shuddering glance into a whirlpool suffices to reveal in thought rapid as lightning, the entire unfathomable depth; just as in one momentary glance at the starry heavens we can conceive the infinite multitude of that glorious host of unknown orbs.

In such a retrospect, the terrified sinner shrinks back into himself, and finding there no stay by which to cling, must feel shrinking into infinite nothingness; while the devout soul raises its thoughts to the Almighty, yielding itself up to Him in childlike trust, and praying, “Thy will be done in me!”

But this man had not the childlike mind, neither did he tremble like the sinner; his thoughts were still the self-praising thoughts in which he had fallen asleep. His path, he believed, must lead straight heavenward, and Mercy, the promised Mercy, would open to him the gates.

And, in his dream, the Soul followed the Angel of Death, though not without first casting one wistful glance at the couch where lay, in its white shroud, the lifeless image of clay, still, as it were, bearing the impress of the soul’s own individuality. And now they hovered through the air, now glided along the ground. Was it a vast, decorated hall they were passing through, or a forest? It seemed hard to tell; Nature, it appeared, was formally set out for show, as in the artificial old French gardens, and amid its strange, carefully arranged scenes, passed and re-passed troops of men and women, all clad as for a masquerade.

“Such is human life!” said the Angel of Death.

The figures seemed more or less disguised; those who swept by in the glories of velvet and gold were not all among the noblest or most dignified-looking, neither were all those who wore the garb of poverty insignificant or vulgar. It was a strange masquerade! But it was the most strange to see how one and all carefully concealed under their clothing something they would not have others perceive, but in vain, for each was bent upon discovering his neighbour’s secret, and they tore and snatched at one another till, now here, now there, some part of an animal was revealed. In one was found the grinning head of an ape, in another the cloven fool of a goat, in a third the poison-fang of a snake, in a fourth the clammy fin of a fish.

All had in them some token of the animal—the animal which is fast rooted in human nature, and which here was seen struggling to burst forth. And, however closely a man might hold his garment over it, the others would never rest till they had rent the hiding veil, and all kept crying out, “Look here! look now! here he is! there she is!”—and everyone mockingly laid bare his fellow’s shame.

“And what was the animal in me?” inquired the disembodied Soul; and the Angel of Death pointed to a haughty Form, around whose head shone a bright, wide-spread glory of rainbow-coloured rays, but at whose heart might be seen lurking, half hidden, the feet of the peacock; the glory was, in fact, merely the peacock’s gaudy tail.

And as they passed on, large, foul-looking birds shrieked out from the boughs of the trees; with clear, intelligible, though harsh, human voices they shrieked, “Thou that walkest with Death, dost remember me?” All the evil thoughts and desires that had nestled within him from his birth until his death now called after him, “Rememberest thou me?”

And the Soul shuddered, recognizing the voices; it could not deny knowledge of the evil thoughts and desires that were now rising up in witness against it.

“In our flesh, in our evil nature, dwelleth no good thing,” cried the Soul; “but, at least, thoughts never with me ripened into actions; the world has not seen the evil fruit.” And the Soul hurried on to get free from the accusing voices; but the great black fowls swept in circles round, and screamed out their scandalous words louder and louder, as though they would be heard all over the world. And the Soul fled from them like the hunted stag, and at every step stumbled against sharp flint stones that lay in the path. “How came these sharp stones here? They look like mere withered leaves lying on the ground.”

“Every stone is for some incautious word thou hast spoken, which lay as a stumbling-block in thy neighbour’s path, which wounded thy neighbour’s heart far more sorely and deeply than these sharp flints now wound thy feet.”

“Alas! I never once thought of that,” sighed the Sou!.

And those words of the gospel rang through the air, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,”

“We have all sinned,” said the Soul, recovering from its momentary self-abasement. “I have kept the Law and the Gospel, I have done what I could, I am not as others are.”

And in his dream, this man now stood at the gates of heaven, and the Angel who guarded the entrance inquired, “Who art thou? Tell me thy faith, and show it to me in thy works.”

“I have faithfully kept the Commandments, I have humbled myself in the eyes of the world, I have preserved myself free from the pollution of intercourse with sinners, I have hated and persecuted evil, and those who practice it, and I would do so still, yea, with fire and sword, had I the power.”

“Then thou art one of Mohammed’s followers?” said the Angel.

“I? a Mohammedan?—never!”

“‘He who strikes with the sword shall perish by the sword,’ thus spake the Son; His religion thou knowest not. It may be that thou art one of the children of Israel, whose maxim is, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’—art thou such?”

“I am a Christian.”

“I see it not in thy faith or in thine actions. The law of Christ is the law of forgiveness, love, and mercy.”

“Mercy!” The gracious echo of that sweet word thrilled through infinite space, the gates of heaven opened, and the Soul hovered toward the realms of endless bliss.

But the flood of light that streamed forth from within was so dazzlingly bright, so transcendently white and pure, that the Soul shrank back as from a two-edged sword, and the hymns and harp-tones of Angels mingled in such exquisite celestial harmony as the earthly mind has not power either to conceive or to endure. And the Soul trembled and bowed itself deeper and deeper, and the heavenly light penetrated it through and through, and it felt to the quick, as it had never truly felt before, the burden of its own pride, cruelty, and sin.

“What I have done of good in the world, that did I because I could not otherwise, but the evil that I did—that was of myself!”

This confession was wrung from him; more and more the man felt dazzled and overpowered by the pure light of heaven; he seemed falling into a measureless abyss, the abyss of his own nakedness and unworthiness. Shrunk into himself, humbled, cast out, unripe for the kingdom of heaven, shuddering at the thought of the just and holy God—hardly dared he to gasp out, “Mercy!”

And the face of the Angel at the portal was turned toward him in softening pity. “Mercy is for them who implore it, not claim it; there is Mercy also for thee. Turn thee, child of man, turn thee back the way thou camest to thy clayey tabernacle; in pity is it given thee to dwell in dust yet a little while. Be no longer righteous in thine own eyes, copy Him who with patience endured the contradiction of sinners, strive and pray that thou mayest become poor in spirit, and so mayest thou yet inherit the Kingdom.”

“Holy, loving, glorious forever shalt thou be, O, erring human spirit!”—thus rang the chorus of Angels. And again overpowered by those transcendent melodies, dazzled and blinded by that excess of purest light, the Soul again shrank back into itself. It seemed to be falling an infinite depth; the celestial music grew fainter and fainter, till common earthly sights and sounds dispelled the vision. The rays of the early morning sun falling full on his face, the cheerful crow of the vigilant cock, called the sleeper up to pray.

Inexpressibly humbled, yet thankful, he arose and knelt beside his bed. “Thou, who hast shown me to myself, help me now, that I may not only do justly, but love mercy, and walk humbly with my God. Thou, who hast convicted me of sin, now purify me, strengthen me, that, though ever unworthy of Thy presence, I may yet, supported by Thy Love, dare to ascend into Thine everlasting light!’

The Vision was his; let the lesson, the prayer, also be ours.

[ 1852 ]

A Story

—

In the garden, all the apple trees were in blossom. They had hastened to bring forth flowers before they got green leaves, and in the yard all the ducklings walked up and down, and the cat too: it basked in the sun and licked the sunshine from its own paws. And when one looked at the fields, how beautifully the corn stood and how green it shone, without comparison! and there was a twittering and a fluttering of all the little birds, as if the day were a great festival; and so it was, for it was Sunday. All the bells were ringing, and all the people went to church, looking cheerful, and dressed in their best clothes. There was a look of cheerfulness on everything. The day was so warm and beautiful that one might well have said: “God’s kindness to us men is beyond all limits.” But inside the church the pastor stood in the pulpit, and spoke very loudly and angrily. He said that all men were wicked, and God would punish them for their sins, and that the wicked, when they died, would be cast into hell, to burn for ever and ever. He spoke very excitedly, saying that their evil propensities would not be destroyed, nor would the fire be extinguished, and they should never find rest. That was terrible to hear, and he said it in such a tone of conviction; he described hell to them as a miserable hole where all the refuse of the world gathers. There was no air beside the hot burning sulphur flame, and there was no ground under their feet; they, the wicked ones, sank deeper and deeper, while eternal silence surrounded them! It was dreadful to hear all that, for the preacher spoke from his heart, and all the people in the church were terrified. Meanwhile, the birds sang merrily outside, and the sun was shining so beautifully warm, it seemed as though every little flower said: “God, Thy kindness towards us all is without limits.” Indeed, outside it was not at all like the pastor’s sermon.

The same evening, upon going to bed, the pastor noticed his wife sitting there quiet and pensive.

“What is the matter with you?” he asked her.

“Well, the matter with me is,” she said, “that I cannot collect my thoughts, and am unable to grasp the meaning of what you said today in church—that there are so many wicked people, and that they should burn eternally. Alas! eternally—how long! I am only a woman and a sinner before God, but I should not have the heart to let even the worst sinner burn for ever, and how could our Lord to do so, who is so infinitely good, and who knows how the wickedness comes from without and within? No, I am unable to imagine that, although you say so.”

•  •  •

It was autumn; the trees dropped their leaves, the earnest and severe pastor sat at the bedside of a dying person. A pious, faithful soul closed her eyes forever: she was the pastor’s wife.

…“If anyone shall find rest in the grave and mercy before our Lord you shall certainly do so,” said the pastor. He folded her hands and read a psalm over the dead woman.

She was buried; two large tears rolled over the cheeks of the earnest man, and in the parsonage it was empty and still, for its sun had set for ever. She had gone home.

It was night. A cold wind swept over the pastor’s head; he opened his eyes, and it seemed to him as if the moon was shining into his room. It was not so, however; there was a being standing before his bed, and looking like the ghost of his deceased wife. She fixed her eyes upon him with such a kind and sad expression, just as if she wished to say something to him. The pastor raised himself in bed and stretched his arms towards her, saying, “Not even you can find eternal rest! You suffer, you best and most pious woman?”

The dead woman nodded her head as if to say “Yes,” and put her hand on her breast.

“And can I not obtain rest in the grave for you?”

“Yes,” was the answer.

“And how?”

“Give me one hair—only one single hair—from the head of the sinner for whom the fire shall never be extinguished, of the sinner whom God will condemn to eternal punishment in hell.”

“Yes, one ought to be able to redeem you so easily, you pure, pious woman,” he said.

“Follow me,” said the dead woman. “It is thus granted to us. By my side you will be able to fly wherever your thoughts wish to go. Invisible to men, we shall penetrate into their most secret chambers; but with sure hand you must find out him who is destined to eternal torture, and before the cock crows he must be found!” As quickly as if carried by the winged thoughts they were in the great city, and from the walls the names of the deadly sins shone in flaming letters: pride, avarice, drunkenness, wantonness—in short, the whole seven-coloured bow of sin.

“Yes, therein, as I believed, as I knew it,” said the pastor, “are living those who are abandoned to the eternal fire.” And they were standing before the magnificently illuminated gate; the broad steps were adorned with carpets and flowers, and dance music was sounding through the festive halls. A footman dressed in silk and velvet stood with a large silver-mounted rod near the entrance.

“Our ball can compare favourably with the king’s,” he said, and turned with contempt towards the gazing crowd in the street. What he thought was sufficiently expressed in his features and movements: “Miserable beggars, who are looking in, you are nothing in comparison to me.”

“Pride,” said the dead woman; “do you see him?”

“The footman?” asked the pastor. “He is but a poor fool, and not doomed to be tortured eternally by fire!”

“Only a fool!” It sounded through the whole house of pride: they were all fools there.

Then they flew within the four naked walls of the miser. Lean as a skeleton, trembling with cold, and hunger, the old man was clinging with all his thoughts to his money. They saw him jump up feverishly from his miserable couch and take a loose stone out of the wall; there lay gold coins in an old stocking. They saw him anxiously feeling over an old ragged coat in which pieces of gold were sewn, and his clammy fingers trembled.

“He is ill! That is madness—a joyless madness—besieged by fear and dreadful dreams!”

They quickly went away and came before the beds of the criminals; these unfortunate people slept side by side, in long rows. Like a ferocious animal, one of them rose out of his sleep and uttered a horrible cry, and gave his comrade a violent dig in the ribs with his pointed elbow, and this one turned round in his sleep:

“Be quiet, monster—sleep! This happens every night!”

“Every night!” repeated the other. “Yes, every night he comes and tortures me! In my violence I have done this and that. I was born with an evil mind, which has brought me hither for the second time; but if I have done wrong I suffer punishment for it. One thing, however, I have not yet confessed. When I came out a little while ago, and passed by the yard of my former master, evil thoughts rose within me when I remembered this and that. I struck a match a little bit on the wall; probably it came a little too close to the thatched roof. All burned down—a great heat rose, such as sometimes overcomes me. I myself helped to rescue cattle and things, nothing alive burned, except a flight of pigeons, which flew into the fire, and the yard dog, of which I had not thought; one could hear him howl out of the fire, and this howling I still hear when I wish to sleep; and when I have fallen asleep, the great rough dog comes and places himself upon me, and howls, presses, and tortures me. Now listen to what I tell you! You can snore; you are snoring the whole night, and I hardly a quarter of an hour!” And the blood rose to the head of the excited criminal; he threw himself upon his comrade, and beat him with his clenched fist in the face.

“Wicked Matz has become mad again!” they said amongst themselves. The other criminals seized him, wrestled with him, and bent him double, so that his head rested between his knees, and they tied him, so tightly that the blood almost came out of his eyes and out of all his pores.

“You are killing the unfortunate man,” said the pastor, and as he stretched out his hand to protect him who already suffered too much, the scene changed. They flew through rich halls and wretched hovels; wantonness and envy, all the deadly sins, passed before them. An angel of justice read their crimes and their defence; the latter was not a brilliant one, but it was read before God, Who reads the heart, Who knows everything, the wickedness that comes from within and from without, Who is mercy and love personified. The pastor’s hand trembled; he dared not stretch it out, he did not venture to pull a hair out of the sinner’s head. And tears gushed from his eyes like a stream of mercy and love, the cooling waters of which extinguished the eternal fire of hell.

Just then the cock crowed.

“Father of all mercy, grant her the peace that I was unable to procure for her!”

“I have it now!” said the dead woman. “It was your hard words, your despair of mankind, your gloomy belief in God and His creation, which drove me to you. Learn to know mankind! Even in the wicked one lives a part of God—and this extinguishes and conquers the flame of hell!”

•  •  •

The pastor felt a kiss on his lips; a gleam of light surrounded him—God’s bright sun shone into the room, and his wife, alive, sweet and full of love, awoke him from a dream which God had sent him!

[ 1851 ]

The Child in the Grave

—

Sorrow was in the house, sorrow in every heart. The youngest child, a boy four years old, the joy and hope of his parents, had died. There still remained to them two daughters—good, charming girls—the elder of whom was just about to be confirmed; but the child one has lost is always the dearest, and in that case it was the youngest, and a son. It was a heavy trial. The sisters mourned as young hearts do, and were especially moved by their parents’ grief. The father was bowed down, but the mother was quite overwhelmed by her great sorrow. Day and night she had sat by the sick child, had nursed him, lifted and carried him; she had felt how great a part he was of herself. She could not grasp that the child was dead, that he was to be laid in the coffin and rest in the grave; she had thought God could not take the child from her, and when it really came to pass, and there was no longer any doubt, she said in her feverish pain:

“God did not know it; He has heartless servants here on earth, who act as they please, and who do not hear a mother’s prayers.”

In her grief she turned from Heaven, and there arose dark thoughts, thoughts of death, of everlasting death, that man became dust in the earth, and that all ended with that. But such thoughts afforded her no hold, nothing to which she could cling, and she sank into the bottomless abyss of despair.

In her saddest moments she could not even weep; she gave no thoughts to the young daughters whom she still had. Her husband’s tears fell upon her brow, but she did not look at him; her thoughts were with her dead child—her whole mind and being were alone intent in recalling every remembrance of the little one, every one of his innocent childish words.

The day of the funeral came. For nights before, the mother had not slept; but in the morning twilight of that day she slumbered a little, overpowered by weariness, and in the meantime the coffin was carried to a distant room, and there nailed down, so that she should not hear the sound of the hammer.

When she awoke and wanted to see her child, her husband said to her in tears:

“We have nailed down the coffin; it had to be done.”

“If God is hard to me, what can I expect from others?” she exclaimed, amidst tears and sobs.

The coffin was carried to the grave. The disconsolate mother sat with her daughters; she gazed at them and yet did not see them, for her thoughts were no longer busied with her domestic hearth. She gave herself up entirely to grief, and her mind was tossed restlessly to and fro, as a ship without a rudder or steersman is tossed about by the sea.

So passed the day of the funeral, and similar days of dull heavy pain followed. With tearful eyes and mournful glances the sorrowing daughters and the afflicted husband gazed upon her who was deaf to their words of consolation; and indeed what comfort could they offer her, when they themselves were so heavily bowed down?

It seemed as if she knew sleep no more; and yet that alone would now have been her best friend, have strengthened her body and brought peace to her soul. She was prevailed upon to seek her couch, and she lay there still like one sleeping. One night her husband listened, as he often did, to her breathing, and firmly believed that she had at last found peace and relief. He folded his hands in prayer, and soon fell into a deep sound sleep himself; he did not notice that his wife got up, threw her clothes around her, and crept silently out of the house to reach the place where her thoughts lingered day and night—the grave which held her child. She strode through the garden of the house, and across the fields where a path led to the churchyard. Nobody saw her on her walk, and she had seen no one—her eyes were fixed on one goal.

It was a glorious starlight night. The air was still mild, for it was the beginning of September.

She entered the churchyard and stood by the little grave, which looked like a great nosegay of fragrant flowers. She sat down and bowed her head low over the grave, as if she could have seen through the heavy clay the little child whose smile rose so vividly before her, the sweet expression of whose eyes, even on his bed of sickness, was never to be forgotten. How eloquent had been his look, when she bent down over him and took his little hand, which he himself was no longer able to lift! As she had sat by his bedside, so she now sat by his grave, except that here her tears had free course and fell upon the little mound.

“Do you wish to go down to your child?” said a voice quite close to her—a voice that sounded so clear and deep, it went straight to her heart. She looked up, and beside her stood a man wrapped in a black cloak with the hood drawn deep down over his head, but still she could see his face under it; it was stern but yet inspired confidence, and his eyes beamed with the brightness of youth.

“Yes, down to my child!” she repeated, and a despairing entreaty spoke out of her words.

“Have you the courage to follow me?” asked the form; “I am Death.”

She bowed her head in acquiescence. Then in a second it seemed as if the stars above shone with the radiance of the full moon, showing her the bright colours of the flowers on the grave, whilst the surface of the earth yielded gently and gradually like a waving cloth. She sank, and the form covered her with his black cloak; it was night, the night of death, and she sank deeper than the sexton’s spade ever penetrates, while the churchyard stood like a roof over her head.

The end of the cloak was drawn aside, and she stood in a great hall far extending and pleasing to the eye. Twilight reigned around. Suddenly her child appeared before her, and in a second was pressed to her heart, smiling at her and looking more beautiful than she had ever seen him do before. She uttered a cry which, however, remained inaudible.

The sweet strains of heavenly music came swelling alternately quite close at hand and then from afar; never had such angelic tones fallen on her ear. They came from beyond the thick curtain, dark as night, that separated the hall from the great land of eternity.

“My sweet darling mother,” she heard her child say. It was the clear, well-known voice, and kiss followed kiss in endless happiness, and the child pointed to the dark curtain.

“It is not so beautiful as that on earth; do you see, mother, do you see them all? Oh, that is happiness!”

But the mother saw nothing where the child pointed—nothing but the dark night. She looked with earthly eyes, and did not see like the child whom God had called to Him. She could hear, too, only the sound—the notes of the music—but the Word, the Word in which she was to believe, she heard not.

“I can fly now, mother, fly with all the other happy children into the presence of the Lord. I would so much like to go; but if you weep as you are weeping now I might be lost to you, and yet I would so much like to go. Will you not let me fly? And you will come to me there very soon, dear mother!”

“Oh, stay! stay!” cried the mother; “only a moment longer, only once more would I look at you, kiss you, and fold you in my arms.”

She kissed the child and pressed it to her heart. Then her name was called from above—called in plaintive tones. “Oh, what can this mean?”

“Do you hear?” said the child; “it is father who is calling you.”

And again, in a few moments, were heard deep sobs as of weeping children.

“They are my sisters,” said the child. “Mother, you surely have not forgotten them?”

And she remembered those she had left behind. Terror seized her; she looked out into space, and forms were continually flitting past. She thought she recognised some of them as they flitted through the Hall of Death towards the dark curtain, where they vanished. Perhaps her husband and daughters would also come flitting by. No, their sighs and lamentations were still heard from above—she had almost forgotten them for the sake of the dead.

“Mother, now the bells of heaven are ringing,” said the child. “Mother, now the sun is rising.”

An overpowering light streamed in upon her. The child had vanished, and she was borne upwards. It became cold all around her; and, lifting her head, she saw that she was lying in the churchyard, on the grave of her child. But in this dream God had become a stay for her feet, a light to her spirit; she fell on her knees and prayed.

“O Lord, my God, forgive me for having wished to keep back an eternal soul from its flight, and for having forgotten my duties towards the living whom Thou hast given to me.”

At these words it seemed as if her heart found relief. The sun burst forth, a little bird sang overhead, and the church bells rang for early service. All seemed holy around her—chastened like her heart. She acknowledged her God, she acknowledged her duties, and eagerly she hastened home. She bent over her husband, who was still sleeping; her warm tender kiss awoke him, and heartfelt words of affection flowed from the lips of both. She was strong and gentle as a wife can be, and from her came those words of comfort, “God’s will is always best.”

“Whence did this strength and feeling of consolation come to you so suddenly?” asked her husband.

And as she kissed him and kissed her children she said: “They came to me from God, through the child in the grave.”

[ 1859 ]

The Jewish Girl

—

In a charity school, among other children, sat also a little Jewish girl. She was a good intelligent child, the quickest in the school; but she had to be excluded from one of the subjects taught in that school—that is to say she was not allowed to take part in religious instruction, for it was a Christian school.

The little girl was allowed in the meantime to open her geography book, or to work out some calculation for the following day, but that was soon done, and when she had got through her geography lesson, the book, it is true, remained open before her, but she no longer read it; she listened attentively to the words of the Christian master, who soon perceived that she was more attentive than any of the other children.

“Read your book, Sarah,” said the master, reproving her gently; but her black radiant eyes remained fixed upon him, and when once he addressed a question to her, she knew more about the subject than any of the other children. She had heard, understood, and pondered his words in her heart.

Her father, a poor honest man, had brought his daughter to the school on the condition that she was not to be instructed in the Christian religion. But as it would perhaps have caused trouble, or made the other children discontented, if they had sent her out of the room during this lesson, she remained there; but now it was evident this could not go on. The master went to her father, and explained to him that either he would have to take his daughter away from the school, or he must not be surprised if Sarah became a Christian. “I can no longer be an idle spectator of the child’s beaming eyes, and of her devoutness and longing for the Gospel,” said the teacher.

The father burst into tears. “I know but little of the law of my fathers,” he cried, “but Sarah’s mother was firm in the faith, a daughter of Israel, and I have promised her on her deathbed that our child should never be baptised. I must keep my vow; it is to me like a covenant with God!”

And so the little Jewish girl left the Christian school.

•  •  •

Years had passed. In one of the smallest provincial towns there lived, as servant in a humble household, a poor girl of Mosaic creed. Her hair was as black as ebony, her eyes as dark as night, and yet full of that brightness and light so peculiar to the daughters of the East. It was Sarah. The expression in the face of the grown-up girl was still the same as that of the child, when sitting on the school-bench, and listening attentively to the words of the Christian teacher.

Every Sunday the sound of the organ and the singing of the congregation sounded across the street into the house where Sarah was industriously and conscientiously at work. “Thou shalt keep the sabbath holy!” said the voice of the law in her heart; but her sabbath was a working day with the Christians, and this was a great trouble to her. And then as the thought arose in her mind, “Does God reckon by days and hours?” her conscience felt satisfied on this question, and she found it a comfort that on the Christian Sabbath she could have an hour for her own prayers undisturbed. When the sound of the organ and the singing entered the kitchen where she was at work, even this place became a quiet and consecrated spot. Then she read in the Old Testament, the treasure and comfort of her people; but she read only this, for she faithfully remembered what her father and her teacher had told her when she left school, about the vow which her father had made to her dying mother that she should never be baptised, nor deny the faith of her fathers. The New Testament was to remain a closed book for her, and yet she knew a great deal of it, and the Gospel resounded in her, with the recollections of her childhood.

One evening she sat in a corner of the room; her master was reading aloud, and she could listen to him, because it was not the Gospel, but an old story-book which he read. The book told about an Hungarian knight taken prisoner by a Turkish pasha, who had him yoked with his oxen to the plough, and driven with lashes of the whip, ill-treated him beyond measure, and almost let him die of thirst. The knight’s faithful wife at home sold her jewels, and mortgaged her castle and land; his friends collected large sums; the ransom demanded for his release was almost more than they could pay, but at last it was collected, and the knight rescued from servitude and shame. Sick and suffering, he returned to his home.

But soon there was a fresh appeal to fight against enemies of Christendom. The sick man heard the call, and he could no longer rest and remain at home. They had to lift him on his war-horse; his cheeks coloured, his strength seemed to return and he went forth to battle and to victory.

And the very same pasha, who had him yoked before the plough, now became his prisoner, and was taken to his dungeon. But hardly an hour had passed before the knight stood before the captured pasha, and asked him: “What do you think now awaits you?”

“I know well,” replied the Turk; “retaliation!”

“Yes; the retaliation of the Christians,” replied the knight. “Christ’s doctrine teaches us to forgive our enemies, and to love our neighbour, for God is love. Go in peace; return to your home; I give you back to your beloved ones. But be in future mild and humane towards those who suffer!”

Then the prisoner burst into tears: “How could I believe such kindness possible! Shame and torture seemed to wait for me, seemed so certain—I took poison which I secretly carried about me, and I shall succumb to its effects in a few hours. I must die; it is impossible to save me! But before I die, teach me the doctrine which gives room to such immeasurable love; it is grand and divine! Grant me that I may die in this doctrine—as a Christian!” And his request was granted to him.

Such was the legend which the master read from the old story-+book. All those present listened with great attention; but she who sat still in the corner—Sarah, the Jewish girl—felt her heart inspired; large tears came into her radiant black eyes, she sat there with the same feeling of piety with which she had sat in the school, she felt the sublimeness of the Gospel, and tears rolled over her cheeks.

But the last words of her dying mother came before her, “Let not my child become a Christian,” sounded in her heart with the words of the law, “Honour thy father and thy mother.” “I am not received into the community of the Christians,” she said to herself; “they mock me as a Jewish girl; the neighbour’s boys did so only last Sunday, when I stopped before the church door and looked in, when the altar candles were burning and the congregation singing! Yes, ever since I was at school I have felt the power of Christianity, a power like a sunbeam which shines into my heart, however much I close my eyes! But I will not grieve you in your grave, mother; I will not break my father’s vow, I will not read the Bible of the Christians! Have I not the God of my fathers? To Him I will remain faithful!”

•  •  •

Years passed by once more. Her master died. The widow came into difficult circumstances. The maid was to be dismissed. But Sarah did not leave the house—she became the support in need, and kept the home together; she worked till late at night, and gained the daily bread through the industry of her hands, for there was no relation to assist the family, and the widow became weaker from day to day and was tied to a sick-bed for months. Sarah worked and sat also, nursing and watching by the bedside of the sick woman. She was gentle and good, an angel of blessing to the poverty-stricken household.

“There on the table lies the Bible,” said the sick woman to Sarah. “Read me a little from it; the night seems to me so long, so long—and I am thirsting for the word of God!”

And Sarah bowed her head. She took the book, folded her hands round the Bible of the Christians, opened it and read to the sick woman; tears often came into her eyes, but they were radiant and beaming; and it became light in her heart. “Mother,” she whispered, “your child must not receive the baptism of Christians, not be received into their community. You have wished it, and I will honour your wish—we are one on this point here below; but beyond this earth there is a higher union in God; He leads and guides us beyond death! He descends to earth, and when He has let it suffer thirst, He showers fertility over it. I understand it! I do not know myself how I learned to understand it! But it is through Him, through Christ!”

She trembled all over when she pronounced the holy name, and a baptism as of fiery flames overcame her and overwhelmed her body; she struggled convulsively; her limbs gave way, and she sank, fainting, weaker than the sick woman whom she nursed.

“Poor Sarah!” said the people, “she is exhausted from work and night watching!”

She was carried into the hospital of the poor. There she died, and from there she was borne to the grave, but not to the churchyard of the Christians, there was no place for a Jewish girl. Outside, near the wall, they dug a grave for her.

God’s sun, which shines over the graves of the Christians, also throws his rays over the Jewish girl’s grave outside the wall, and when the psalms sound over the churchyard, they also pass over her solitary resting-place, and the call to the resurrection also appeals to her who who sleeps there, in the name of Christ, our Lord, who spake to His disciples:

“John baptised you with water, but I will baptise you with the Holy Ghost!”

[ 1856 ]

Anne Lisbeth

—

Anne Lisbeth had bright eyes, white teeth, and a complexion like lilies and roses; she was young, gay, pleasant to look on, light-footed, light-minded. What would come of this? Sorrow and shame would have come, had all been known, but all was not known.

Anne Lisbeth went into service at a grand castle: she was nurse to the son of a count, a child beautiful as an angel, beloved like a prince. Clad in silk and velvet she sat in a pleasant chamber, her nurse-child in her lap, and she loved her nurse-child dearly. But her own child—where was he?

Of a verity, he was not beautiful, nor a credit to her anyway, and he was put out to nurse in the grave-digger’s cottage. There, the goodwife’s temper boiled over oftener than her pot; sometimes no one was at home all day, the child cried, but what matter? he cried himself to sleep, and in sleep one feels neither hunger nor thirst. Ah, yes; sleep is a capital invention.

“Ill weeds grow apace,” says the proverb, and Anne Lisbeth’s boy shot up fast. He had taken root, as it were, in the grave-digger’s household, his mother had paid money for his rearing, and thought herself well rid of him. She was a fine lady in her way, and dressed handsomely whenever she went out, but she never came to see her boy, for it was a long walk to the grave-digger’s, and she had other things to do. The boy ought now to earn his bread, they thought, and so he was set to mind Mads Jensen’s red cow.

The watch-dog in the yard basks in the sunshine, barking at everyone who passes, and in rainy weather he crouches, warm and dry, inside his kennel. Anne Lisbeth’s boy sat among the graves in the sunshine, cutting sticks, or watching three strawberry plants in blossom: they would turn into berries, he hoped, and that was a pleasant thought, but the berries never ripened. Sunshine or shower, there he sat; he was often wet to the skin—what matter? the keen wind soon dried his coarse garment, and he was best off there; in the house he got only kicks and cuffs, was called “stupid and ugly”—he was used to that.

Two words suffice to describe the lot of Anne Lisbeth’s boy, only two words: never loved.

After a while he was fairly shoved off the land and sent lo sea in a miserable little vessel. Here he sat at the helm while the captain was drinking, a frost-bitten, shabby-looking boy, and so hungry! folk declared he was never satisfied—probably he never had the chance to be so.

It was late in the year, wet, raw, rough weather, the wind beat chillingly through the warmest clothing, especially at sea. On before the wind drove a miserable little vessel with one sail; there were two men on board, say rather one man and a half; it was the captain and his boy. There had been no light stronger than twilight all day; now it grew darker, and the cold was piercing. The skipper took a dram to warm himself; the bottle was old and the glass was a broken one with a bit of wood painted blue for a foot. The boy sat at the helm, which he held with his hard red hands—a cowed, shrinking form with wild hair. He was called the grave-digger’s boy, although he was entered in the church register as Anne Lisbeth’s son.

The wind drove on and so did the ship; the sail spread out, the wind had strong hold on it. Stop! what was that? something hard pushed against the ship, it bounded, it spun round—the boy at the helm screamed aloud, “Lord Jesus, help us!” The ship had struck against a great rock, and sank like an old shoe in a duck-pond; sank with all its crew, its one man and a half. No one saw it but the screaming seagulls overhead and the fishes beneath, and these hardly saw it aright, for they darted away in terror when the water rushed into the sinking vessel.

And so these two were drowned and forgotten, drowned in water scarcely a fathom deep. But the broken glass with its blue wooden foot did not sink, the wooden foot kept it afloat, and it drifted onto the shore. That old broken glass had been useful; it had been loved too, after a fashion, which Anne Lisbeth’s boy had never been. No matter, in the kingdom of heaven no soul will be able to say, “Never loved.”

•  •  •

Anne Lisbeth had lived many years in the town: she was called “Madame,” and felt very dignified in consequence; she remembered the old noble days when she drove in a carriage, and associated with countesses and baronesses. As to her nurse-child, he was the sweetest of little cherubs; he had loved her and she had loved him; he was her pride and her joy; by this time he must be fourteen years old, a clever, beautiful boy; she had not seen him since the days when she carried him in her arms; it was so long a journey to the castle.

“But I must find my way there someday,” said Anne Lisbeth; “I must see my sweet young count again. He must be longing for me, loving me still as he did when he would fling his angel-arms round my neck, and lisp ‘Ann Lis!’ as sweet as a violin. Yes, I must see him again!”

So she accomplished the long journey, partly on foot, partly in a farmer’s wagon. The count’s castle was as splendid, the count’s gardens as blooming as ever, but the servants were all strangers to her, not one of them knew Anne Lisbeth, or seemed to think her at all an important personage. “No matter,” she thought, “the countess will know me, and my own boy! how I long for him!”

She had to wait a long, long time. At last, just before the company went in to dinner, Anne Lisbeth was called in. The countess spoke very kindly to her, and promised that after dinner she should see her darling boy. So she had to wait for her second summons.

“Her darling boy” had grown into such a tall, straight, lanky fellow, but he still had his beautiful eyes and cherub mouth. He looked at her and said not a word. Certainly he had no recollection of her. He turned to go, when she seized his hand, and pressed it to her lips. “Oh, yes, that will do,” he muttered hastily, and went out of the room. The ungrateful young count, whom she had loved most on earth—had made the pride of her life!

And Anne Lisbeth left the castle and took her way homeward along the public road in deep sadness. That he should be so cold to her, have not a word or a thought for her—he whom she had once carried night and day, and had for years ever since carried in her heart! It was very bitter to her.

A great black raven flew down and settled on the road just in front of her, screaming hoarsely.

“Ah,” she exclaimed. “what bird of ill omen are you?”

She passed the grave-digger’s cottage, his wife was standing in the doorway and greeted her. “How well and stout you are looking; all goes right with you, I see!”

“Pretty well,” replied Anne Lisbeth.

“There has been a mischance here,” said the grave-diggers’ wife. “Lars, the skipper, and your boy, both are drowned. So there is an end of the matter. But I had hoped that the boy would have lived to help me at times with a penny or so; he has cost you nothing for a long while, you know, Anne Lisbeth.”

“Drowned, are they?” exclaimed Anne Lisbeth; and no more was said on the subject.

Anne Lisbeth was cut to the heart because the young count would not speak to her, and because the expensive journey she lad taken had brought her so little pleasure; still, not for the world would she betray her disappointment to the grave-digger’s wife, nor would she have it supposed that she was no longer respected at the count’s. Whilst she stood talking the raven again flew screaming over her head. “The black wretch!” she exclaimed, “he will end by giving me a fright today.”

She had with her some coffee-beans and some chicory; she felt tired, and it would be a kindness to the grave-digger’s wife to give these to her and take a cup with her. So the poor woman went to prepare the coffee, and Anne Lisbeth sat down on a chair and fell asleep.

Strangely enough, she dreamed of one whom she had never dreamed of before; she dreamed of her own child, who in that house had hungered and cried, and who now lay deep below the sea, in a spot only known by God. It seemed to her that she was still sitting in the hut, where the woman was busily preparing the coffee; she could smell the berries roasting.

As she sat there, a shining one, beautiful as the young count, stood in the doorway, and this apparition said to her:

“The world is passing away; hold fast to me, for you are my mother, after all; you have an angel in heaven. Hold me fast!” And he took hold of her, and in that very moment came a loud crash, as though the world were bursting asunder, and the angel rose in the air lifting her by her sleeve. She felt herself lifted from the ground. But then something heavy clung to her feet and dragged her down. Hundreds of women were clinging fast to her, screaming, “If you are to be saved, we must be saved too! Hold fast, hold fast!” And they all clung to her, and the weight was too heavy: the sleeve was torn, and Anne Lisbeth fell to the earth. In her terror she awoke. She nearly fell off the chair she sat on, her head was so dizzy. She could not understand her dream, she could not rightly remember it, but she felt it foreboded evil.

She drank her cup of coffee, took leave of the grave-digger’s wife, and walked on to the nearest village, where she was to meet the carrier, and drive home with him the same evening. But the carrier told her he could not start till the following evening; she might wait for him if she pleased. She thought over the expense of staying, considered the length of the way, and resolved to walk home; she could go by the shore, as by the road it would be two miles longer. It was bright weather and the moon was at the full, so Anne Lisbeth would walk home through the night.

The sun had set, the evening bells were still ringing the sun down [96] —but no—it was only the frogs croaking in the marshes. But soon they too were hushed, and all was silence, not a bird raised its voice, for all were at rest, and the owl, it seemed, was not at home. The stillness of death brooded over wood and shore, she could hear the sound of her own footsteps in the sand, not a wave rippled the sea, the deep waters were at peace; silence was everywhere, silence among the living and the dead.

Anne Lisbeth walked on, “thinking of nothing at all,” as the saying goes, or rather, her thoughts wandered, but thoughts had not gone far from her, for they are never absent, they only slumber.

And yet though she might not be conscious of them, her thoughts were busy within her as they always are with us all. They lie slumbering within us, both those thoughts that have already shaped themselves into action and those that have never yet stirred—there they lie, nevertheless, and someday will come forth. It is written, “The work of righteousness is peace;” and again it is written, “The wages of sin are death!” Anne Lisbeth had read and heard these words many a time; it might be said she had never reflected on them, but they lay deep down in her heart, nevertheless.

All vices and virtues lie dormant in our hearts—in yours and mine too. They lie there like tiny invisible seeds, and then a ray of sunshine, or a breath of evil comes from outside, or you turn the right-hand or left-hand corner, and the decision is made. The little seed is stirred, it swells and shoots up, and pours its sap into all your veins, directing your course either for good or evil.

Many tormenting thoughts may lie fermenting in the brain, and one does not notice them when one walks on with slumbering senses, but they are there all the same

Anne Lisbeth walked on in this way, her senses only half awake, but thoughts were fermenting in her heart.

From one Shrove Tuesday to another much may happen that weighs heavily upon the mind—it is the reckoning of a whole year, and in that time much is forgotten—sins of thought and deed against Heaven, our neighbours, and our own conscience. We don’t think of these things, and Anne Lisbeth did not think of any of her errors. She had committed no crime against the laws of the land; she was an honourable and respected person, and in a good position—that she knew.

She continued to walk along the beach; she saw something lying there. What was it? Only an old hat—a man’s hat. When might that have been washed overboard? She took a step nearer and stopped to look at the hat. Ha! what was lying yonder? She shuddered, yet it was nothing more than a heap of tangled seaweed flung across a stone, but it looked just like a corpse—only tangled seaweed, and yet it frightened her; and as she turned to walk on, much came into her mind that she had heard in her childhood, old superstitions about ghosts on the seashore, spectres of drowned people who were unburied, and whose bodies had been washed up on the lonely and desolated beach. The corpse, she had heard, could do no harm to anyone; but the spirit could pursue one, if alone, and attach itself to one, and demand to be carried to the churchyard, that it might rest in consecrated ground.

“Hold fast, hold fast!” the spectre would then cry; and while Anne Lisbeth murmured these words to herself, her whole dream suddenly came before her, when the mothers clung to her and had repeated these words, when the world fell together with a crash, and her sleeve was torn, and she slipped out of the grasp of her own child, who wanted to support her in that dreadful hour. Her child, her own child, whom she had never loved, now lay buried in the sea, and might rise up like a spectre from the waters and cry:

“Hold fast; carry me to consecrated ground.”

When she thought of this, fear gave speed to her feet, so that she walked on faster and faster, terror came upon her like a. cold clammy hand clutching her heart, and she almost fainted; and as she looked towards the sea, it grew darker and darker, a heavy mist was rising; it clung to bush and tree, distorting them into fantastic shapes; she turned round and looked up at the moon, which had risen behind her.

It looked like a pale rayless surface, and a heavy weight seemed to hang upon her limbs. “Hold fast,” she thought, and turned to look at the moon a second time. Its white face seemed quite close to her, the mist hanging like a white garment from its shoulders. “Hold, stop! carry me to consecrated earth!” sounded in her ears in strange, hollow tones. The sound did not come from the frogs or ravens; she saw no signs of any living creature. “A grave, dig me a grave!” was repeated quite distinctly. Yes, it was the ghost of her child, the child that lay in the deep waters, and whose spirit could have no rest until it was carried to the churchyard, until a grave had been dug for it in consecrated ground. She would go there at once, and dig; and as she went in the direction of the church the weight on her heart seemed to grow lighter, and even to vanish altogether, but when she turned to take the shorter way home it returned.

“Stop, stop!”—the words were quite clear, although something like the croak of a frog or wail of a bird—“A grave! dig me a grave!”

The mist was damp and chilly, her face and hands were cold and clammy with horror, a heavy weight again clung to her, and seemed to drag her down; and in her mind a great space opened, for thoughts that were new to her.

In the North the beech wood often buds in a single night, and appears in the morning sunlight in its full glory of young foliage; and thus in a single instant, the conscience can realise a sin that has been committed in a thought, word, or deed of our past life.

It springs up and reveals itself in a moment, when once our conscience is awakened, and God wakens it when we least expect it.

Then we find no excuse for ourselves—the deed is there, and bears witness against us; our thoughts seem to become words, and to sound far out into the world. We are horrified to find what we have carried in our hearts, that we have not overcome the evil that we have sown in thoughtlessness and pride. The heart hides within itself all virtues and vices, and they grow even in the shallowest ground.

Anne Lisbeth now experienced the thoughts we have clothed in words. She was quite overpowered, and sank down, creeping along the sand for some distance on her hands and knees. “A grave! dig me a gravel” sounded again in her ears; she would gladly have buried herself, if oblivion and forgetfulness of every deed could have been found in the tomb.

It was the first hour of her awakening, full of anguish and horror. Superstition alternately made her shudder with cold and burn with the heat of fever. Many things of which she had feared even to speak came into her mind. Silently as the clouds pass over the moon, a ghostly apparition flitted by her; she had heard of it before. Four snorting horses galloped by quite close to her, with the fire spurting from their eyes and nostrils; they dragged a red-hot coach, and the wicked proprietor sat inside.

He had been lord of the manor a hundred years ago; and every night at twelve o’clock he drove into his castle-yard and out again, so the legend ran. See! he was not pale, as dead men are said to be, but as black as coal; he nodded to Anne Lisbeth, and beckoned to her.

“Stop! stop! you may ride in a nobleman’s carriage once more, and forget your own child!”

She pulled herself together, and hastened to the churchyard; but the black crosses and black ravens danced before her eyes, and she could not distinguish the one from the other.

The ravens croaked, as the raven had done that she saw in the daytime, but now she understood what they said! “I am the raven-mother! I am the raven-mother!” each raven croaked; and Anne Lisbeth now understood that the name also applied to her, and she imagined she would be turned into a black bird, and have to cry as they cried if she did not dig the grave. [97]

She threw herself upon the hard ground, and dug with her hands in the earth, so that the blood ran from her fingers.

“A grave! dig me a grave!” still sounded in her ears; and she was afraid that the cock might crow and the first streak of dawn appear in the east before she had finished her task, and then all would be lost. And the cock crowed and the day dawned when the grave was only half dug. An icy hand passed over her head and face and down towards her heart.

“Only half a grave,” a voice wailed and fled away. Yes, it fled away over the sea; it was the ocean spectre—and Anne Lisbeth sank to the ground exhausted and overpowered, and her senses left her.

When she came to herself it was bright daylight, and two men were lifting her up; but she was not lying in the churchyard, but on the beach, where she had dug a deep hole in the sand, and cut her hand against a broken glass whose sharp stem was stuck in a little blue-painted block of wood. Anne Lisbeth was in a fever. Conscience had awakened old superstitions, which so deeply impressed her mind that she fancied that she had only half a soul, and that her child had taken the other half down into the sea. Never more could she cling to the mercy of Heaven until she had got back this other half which was now held fast in the deep water.

After a time Anne Lisbeth returned to her home, but she was never again the woman she had been; her thoughts were confused like a tangled skein, and there was only one clear thought in her mind, namely, that she must carry the sea-ghost to the churchyard and dig a grave for him, and thus win back her soul. Many a night she was missed from home, and was always found on the beach, waiting for the ghost. Thus a whole year passed, and one night she disappeared again and could not be found. The whole of the following day was spent searching for her.

Towards evening, when the clerk went into the church to toll the bell for evening service, he saw Anne Lisbeth standing by the altar. She had spent the whole day there, and her strength was almost exhausted, but her eyes shone brightly and her cheeks were flushed. The last rays of the setting sun lit up the altar and gleamed upon the shining clasps of the great Bible, which lay open at the words of the prophet Joel, “Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord.”

“That was just by chance,” people said; “many things happen by chance.”

Anne Lisbeth’s face, illumined by the sun, shone with peace and happiness. She said she was happy now, for she had conquered—she had won back her soul! Last night the sea-ghost, her own child, had appeared to her and said:

“Thou hast dug me only half a grave, but thou hast now for a year and a day buried me altogether in thy heart, and it is there a mother can best hide her child.” Then he gave her back her lost soul, and guided her into the church.

“Now I am in the house of God,” she said. “It is blessed to be here.”

By the time the sun had set, Anne Lisbeth’s soul had left this earth for the world where fear is unknown, where all sins are blotted out, even such as Anne Lisbeth’s.

[ 1859 ]

The Story of a Mother

—

A poor mother sat watching by the cradle of her little baby. She was very anxious and sorrowful; she dreaded that it was going to be taken from her. Its little eyes were closed, and it was deathly pale; it breathed very faintly, with now and then a long trembling breath like a sigh. The mother grew sadder and sadder as she looked at it.

There was a knock at the door, and a poor old man came in; he was wrapped in a big horse-cloth, which he needed to keep him warm, it was so very cold. Outside everything was covered with ice and snow, and a biting wind whistled round the house.

As the old man was shaking with cold, and the baby had dropped asleep for a moment, the mother got up and put some beer in a little mug on the stove to warm for him. The old man sat rocking the cradle, and the woman sat down on a chair close to him and watched the sick child, who drew its breath more deeply still, and feebly waved its little hand about.

“You think I shall keep him, don’t you?” said she. “The Lord won’t take him from me?”

And the old man, who was Death himself, nodded in such a curious way that she did not know whether it meant yes or no. The mother bent her head, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Her head was so heavy, she had not closed her eyes for three nights and days, and she fell asleep, but only for a moment, then she started up shivering with cold.

“What is it?” she said, looking about to every side. But the old man was gone, and her little child was gone; he had taken it with him. The old clock in the corner whirred and whirred, and the big lead weight ran right down to the ground with a bang, and then the clock stopped too.

But the poor mother rushed out of the house calling for her child.

Out there, all in the snow, sat a woman in long black clothes, and she said, “Death has been into your room. I saw him hurrying away with your child; he goes faster than the wind, and he never brings back what he takes away.”

“Only tell me which way he went,” said the mother. “Tell me the way, and I shall find him.”

“I know the way,” said the woman in the black clothes; “but before I tell you, you must sing me all the songs you used to sing to your baby; I like them; I have often heard them before. I am Night. I saw your tears while you sang.”

“I will sing them all—all,” said the mother; “but don’t stop me; let me go that I may find my little baby.”

But Night stood still and silent, and the mother wrung her hands, sang, and wept. There were many songs, but many, many more tears.

At last Night said, “Go to the right, into the dark pine wood. I saw Death take that road with your child.”

In the heart of the wood she came to a cross-road, and she did not know which way to go. There was a Blackthorn Bush just at the crossing with neither leaf nor flower on it, for it was the hard winter time, and icicles hung from the branches.

“Have you not seen Death pass by with my little child?”

“Yes,” said the Blackthorn Bush; “but I won’t tell you which way he went unless you will warm me at your heart. I am dying of cold; I shall soon be nothing but ice.”

And she pressed the Blackthorn Bush to her heart so tightly, to warm it, that the thorns ran into her flesh, and great drops of blood flowed; but fresh green leaves and flowers sprang out on the thorn bush that cold winter night, such was the warmth of a sad mother’s heart, and the Blackthorn Bush told her the way to go.

Then she came to a great Lake, on which there were neither ships nor boats. The Lake was not frozen hard enough to bear her, nor was it open or shallow enough for her to wade through it; but over it somehow she must go if she would find her child. She lay down to drink up the water, but that was of course impossible; the poor mother thought, however, that a miracle might happen.

“Now, this will never do!” said the Lake. “Let us see if we two can’t make a bargain! I collect pearls, and your eyes are the brightest I have seen; if you will cry them out for me, I will carry you over to the great hothouse where Death lives, and looks after his plants and flowers, every one of which is a human life.”

“Oh, what would I not give to reach my child!” said the weeping mother, and she wept more than ever, till her eyes dropped down to the bottom of the Lake and became two precious pearls. Then the Lake lifted her as if she had been in a swing, and she was borne in a moment from the shore where she stood to the other side. Here stood a curious house a mile wide; one could hardly tell whether it was a mountain covered with woods and hollows, or whether it was built up; but the poor mother could not see it, you know, for she had cried her eyes out.

“Where shall I find Death, who carried off my little child?” she said.

“He has not come back here yet,” said the old grey-haired Woman, whose business it was to tend Death’s big hothouse. “However did you get here, and who helped you?”

“Our Lord has helped me,” said she. “He is merciful, and so will you be. Where shall I find my child?”

“I don’t know,” said the old Woman, “and you can’t see. Many flowers and trees have withered in the night; Death will soon come and transplant them. You know that every human being has his or her tree of life, or flower, according as they are made; they look like other plants, but they have beating human hearts. A child’s heart can beat too. Walk about here, perhaps you will recognise your child’s; but what will you give me if I tell you what more you must do?”

“I have nothing to give,” said the mother sadly, “but I will go to the end of the world for you.”

“I’ve got nothing to do there,” said the old Woman; “but you can give me your long black hair; I’m sure you know yourself that it is beautiful, and I fancy it. I’ll give you my white hair in place of it, that will always be something.”

“Don’t you ask more than that?” said she; “I will give it to you gladly,” and she gave her her beautiful black hair, and received the old Woman’s white hair in exchange.

Then they went into Death’s big hothouse, where the flowers and trees grew curiously mixed up together. Here were delicate hyacinths under bell glasses, and there were great strong peonies; here were water plants, some quite fresh, others sickly with water snakes wound round them, and little black crayfish pinching their stems. Here were beautiful palm trees, oaks, and plane trees; there grew parsley and sweet scented thyme; every tree and every flower had its name. Each one was a human life, living still, one in China, one in Greenland, scattered round about the world. There were big trees in small pots, growing in a stunted way, ready to burst their pots; and there were also, in other places, little tiresome flowers in rich earth surrounded with moss, and covered and tended. But the sad mother bent over all the tiniest plants, and listened for the human heart beating in them. Among a million she knew her child’s at once.

“This is it!” she cried, stretching out her hands over a little blue crocus which hung feebly down to one side.

“Don’t touch the flower,” said the old Woman, “but place yourself here, so that when Death comes (for I expect him every minute) you may prevent him from pulling it up; threaten him that you will do the same to the other flowers, then he will be frightened. He has to answer to our Lord for them, not one may be pulled up without His leave.”

All at once an icy wind whistled through the place, and the blind mother felt that Death had come.

“How didst thou find thy way hither?” asked he. “How couldst thou get here before me?

“I am a mother,” she said.

Then Death stretched out his long hand towards the delicate little flower, but she clasped her hands tightly round his, in terror lest he should touch one of the leaves. Death breathed upon her hands; she felt that his breath was colder than the coldest wind, and her hands fell numbly away from his.

“You have no power against me, you see,” said Death.

“But our Lord has!” said she.

“I only do His will,” said Death. “I am his gardener! I take all His flowers and trees and plant them in the Garden of Paradise, in the Unknown Land; but how they grow, and what they do there, I dare not tell thee!”

“Give me back my child!” said the mother, with tears and prayers; suddenly she clutched with both hands two beautiful flowers growing close by, and called out to Death, “I will pull up all your flowers, for I am in despair!”

“Touch them not!” said Death. “Thou sayst that thou art unhappy, yet wouldst thou make some other mother equally unhappy!”

“Some other mother!” said the poor woman, letting go the flowers at once.

“Here hast thou thine eyes back again,” said Death; “I fished them up out of the lake, they shone so brightly; I did not know that they were thine. Take them back again, they are brighter than ever. Look down into the deep well close by, I will name the names of those flowers thou wast about to pluck, and thou shalt see their whole lives, and all that future thou wast about to destroy.”

And she looked down into the well; it was happiness to see how one of them became a blessing to the world, and to see how much joy and pleasure was unfolded around him. Then she saw the life of the other, and that life was all sorrow, sin, and misery. “Both lives are according to the will of God!” said Death. “Which is the flower of misery and which of blessedness?”

“That I may not tell thee,” said Death; “but I may tell thee that one of the flowers was thy own child’s; it was thy child’s fate thou sawest, thine own child’s future.”

Then the mother shrieked in terror. “Which was my child? tell me that! Save the wretched one! Save my child from all the misery! Rather carry it away! bear it into God’s kingdom! Forget my tears, forget my prayers, and all that I have said!”

“I do not understand thee!” said Death; “wilt thou have thy child back, or shall I take it whither thou knowest not!”

The mother wrung her hands, fell upon her knees, and prayed to Our Father, “Do not listen to me when I pray against thy will, which is best; do not listen, do not listen!” And she bent her head in humble submission.

Then Death carried her child into the Unknown Land.

[ 1848 ]

What The Moon Saw

A PICTURE BOOK WITHOUT PICTURES

—

INTRODUCTION

It is very extraordinary, but when my feelings are most fervent and at their best, my tongue and my hands alike seem tied. I cannot reproduce my impressions either in words or in painting, as I feel them burning within me. And yet I am an artist—my eye tells me so, and all who have seen my sketches and notes acknowledge the same.

I am a poor fellow, and I live in one of the narrowest streets; but light is not wanting to me, for I live high up, and I have a fine view over the roof. For the first few days when I came to live in the town, it seemed very cramped and lonely. Instead of green woods and hills, I had only chimney pots on my horizon. I had not a single friend, and there was not even the face of an acquaintance to greet me.

One evening I was standing sadly by the window. I opened it and looked out, and there—how pleased I was! I saw a face I knew, a round friendly face, my best friend at home. It was the Moon, the dear old Moon, unchanged, and looking exactly the same as she used to look, when she peeped at me there through the wallows in the marshes. I kissed my hand to her, and she shone straight into my room and promised to look in at me every evening she was out. This promise she has faithfully kept, and it is only a pity that she stays so short a time. Every time she comes, she tells me one thing or another which she has seen the night before.

“Now paint what I tell you!” said she, “and you will have a very fine picture-book.” I have done as she said for many evenings, and in my own way I could give a new rendering of the “Thousand and One Nights,” but that would be too many. Those I give here are not selected, but they come in the order in which I heard them. A highly gifted painter, a poet, or a musician might perhaps make more of them; what I have given here are only hasty sketches, with my own thoughts occasionally interspersed, for the Moon did not come every night, there were some evenings when she was hidden by the clouds.

FIRST EVENING

Last evening (to give the Moon’s own words), as I was gliding through the clear atmosphere of India, and reflecting myself in the Ganges, I tried to pierce the thick groves of plantain trees the leaves of which overlay each other as tightly as the horny plates on the back of the turtle. From out of the thicket came a Hindu maiden; she was as light as a gazelle, and as beautiful as Eve. There was such an airy grace about her, and yet such firmness of purpose in this daughter of India; I could read her intention in coming. The thorny creepers tore her sandals, but she stepped rapidly onwards. The deer coming up from the river where they had quenched their thirst, bounded shyly past her, for the girl held in her hand a burning lamp. I could see the blood coursing in her delicate ringers as she bent them round the flame to form a shelter for it. She approached the river and placed the lamp upon the face of the waters, and it floated away on the stream. The flame flickered and seemed as if it would go out, but still it burned, and the dark sparkling eyes of the girl followed it with a longing glance, from under their silken fringes. She knew that if the lamp burned as long as she could follow it with her eyes, her lover lived. But if it went out, he was dead. The lamp burned and flickered, and her heart burned and trembled. She sank upon her knees in prayer. By her side in the grass lay a venomous snake, but she heeded it not; she only thought of Brahma, and her bridegroom. “He lives!” she rejoiced, and from the hills came the echo, “He lives!

SECOND EVENING

It was yesterday, the Moon told me: I peeped down into a little court surrounded by houses; in it sat a hen with eleven chickens. A charming little girl was skipping about among them. The hen clucked and spread her wings in alarm over her brood. Then the little girl’s father came out and scolded her, and I slipped away without thinking any more about it. But tonight, only a few minutes ago, I looked into the same court. At first it was quite quiet, but then the same little girl came out. She crept softly along to the chicken-house, lifted the latch and slipped in beside the hen and chickens. They cackled and flapped their wings and the little girl ran after them. I saw it all quite plainly, for I peeped in by a hole in the wall. I was quite angry with the naughty child, and felt pleased when her father came and scolded her, more angrily than yesterday. He took her by the arm, and she bent back her head, showing her big blue eyes full of tears. “What are you doing here?” asked he. She cried and said, “I only wanted to get in to kiss the hen, and to ask her to forgive me for frightening her yesterday, but I was afraid to tell you.”

The father kissed the sweet innocent upon the forehead, and I kissed her on the eyes and lips.

THIRD EVENING

In the narrow street close by—it is so narrow that I can only let my beams glide down for a few minutes, but in those minutes I see enough to know what the people are who move about there—I saw a woman sixteen years ago; she was a child; away in the country she played in the old vicarage garden. The rose hedges were old and past flowering. They were running wild over the paths and sending up long shoots into the apple trees. Here and there grew one poor rose, not lovely as the queen of flowers should be, but the colour was there, and the fragrance. The parson’s little daughter seemed to me a far sweeter flower, sitting upon her footstool under the wild hedge, kissing the battered cheeks of her doll.

Ten years later I saw her again. I saw her in a brilliant ballroom; she was the lovely bride of a rich merchant. I was delighted with her happiness, and I often sought her in those quiet evenings. Alas! no one thought of my clear eye or my sharp glances. My rose was also sending out wild shoots like the roses in the vicarage garden. There are tragedies in everyday life too.

Tonight I saw the last act. There, in the narrow street, on a bed, she lay at death’s door. The wicked landlord, rough and cruel, her only protector, tore aside the coverlet. “Get up!” he said. “Your face is a sight. Dress yourself up, paint your face, and get some money, or I will turn you into the street. Get up at once!”

“Death is in my heart!” she said. “Oh, let me rest!” But he forced her to get up, and painted her cheeks, and put a wreath of roses in her hair. Then he seated her by the window, with the light close by, and left her. I gazed upon her as she sat motionless, with her hands in her lap. The window flew back, and one of the panes cracked, but she did not move. The curtain fluttered round her like a flame. She was dead.

The dead woman at the open window still preached a moral to me, my rose from the vicarage garden.

FOURTH EVENING

I went to a German play last night, said the Moon. It was in a little town; a stable had been turned into a theatre, that is to say, the stalls were left standing and furnished up to make boxes. All the woodwork was covered up with bright paper. A little iron chandelier hung from the low ceiling, and so that it might disappear into the roof, as in a big theatre at the sound of the prompter’s bell, an inverted tub was fixed above it. “Ring-a-ting” went the bell, and the little chandelier made a spring of about a foot, and then one knew that the play had begun. A young prince and his consort, who were travelling through the town, were present at the performance. The house was crammed; only the place under the chandelier was left like a little crater; not a soul sat there, for the candle-grease dripped down—Drop! drop!

I saw it all, for it was so warm that all the wickets had been opened. The lads and lasses outside were peeping in, notwithstanding that the police inside kept threatening them with their sticks. The noble pair sat in a couple of old armchairs close to the orchestra. The burgomaster and his wife usually occupied these, but on this occasion they were obliged to sit on the wooden benches, just as if they had been ordinary citizens. “There, you see there is rank above rank!” was the quiet remark of the goodwives; and this incident gave a special air of festivity to the entertainment. The chandelier gave its little hops; the mob pressed forward, and got a rap on the knuckle for their pains, and I—yes, the Moon saw the whole entertainment.

FIFTH EVENING

Yesterday, said the Moon, I looked down upon the life of Paris, and my glance penetrated to some of the apartments in the Louvre. An old grandmother, poorly clad, belonging to the lower classes, accompanied by some of the subordinate attendants entered the great empty throne-room. She wanted to see it, she must see it! It had cost her many small sacrifices and much persuasiveness before she had attained her wish. She folded her thin hands and looked about her as reverently as if she were in a church. “It was here,” she said, “here,” and she approached the throne with its rich embroidered velvet hangings. “There!” she said, “there!” and she fell upon her knees and kissed the purple carpet; I believe she wept.

“It was not this very velvet,” said the attendant, a smile playing round his mouth.

“But it was here!” said the woman, “it looked the same.”

“The same,” he answered, “yet not the same; the windows were smashed to atoms, the doors torn off, and there was blood upon the floors!”

“But still you may say that my grandson died upon the throne of France. Died!” repeated the old woman. I don’t think anything more was said; they left the room soon after. The twilight faded, and my light grew stronger upon the rich velvet on the throne of France. Who do you think the old woman was? I will tell you a story.

It was evening, on the most brilliant day of victory in the July revolution, when every house was a fortress, every window an embrasure. The populace stormed the Tuileries, even women and children fought among the combatants; they pressed through the apartments of the palace. A poor half-grown lad in rags fought bravely among the other insurgents; he fell fatally wounded by bayonet thrusts, and sank to the ground in the throne-room itself, and his bleeding form was laid upon the throne where his blood streamed over the imperial purple! What a picture that was! The noble room, the struggling groups, a torn banner upon the ground, the tricolour floating from the bayonets; and on the throne the poor dying boy with the pale transfigured face, his eyes turned towards heaven, while his limbs were already stiffening in death. His naked breast and torn clothing were half hidden by the purple velvet decked with the lilies of France. It had been prophesied at his cradle that “he should die on the throne of France.” The mother’s heart had dreamed of a new Napoleon. My beams have kissed the wreath of Immortelles on the lad’s grave, and this night they kissed the forehead of the old grandmother while she dreamed and saw the picture you may sketch here, “The poor boy upon the throne of France!”

SIXTH EVENING

I have been in Upsala, said the Moon. I looked down upon the great plain covered with coarse grass and the barren fields. I looked at myself in the waters of the Fyris river, while the steamers frightened the fishes in among the rushes. The clouds chased each other below me, and threw their shadows on to Odin’s, Thor’s, and Freya’s graves, as they are called. Names have been cut all over the mounds in the short turf. There is no monument here, where travellers can have their names carved, nor rock walls where they may be painted, so the visitors have had the turf cut away, and their names stand out in the bare earth. There is a perfect network of these spread all over the mounds. A form of immortality which only lasts till the fresh grass grows.

A man was standing there, a poet. He emptied the mead horn with its broad silver rim and whispered a name, telling the wind not to betray it; but I heard it and knew it. A count’s coronet sparkles over it, and therefore he did not speak it aloud. I smiled; a poet’s crown sparkles over his! Eleanora d’Este’s nobility gains lustre from Tasso’s name. I knew, too, where this Rose of Beauty blooms!

Having said this, the Moon was hidden by a cloud. May no clouds come between the poet and his rose!

SEVENTH EVENING

Along the shore stretches a great forest of oak and beech; sweet and fragrant is its scent. It is visited every year by hundreds of nightingales. The sea is close by, the ever changing sea, and the broad highroad separates the two. One carriage after another rolls by; I do not follow them, my eye rather rests on one particular spot. It is a tumulus, or barrow; brambles and wild sloes grow among its stones. Here is real poetry in nature. How do you think people in general interpret it? I will tell you what I heard only last night.

First two rich farmers drove by. “There are some fine trees,” said one. “There are ten loads of wood in each,” answered the other. “This will be a hard winter, and last winter we got fourteen dollars a cord,” and they were gone.

“This is a bad bit of road,” said the next man who drove along. “It’s those cursed trees,” answered his companion. “You don’t get a current of air, you only have the breeze from the sea,” and then they rolled by.

Next, the diligence came along. The passengers were all asleep at the prettiest part of the road. The driver blew his horn; he only thought “how well I am blowing it, and it sounds well here; I wonder what they think of it,” and then the diligence, too, was gone.

The next to pass were two lads on horseback. Here we have youth and champagne in the blood, I thought. And indeed they looked with a smile at the moss-grown hill and the dark thicket. “Shouldn’t I like a walk here with the miller’s Christine!” said one, and then they rushed on.

The flowers scented the air, and every breeze was hushed, it looked as if the sea was a part of the heavens outspread over a deep valley. A carriage drove by in which were six travellers, four of them were asleep, the fifth was thinking of his new summer coat, and whether it became him. The sixth leaned forward and asked the driver if there was anything remarkable about that heap of stones. “No,” answered the man, “it’s only a heap of stones; but those trees are remarkable.”  “Tell me about them.”  “Well, they are very remarkable; you see, sir, in winter when the snow lies deep, and every place looks alike, these trees are a landmark to me, and I know I must keep close to them so as not to drive into the sea. In that way, you see, they are remarkable,” then he drove on.

Now an artist came along and his eyes sparkled, he did not say a word, but he whistled and the nightingales sang, the one louder than the other. “Hold your tongues,” he cried, and took out his notebook and began noting down the colours in the most methodical manner, “Blue, lilac, dark brown. It will make a splendid picture.” He saw it as a mirror reflects a scene, and in the meantime he whistled a march by Rossini.

The last to come by was a poor girl, she rested a moment by the barrow and put down her burden. She turned her pale pretty face towards the wood and her eyes shone when she looked upwards to the sky over the sea. She folded her hands and I think she whispered a prayer. She did not herself understand the feelings which penetrated her, but I know that in years to come this night will often recur to her with all the lovely scene around her. It will be much more beautiful and truer to nature in her memory than the painter’s picture will be with his exact colouring noted down in a book. My beams followed her till the dawn kissed her forehead.

EIGHTH EVENING

There were heavy clouds in the sky, and the Moon did not appear at all. I was doubly lonely in my little room, looking up into the sky where the Moon ought to have been.

My thoughts wandered up to the kind friend who had told me stories every evening and shown me pictures. What had she not experienced? She had sailed over the angry waters of the flood and looked down upon the ark, as she now did upon me, bringing consolation to the new world which was to arise. When the children of Israel stood weeping by the waters of Babylon, she peeped sadly through the willows where their harps were hung. When Romeo climbed on to the balcony and young love’s kiss flew like a cherub’s thought from earth to heaven, the round Moon was hidden behind the dark cypresses in the transparent air. She saw the hero at St. Helena where he stood on the rock gazing out over the illimitable ocean, while great thoughts stirred his breast. Nay, what could not the Moon tell us? The life of the world is a story to her. Tonight I do not see you, old friend; and I have no picture to draw in remembrance of your visit.

But as I looked dreamily up at the clouds, there appeared one beam from the Moon—it was soon gone, the black clouds swept over it. Still, it was a greeting, a friendly evening greeting, to me from the Moon.

NINTH EVENING

The air was clear again, several evenings had passed, while the Moon was in its first quarter. Then I got a new idea for a sketch. Hear what the Moon told me:

I have followed the polar birds and the swimming whales to the east coast of Greenland. Gaunt ice-covered rocks, and dark clouds overhung a valley where willows and bilberry bushes stood in thick bloom, and the scented lychnis diffused its fragrance; my light was dim and my crescent pale as the leaf of the water-lily which has been floating for weeks upon the waters after being torn away from its stem. The corona of the northern lights burned with a fierce light. The rays spread out from its wide circle over the heavens like whirling columns of fire playing in green and red light.

The inhabitants were assembled for dancing and merry-making, but they had no wonder to bestow on the glorious sight, so accustomed to it were they. “Let the souls of the dead play at ball with the walrus’ head as much as they like,” they thought, according to their superstitions. Their attention was entirely centred on the dancing and singing.

A Greenlander without his fur coat stood in the middle of the circle, with a small drum in his hand, on which he played, and at the same time sang a song in praise of seal hunting; the chorus answered him with “Eia, eia, a!” and at the same time hopped round the circle in their white fur coats looking like polar bears. They wagged their heads and rolled their eyes in the wildest way. Then they held a mock court of justice. The litigants stepped forward and the plaintiff rehearsed his opponent’s faults all in a bold and mocking manner; the rest meanwhile dancing to the music of the drum. The defendant replied in the same spirit, and the assemblage laughingly gave their judgment.

Thunders resounded from the mountains when portions of the ice fields slipped away, and great masses broke off shivering into dust. It was a typical Greenland summer night.

A hundred paces away, under a tent of skins, lay a sick man; life was still coursing through his veins, yet he was to die. He knew it himself, and those standing round him knew it too, so much so that his wife was already sewing up the skin robe around him so as not to have to touch the dead man later. She asked him, “Will you be buried on the Fells, in the hard snow, or would you rather be sunk in the sea?”

“In the sea,” he whispered, and nodded with a sad smile.

“Yes, the sea is a cosy summer tent,” said the woman. “Thousands of seals sport about in it, and the walrus will sleep at your feet; the chase is certain and plenty of it.”

The children wailed, and tore away the tightened skin from the window, so that the dying man might be borne down to the sea, the swelling ocean which gave him food for life, and now in death a resting-place! His headstone was the floating iceberg which changes from day to day. Seals slumber on the ice, and the albatross spreads its great wings above it.

TENTH EVENING

I knew an old maid, said the Moon; she used to wear a yellow satin pelisse in winter. It was always new, and she never varied the fashion of it. Every summer she used to wear the same straw hat and, I believe, a bluish grey dress. She only stirred from home to visit one old friend, who lived across the street; but for the last few years she did not go, for her friend was dead. My old friend bustled about in her loneliness by her window, which was always full of beautiful flowers in summer, and in the winter she grew splendid mustard and cress on a piece of felt.

For the last few months she has not appeared at the window, but I knew that she still lived, for I had not seen her take the great journey about which she and her friend talked so much. “Yes,” she used to say, “when my time comes to die, I shall travel much further than I have ever done in my whole life. Our family burial place is twenty miles from here, and I am to be taken there for my last sleep with the rest of my family!”

Last night a van stopped at the door, and a coffin was carried out, so I knew that she was dead. They put straw round the coffin and drove off. In it slept the quiet old maid, who for the last few years had not been outside the house. The van rattled quickly out of the town, as if bent on a pleasure trip. They went faster still when they reached the highroad. The driver looked over his shoulder every now and then; I believe he was half afraid of seeing the old lady sitting there, on the top of the coffin, in her yellow pelisse. Then he whipped up the horses mercilessly and held them in so tightly that they foamed at the mouth, a hare darted across the road, and they got beyond the man’s control. The quiet old maid, who, year in year out, had moved so slowly in her daily round, now that she was dead, was being hurried at a headlong pace over stock and stone along the road. The coffin, which was wrapped in mats, slipped off the van and fell on to the road, while driver, horses, and van rushed away in their wild flight.

A little lark flew up from the field and burst into its morning song, right over the coffin. It perched on it and pecked at the matting, as if to tear the shell asunder, then it rose gaily warbling into the air, and I drew back behind the rosy clouds of dawn!

ELEVENTH EVENING

It was a bridal feast! said the Moon. Songs were sung, toasts were drunk, everything was gay and festive. The guests went away; it was past midnight. The mothers kissed the bride and the bridegroom. Then I saw them alone, but the curtains were almost closely drawn; the comfortable room was lit up by a lamp. “Thank goodness they are all gone,” said he, kissing her hands and her lips. She smiled and wept and leaned her head upon his breast, trembling like the lotus flower upon the flowing waters. They talked together in tender glowing words. “Sleep sweetly!” he exclaimed, and she drew aside the window curtain. “How beautifully the Moon is shining!” she said; “see how still and clear it is!” Then she put out the lamp, and the cosy room was dark, except for my beams, which shone as brightly as his eyes. Oh, womanhood, kiss thou the poet’s lyre, when he sings of the mysteries of life!

TWELFTH EVENING

I will give you a picture of Pompeii, said the Moon. I was in the outskirts of the town, in the street of Tombs, as it is called, where the beautiful monuments stand; it is the place where once joyous youths crowned with roses danced with the fair sisters of Lais. Now the stillness of death reigns.

German soldiers, in the pay of Naples, keep guard and play at cards and dice. A crowd of strangers from the other side of the mountains came into the town with guides. They wanted to see this city risen from the grave under my full beams. I showed them the chariot tracks in the streets paved with slabs of lava; I showed them the names on the doors and the signboards still hanging. In the small courtyards they saw the basins of the fountains decorated with shells, but no stream of water played, and no songs resounded from the richly painted chambers where the metal dog guarded the doors. It was indeed a city of the dead, only Vesuvius thundered forth its everlasting hymn, the several verses of which are called by man, “a new eruption.” We went to the Temple of Venus, built of dazzling white marble, with its high altar in front of the broad steps, and the weeping-willow shooting up among the pillars. The air was blue and transparent, and in the background stood Vesuvius, inky black, with its column of fire like the stem of a pine tree. In the darkness the cloud of smoke looked like the crown of the tree, only it was blood-red illuminated by the internal flames.

A songstress was among the company, a great and noted one; I have seen the homage paid to her in the various capitals of Europe. When they reached the tragic theatre, they all sat down on the stone steps of the amphitheatre. They filled up a little corner of it as in centuries gone by. The stage still stood with its walled side scenes, and two arches in the background through which one sees the same decoration as was seen then—nature herself, the hills between Amalfi and Sorrento.

For a joke the singer mounted the stage and sang, for the place inspired her. I thought of the wild Arab horse, when it neighs, tosses its mane, and tears away—her song was so light and yet so assured. I also thought of the suffering mother beneath the cross of Golgotha, it was so full of deep feeling and pain. Round about echoed, just as it had done a thousand years ago, the sound of applause and delight. “Happy, gifted creature!” they all cried.

Three minutes later the stage was empty and not a sound was to be heard. The company departed, but the ruins stood unchanged, as they will stand for centuries, and no one will know of the momentary burst of applause, the notes of the beautiful songstress and her smiles; they are past and gone. Even to me they are but a vanished memory.

THIRTEENTH EVENING

I peeped through the windows of an editor’s office, said the Moon. It was somewhere in Germany. It was well furnished; there were many books and a perfect chaos of papers. Several young men were present, and the editor stood by the desk. Two small books, both by young authors, were to be reviewed.

“This one has been sent to me,” he said; “I have not read it yet, but it is nicely got up; what do you say about the contents?”

“Oh,” said one, who was himself a poet, “it is pretty good, a little drawn out perhaps, but he is a young man still. The verses might be better, but the thoughts are sound, if a little commonplace. What are you to say? you can’t always think of something new. You will be quite safe in praising him, though I don’t suppose he will ever be a great poet. He is well read, a first rate Oriental scholar, and he has judgment. It was he who wrote that nice article on my Reflections on Domestic Life. One must be kind to a young man.”

“But he must be a regular ass!” said another man in the room; “nothing is worse in poetry than mediocrity, and he will never rise above it.”

“Poor fellow!” said a third, “and his aunt is so delighted with him; it is she, Mr. Editor, who found so many subscribers to your last translation.”

“Oh, the good woman. Well, I have reviewed the book quite briefly. Unmistakable talent—a welcome offering—a flower in the garden of poetry—well got up—and so on. But the other book! I suppose the author wants me to buy it. I hear it is being praised. He has genius, don’t you think so?”

“Oh, they all harp upon that,” said the poet; “but he talks rather wildly! And the punctuation is most peculiar.”

“It would do him good to pull him to pieces a bit and enrage him, or he will think too highly of himself!”

“But that would be rather unreasonable,” cried another; “don’t let us carp at his small faults, rather let us rejoice over his good points: and he has many. He beats all the others.”

“Heaven preserve us! If he is such a genius he will be able to stand some rough handling. There are plenty of people to praise him in private. Don’t let us make him mad!”

“Unmistakable talent,” wrote the editor, “with the usual want of care; that he can write incorrect verses may be seen on page 25, where there are two false quantities. A study of the Ancients is recommended, and so on!”

I went away, said the Moon, and peeped through the window into the aunt’s room where the cherished poet sat, the tame one. He was worshipped by all the guests, and quite happy.

I sought the other poet, the wild one, he was also at a large party, in the house of one of his admirers, where they were talking of the other poet’s book. “I mean to read yours too,” said Maecenas; “but you know I never tell you anything but what I think, and to tell the truth, I do not expect great things of you, you are too wild and too fantastic; but I acknowledge, that as a man you are very respectable.”

A young girl sat in a corner, and she read in a book these words:

“Let stifled genius lie below,

While you on dullness praise bestow,

So has it been from ages past

And aye, will be, while earth doth last.”

FOURTEENTH EVENING

The Moon said to me: There are two cottages by the roadside in the wood, the doors are low and the windows crooked, but the buckthorn and the barberries cluster round them. The roofs are overgrown with moss, yellow flowers, and houseleek. There are only cabbages and potatoes in the little garden, but near the fence is a flowering elder-bush, and beneath it sat a little girl; her brown eyes were fixed upon the old oak between the cottages. It had a great gnarled trunk, and the crown had been sawn off, and the stork had built his nest on the top of the trunk. He was standing there now clattering his beak. A little boy came out and placed himself beside the girl, they were brother and sister.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“I am looking at the stork,” she said; “the woman next door has told me that he is going to bring us a little brother or sister tonight, and I am watching to see them come.”

“The stork won’t bring one,” said the boy; “our neighbour told me the same thing, but she laughed when she said it, and I asked if she dared swear by the name of God, and she dared not, so I know very well that all that nonsense about the stork is just something they make up for us children!”

“Where will the little baby come from then?” asked the girl.

“Our Lord will bring it,” said the boy. “God has it under His mantle; but nobody can see God, and so we shall not see Him bring it.”

Just then a gust of wind rustled through the leaves of the elder-bush, and the children clasped their hands and looked at each other. It must be God sending the baby!—they took hold of each other’s hands. The cottage door opened, and a woman appeared. “Come in now,” she said; “come in and see what the stork has brought; it is a little brother!”

The children nodded, they knew well enough that he had come.

FIFTEENTH EVENING

I was passing over Limborg heath, said the Moon, and I saw a lonely hut by the wayside. Some leafless trees grew round it, on one of which a nightingale was singing; she had lost its way. I knew that she must die of the cold, and that it was her swan-song I heard.

At daybreak a caravan came along, of emigrant peasants, on their way to Bremen or Hamburg to take ship for America, where good fortune, the fortune of their dreams, was awaiting them. The women were carrying the babies, and the bigger children skipped along beside them. A wretched horse drew a van on which were a few miserable articles of furniture.

A cold wind blew, and a little girl clung closer to her mother, who looked up at my waning disc, and thought what bitter need they had endured at home, and of the heavy taxes which could not be paid. Her thoughts were those of the whole caravan, so the red dawn shone upon them, like a glimmer from that sun of fortune which was about to arise. They heard the song of the dying nightingale, and to them it was no false prophet, but rather a harbinger of good fortune. The wind whistled sharply, and they did not understand its song. Sail on securely over the ocean! you have given all that you possessed in return for the journey; poor and helpless you will land upon the shores of your Canaan. You must sell yourself, your wife, and your children, but you shall not suffer long. The goddess of death lurks behind the broad, fragrant leaves, her kiss of welcome will breathe pestilential fever into your blood! Sail on, sail on over the surging waters!

But the travellers listened happily to the song of the nightingale, for it promised them good fortune.

Daylight shone through the floating clouds, and peasants were wending their way over the heath to church. The women in their black dresses, and with white kerchiefs round their heads, looked as if they might have stepped down out of the old pictures in the church. Round about there was only the great dead plain, covered with brown withered heather and the white sand hills beyond. The women held their prayer-books in their hands and wandered on towards the church. Ah, pray, pray for those whose steps are leading them to the grave beyond the rolling waters!

SIXTEENTH EVENING

I know a Punchinello, said the Moon. The public shout directly they see him, each of his movements is so comic that the whole house roars when he appears; his personality makes them laugh, not his art. Even when he was little, playing about with the other boys, he was already a Punchinello. Nature had made him one; she had given him a hump on his back and one on his chest. But the inner man, the soul, ah, that was richly endowed. No one had deeper feelings or greater elasticity of mind than he. The theatre was his ideal world. If he had been slender and well made he would have been the first tragedian on any stage. The great and the heroic filled his soul, and yet he had to be a Punchinello. Even his pain and his melancholy increased the comic dryness of his sharply-cut features, and called forth laughter from the multitudes who applauded their favourite.

The pretty Columbine was kind and friendly, but she preferred marrying the Harlequin. It would have been far too comic in real life if Beauty and the Beast had joined hands. When Punchinello was in low spirits she was the only person who could make him smile, nay, even laugh outright. At first she would be melancholy too, then gay, and at last full of fun. “I know what is the matter with you, well enough!” said she; “you are in love.”

“I and love,” he exclaimed; “we should be a nice pair! How the public would applaud us!”

“You are in love,” she repeated, “you are in love with me.”

That might very well be said when one knew there was no question of love. Punchinello laughed, and bounded into the air, all his melancholy was gone. Yet she had spoken the truth; he loved her, worshipped her, as he worshipped all that was highest and best in Art. At her wedding he was the merriest person there, but at night he wept bitter tears. Had the public seen his distorted face they would indeed have applauded.

Quite lately Columbine had died, and on the day of her burial Harlequin had a holiday; was he not a sorrowing widower? The manager was obliged to produce something more than usually merry, so that the public should not miss pretty Columbine. Therefore Punchinello had to be doubly lively; he danced and bounded with despair in his heart, and he was more applauded than ever. “Bravo! Bravissimo!” Punchinello was called forward, he was indeed above all price.

Last night after the performance the little hunchback wandered out of the town to the lonely churchyard. The wreaths were already withering on Columbine’s grave. He sat down upon it. It would have made a touching picture, with his hand under his chin, his eyes turned towards me; he was like a monument, a Punchinello on a grave, characteristic and comical. If the public had seen their favourite, how they would have shouted, “Bravo! Bravissimo! Punchinello.”

SEVENTEENTH EVENING

Listen to what the Moon told me:

I have seen the cadet become an officer, and for the first time put on his handsome uniform. I have seen the young girl in her ball dress, and I have seen a royal bride rejoicing in her festal robes; but I have never seen greater delight than I saw last night in a child, a little four year old girl. She had on a new blue frock and a pink hat! they had just been put on, and the bystanders were calling for lights. The Moon shining through the window gave too faint a light, they must have something brighter altogether. There stood the little girl as stiff as any doll, holding her arms away from the dress, each finger stuck stiffly out! Oh! how her eyes glistened, and her whole face beamed with delight.

“Tomorrow you shall go out in them,” said the mother; and the little one looked down at her frock and smiled contentedly. “Mother!” she said, “what will the dogs think when they see me in all my pretty things!”

EIGHTEENTH EVENING

I have told you of Pompeii, said the Moon, the corpse of a city, now once more ranked in the catalogue of living cities. I know another far stranger still, which is no corpse, but in truth the phantom of a city. I seem to hear the romance of the floating city wherever the fountains play into their marble basins. Yes, water must tell its story, the waves of the sea sing its song!

A mist often floats over the stretches of its waters; that is its veil of widowhood. The bridegroom of the sea is dead; his palace and town are now his mausoleum. Do you know this city? Never has the roll of wheels or the clatter of horses’ hoofs been heard in its streets. The fish swim in them, and the black gondola skims over the surface of its green waters.

I will show you, continued the Moon, the Forum of the town, its grand square, and you may imagine yourself to have been in Fairyland. The grass grows between its broad flags, and at dawn thousands of tame pigeons flutter round its solitary lofty tower. On three sides of it you are surrounded by colonnades; under their shelter the silent Turk sits smoking his long pipe. A handsome Greek boy leans against the columns, and looks up at the trophies and lofty masts raised around, memorials of its ancient power. The flags droop from them like mourning scarves. Here a girl is resting; she has put down her heavy water-pails, and the yoke in which she carried them hangs on her shoulders; she supports herself against the column of Victory.

That is no fairy palace there in front of you; it is a church; its gilt cupolas and balls glitter in my beams. Those majestic bronze horses have travelled, like the bronze horse in the fairy tale. They came hither, went hence, and again returned. Do you see the gorgeous colouring on the walls and in the windowpanes? It looks as if genius had given way to the whims of some child in adorning the wonderful temple. Do you see the winged lion on its column? The gold still glitters, but its wings are bound; the lion is dead, for the king of the sea is dead; his great halls are empty, and there are only bare walls now where costly pictures used to hang. The Lazzaroni sleep now under the arches, on whose floor only the highest nobles in the land dared at one time to tread. From the deep wells—or does it come from the leaden chambers near the Bridge of Sighs?—sounds a groan, just as in the days when tambourines sounded from the gondolas with their gay trappings, when the bridal ring flew from the brilliant Bucentaur to Adria, queen of the sea. Oh, Adria, wrap thyself in the mist! Let thy widow’s veil cover thy bosom! Hang it over the mausoleum of the bridegroom, oh Venice, thou city of ghostly marble palaces.

NINETEENTH EVENING

I was looking down on a large theatre, said the Moon. The whole house was crammed with spectators, for a new actor was to make his début. My beams glided over a little window in the wall. A painted face was pressed against its panes; it was the hero of the evening. The knightly beard curled around his chin, but there were tears in the man’s eyes, for he had been hissed off the stage, and rightly hissed off. Poor fellow! But a “poor fellow” can’t be tolerated in the Kingdom of Art. His feelings were deep, and he loved his art enthusiastically, but art did not love him.

The call-bell rang; the hero enters; “boldly and gallantly” was the stage direction. He had to face an audience to whom he was a laughing-stock.

When the piece came to an end, I saw a man, muffled in a cloak, creep downstairs. It was the crushed knight of the evening, the scene-shifters whispered to each other. I followed the poor wretch to his home. Hanging is an ugly death, and one has not always got poison at hand. I know he thought of both. I saw him look at his pale face in the glass, and half shut his eyes to see if he would be a handsome corpse. A man may be most unhappy and yet very affected. He thought of death, of suicide; I believe he wept over himself; he wept bitterly; and when a man has been able to shed tears he does not kill himself.

A whole year has passed since then. There was a play being acted at a small theatre by a poor touring company, I saw a well-known face, the painted cheeks and curly beard. He looked up at me and smiled; and yet he had been hissed off the stage only a minute ago; hissed by a miserable, low-class audience in a wretched theatre!

Tonight a poor hearse drove out of the town gates, not a soul following it. It was a suicide—our poor, painted, despised hero. The driver was the only mourner, nobody else, only the Moon. The suicide is laid in the corner of the churchyard under the wall. The nettles will soon shoot up, and the grave-diggers will throw weeds and rubbish on it from other graves.

TWENTIETH EVENING

I come from Rome, said the Moon. There in the middle of the town, on the summit of one of the seven hills, stands the ruins of the palace of Caesars. The wild fig grows now in the crevices of the walls, covering their nakedness with its broad greyish green leaves. The ass treads down its laurel hedges among the heaps of stones, and browses on the barren thistle. Here, whence once the eagles of Rome fluttered—came, saw, and conquered—there is now the entrance to a poor little hovel plastered up with clay between the two broken marble columns. The vine hangs like a mourning wreath over its crooked windows.

An old woman lives in it with her little granddaughter; they now rule in the palace of the Caesars, and show its treasures to visitors. There is only a bare wall left standing of the rich throne-room; the dark cypress points with its long shadows to where the throne once stood. The earth is heaped high over the ruined floor, and the little girl, now sole daughter of the Caesars, often brings her footstool there when the evening bells ring. She calls the keyhole in the door close by her balcony, for she can see half Rome through it, as far as the mighty dome of St. Peter’s.

Silence reigned, as always, this evening when the little girl came out into the full light of my beams. She was carrying a water jar of antique shape on her head: her feet were bare, her short skirt and the sleeves of her little chemise were ragged. I kissed the child’s delicately rounded shoulders, her dark eyes, and black shining hair. She climbed up the steps to the little house, they were steep and made of sharp bits of marble from the broken columns. Gaily coloured lizards darted about among her feet, but they did not startle her. She was just raising her hand to the bell-pull, this was a hare’s foot at the end of a piece of string, such is the bell now in the palace of the Caesars. She paused a moment—what was she thinking about? Perhaps about the beautiful Infant Jesus wrapped in gold and silver down in the chapel, where the silver lamps gleamed, and where her little friends took part in singing the hymns which she knew too; I do not know—she moved forward again, tripped, and the jar fell from her head on to the steps, where it was broken to atoms upon the fluted marble. She burst into tears. The beautiful daughter of the Caesars, weeping over the poor broken jar. There she stood with her bare feet, weeping, and dared not pull the string—the bell-rope of the palace of the Caesars.

TWENTY-FIRST EVENING

The Moon had not shone for over a fortnight, but now I saw her again; she stood round and bright above the slowly moving clouds. Listen to what she told me:

I followed a caravan from one of the towns of the Fezzan. They made a halt near the desert by one of the salt plains; it shone like a sheet of ice, and was covered only in parts with quicksands. An elder among them, with a water-bottle hanging at his belt, and a bag of unleavened bread lying by him, drew a square with his staff in the sand, and wrote in it some words from the Koran. After this the whole caravan entered within the consecrated space. A young merchant, a child of the sun—I saw it in his eyes and in the beautiful lines of his figure—rode his fiery white steed thoughtfully. Was he perhaps thinking of his fair young wife? It was only two days since a camel covered with skins and costly shawls carried her, his lovely bride, round the walls of the town to the sound of drums and pipes. Women sang, and festive salvoes were fired; the loudest and most frequent were fired by the bridegroom himself, and now—now he was leading the caravan through the desert. I followed them for many nights; I saw them rest by the walls among the dwarf palms. They stuck their knives into the breast of a fallen camel, and roasted the meat by the fire. My beams cooled the burning sand, my beams showed them the buried rocks like submerged islands in a sea of sand. They encountered no unfriendly tribes on the trackless plain, no storms arose, and no sand-storm swept mercilessly over the caravan.

At home the lovely wife prayed for her husband and her father. “Are they dead?” she asked my golden horns. “Are they dead?” she asked my shining disc.

Now the desert lies behind them, and this evening they sit beneath the lofty palm trees, where the crane spreads its broad wings and the pelican watches them through the branches of the mimosa. The luxuriant thicket is trodden down by the heavy feet of the elephant; a troop of negroes are returning from the market far inland. The women have copper beads twisted round their heads of frizzled hair, and they are clad in skirts of indigo blue. They drive the heavily laden oxen, on whose backs the naked black children lie sleeping. A negro leads by a rope a young lion which he has bought; they approach the caravan.

The young merchant sits motionless and silent, thinking of his lovely bride; dreaming in the land of the blacks of his white flower beyond the desert, he lifts his head…

A cloud passed before the Moon, and then another; I heard no more that evening.

TWENTY-SECOND EVENING

I saw a little girl crying, said the Moon. She was crying at the wickedness of the world. The loveliest doll in the world had been given to her. Oh, it was most delicate and fragile, and certainly not fit to face adversity. But the little girl’s brothers, great big boys, had taken the doll away and put it up into a high tree, and then had run away. The poor little girl could not get it down, or get at it in any way, so she sat down and cried. The doll no doubt was crying too; it stretched out its arms among the branches, and looked most unhappy.

Yes, this must be the adversity of the world, about which mama talked so much. Oh, the poor doll! Evening was coming on, it was getting dark, and it would soon be night. Was it to stay out there all alone in the tree for the whole night? No, the little girl could not endure the thought. “I will stay with you/ she said, although she was not at all courageous, and she fancied already that she could see the little Brownies in their tall pointed caps peeping through the bushes, and there were long ghostly shadows dancing about in the dark walk. They came nearer and nearer, and stretched out their hands towards the tree where the doll was sitting; and they laughed and pointed their fingers at her. Oh! how frightened the little girl was. “But if one has committed no sin,” she thought, “evil can do one no harm. I wonder if I have sinned!” Then she began to think. “Oh, yes” she said, “I laughed at the poor duck with a red rag round its leg, it looked so funny limping along, so I laughed, and it is a sin to laugh at dumb animals.” Then she looked up at her doll. “Have you ever laughed at dumb animals?” And the doll seemed to shake its head.

TWENTY-THIRD EVENING

I looked down in the Tyrol, said the Moon. I let the dark pine trees throw their long shadows on to the rocks. I saw St. Christopher with the child Jesus on his back, as they are painted on the walls of the houses; they are colossal in size, reaching from the ground to the tops of the gables. There is also St. Florian pouring water on the burning house, and the Saviour hanging bleeding on the cross at the roadside. These are old pictures to the new generation, but I saw their origin.

There is a solitary convent perched upon the mountain-side like a swallow’s nest. Two of the sisters were standing up in the tower ringing the bell; they were both young, so their glances roamed over the mountains into the wide world beyond. A travelling carriage drove along the highroad; the post horn sounded gaily, and the poor nuns fixed their eyes, filled with the same thoughts, upon the carriage; a tear stood in those of the youngest. The sound of the horn grew fainter and fainter till its dying notes were drowned by the convent bell.

TWENTY-FOURTH EVENING

Hear what the Moon told me.

Several years ago I was in Copenhagen; I peeped in at the window of a poor little room. The father and mother were both asleep, but their little son was awake. I saw the flowered chintz curtains stirring and the child peeped out. I thought at first that he was looking at the grandfather’s clock from Bornholm. It was gaily painted in red and green, and a cuckoo sat at the top; it had heavy laden weights, and the pendulum, with its shining brass disc, swung backwards and forwards, “Tick, tack;” but that was not what he was looking at. No, it was his mother’s spinning-wheel which stood under the clock. It was the boy’s dearest treasure in all the house, but he dared not touch it or he would be rapped over the knuckles. He would stand for hours, while his mother was spinning, looking at the whirling spindle and the whizzing wheel, and he had his own thoughts about them. Oh, if only he dared spin with that wheel; father and mother were asleep; he looked at them, he looked at the wheel, and soon he put one bare little foot out of bed, and then another little bare foot followed by two little legs—bump, there he stood upon the floor. He turned round once more to see if father and mother were still asleep. Yes, they were fast asleep; so he went softly, very softly, in his short little shirt, to the wheel and began to spin. The cord flew off, and the wheel ran faster and faster. I kissed his yellow hair and his large blue eyes. It was a pretty picture.

His mother woke just then. She put the curtain aside and looked out, and thought she saw a Brownie or some other little sprite. “In Heaven’s name,” she said, pushing her husband; he opened his eyes, rubbed them, and looked at the busy little figure. “Why, it is our Bertel!” he said.

And my eye turned away from the poor little room. My glances extend so far that at the same moment I looked in at the galleries of the Vatican where the sculptured gods stand. I flooded the Laocoön group with my light, and the marble seemed to sigh. I pressed a gentle kiss upon the bosom of the muses; they almost seemed to move.

But my glance rested longest upon the great Nile-group with the colossal god. He leant pensively against the Sphinx, dreamy and thoughtful, as if he was pondering on the bygone years. Little Cupids played around him sporting with the crocodiles. One tiny little Cupid sat inside the cornucopia with his arms folded looking at the great solemn river-god. He was a true picture of the little boy at the spinning-wheel, his features were the same. This little marble child was life-like, and graceful in the extreme, yet the wheel of time had turned more than a thousand times since he sprang from the marble. Just so many times as the little boy turned the spinning-wheel in the humble little room had the greater wheel of time whirled round, and yet will whirl, before the present time creates marble gods like these.

Now all this happened years ago, continued the Moon. Yesterday I looked down on a bay on the east coast of Zealand. The cliffs round it were beautifully wooded, and in the midst of the woods stood an old red castle, with swans swimming in the moat. A little country town lay near, with its church buried among apple trees.

A procession of boats with blazing torches glided over the smooth waters; these torches were not lighted for spearing eels. No, it was a great festivity; there were sounds of music and singing, and in one of the boats stood the object of all the homage. He was a tall powerful man wrapped in a cloak; he had blue eyes and long white hair. I knew him, and thought of the Vatican and the Nile-group among all the sculptured gods. Then I thought of the poor little room where little Bertel sat spinning in his little shirt. The wheel of time had been turning, and new gods have arisen from the marble since then. From the boats came “Hurrah, hurrah for Bertel Thorwaldsen!

TWENTY-FIFTH EVENING

I will give you a picture from Frankfort, said the Moon. I looked at one building in particular. It was not Goethe’s birthplace, not the old Townhall, where, through the grated windows, may still be seen the horns of the oxen which were roasted and given to the people at the coronation of the Emperor. No, it was a burgher’s house I looked at; it was painted green, and was quite plain; it stood at the corner of the narrow Jews’ street. It was Rothschild’s house.

I looked in through the open door, the staircase was brightly lighted, footmen stood there holding burning lights in massive silver candlesticks, bending low before the old woman who was being carried down in a carrying chair. The owner of the house stood with bared head, and pressed a respectful kiss upon her hand. She was his mother; she nodded kindly to him and the footmen, and they carried her into a little house in the dark narrow street. Here she lived, here she had borne her children, from here their fortune had blossomed forth. If she now left the little house in the mean street perhaps their luck would leave them. This was her belief.

The Moon told me no more; her visit tonight was far too short, but I thought of the old woman in the narrow mean street. One word from her and she might have a palace on the banks of the Thames; one word, and she would have had a villa on the Bay of Naples. Were I to leave this humble house where the fortunes of my sons originated, their fortune might forsake them. It is a superstition, but a superstition of such a kind that, if one knows the story and sees the picture, it only needs two words to understand it—A Mother.

TWENTY-SIXTH EVENING

Yesterday at daybreak (these were the Moon’s own words), not a chimney was yet smoking in the great town, and it was these very chimneys I was looking at, when suddenly a little head popped out at the top of one of them, followed by the upper part of a body, with the arms resting on the edge of the chimney. “Hurrah!” It was a little chimney sweep who had gone right up a chimney for the first time in his life, and got his head out at the top. “Hurrah!” this was a very different matter from creeping about in the narrow flues and smaller chimneys. A fresh breeze met his face, and he could see right out over the town away to the green woods beyond. The sun was just rising, big and round, and it shone straight into his face which beamed with delight, although it was thoroughly smudged with soot. “Now the whole town can see me,” said he, “and the Moon can see me, and the sun too, hurrah!” and he waved his brush above his head.

TWENTY-SEVENTH EVENING

Last night I looked down upon a town in China, said the Moon; my beams illumined the long blank walls which border the streets. Here and there you certainly find a door, but it is always tightly shut, for what does the Chinaman care about the outside world! The windows of the houses behind the walls are closely covered with jalousies. The Temple was the only place whence a dim light shone through the windows. I looked in upon its gorgeous colours. The walls from floor to ceiling are covered with pictures in strong colours and rich gilding. They are representations of the labours of the gods here on earth. There is an image of a god in every niche, almost hidden by gorgeous draperies and floating banners. Before each of the gods—which are all made of tin—stands a little altar with holy water, flowers, and burning wax tapers.

At the upper end of the Temple stands Fu, the chief of all the gods; he is draped in silk of the sacred yellow. At the foot of the altar sat a living being, a young priest. He seemed to be praying, but in the midst of his prayers to fall into a reverie; and no doubt that was a sin, for his cheeks burned, and his head sank lower and lower. Poor Soui-houng! was he in his dream seeing himself behind those dreary walls in a little garden of his own working at the flower beds? Perhaps a labour much dearer to him than this of tending wax tapers in the Temple. Or was it his desire to sit at a richly spread table, wiping his lips between each course with tissue paper? Or was his sin so great that did he dare to express it the Heavenly powers would punish him with death? Did his thoughts venture to stray with the barbarians’ ships to their home in far distant England? No, his thoughts did not fly so far a-field, and yet they were as sinful as only the hot blood of youth can conceive them. Sinful, here in the Temple, before the image of Fu and the other gods. I know whither his thoughts had wandered.

In the outskirts of the town, upon the flat flagged roof of a house where the parapet seemed to be made of porcelain, and among handsome vases full of large white bell-shaped flowers, sat the lovely Pe, with her narrow roguish eyes, full lips, and tiny feet. Her shoes pinched, but the pressure at her heart was far greater, and she wearily raised her delicately modelled arms in their rustling satin sleeves. In front of her stood a glass bowl with four goldfish in it; she slowly stirred the water with a little painted and lacquered stick, slowly, oh very slowly, for she was musing. Was she thinking how richly the fish were clad in gold, and how securely they lived in their glass bowl with all their plentiful food, and yet how much happier they would be if they had their freedom? Ah, yes, the fair Pe thoroughly comprehended that. Her thoughts wandered from her home and sought the Temple, but not for the sake of God! Poor Pe! Poor Soui-houng! their earthly thoughts met, but my cold beams fell between them like an angel’s sword!

TWENTY-EIGHTH EVENING

It was a dead calm, said the Moon; the water was as transparent as the pure air that I was traversing. I could see the curious plants down under the water, they were like giant forest trees stretching towards me, many fathoms long, while the fish swam over their tops.

A flock of wild swans were flying past high up in the air; one of them sank with outspread wings lower and lower. It followed with its eyes the aerial caravan, as the distance between them rapidly increased. It held its wings outspread and motionless, and sank as a soap bubble sinks in the quiet air; when it touched the surface of the water, it bent its head back between its wings, and lay as still as the white lotus blossom on a tranquil lake.

A gentle breeze rose and swelled the glittering surface of the phosphorescent water, brilliant as ether itself rolling on in great broad billows. The swan lifted its head, and the sparkling water dashed over its back and breast like blue flames. Dawn shed its rosy light around, and the swan soared aloft with renewed vigour towards the rising sun, towards the faint blue coast line whither the aerial caravan took its flight. But it flew alone with longing in its breast. Lonely it flew over the swelling blue waters.

TWENTY-NINTH EVENING

I will give you one more picture from Sweden, said the Moon. Among gloomy forests near the melancholy shores of the Roxen stands the old convent church of Wreta. My beams fell through a grating in the wall into a spacious vault where kings slumber in their marble tombs. A royal crown glitters on the wall above them as an emblem of earthly glory; a royal crown, but it is made of painted wood, and kept in place by a wooden peg driven into the wall. Worms have gnawed through the gilded wood; the spider has spun its web from the crown to the coffin. It is a mourning banner, frail and transient as the grief of mortals.

How calm their slumber! I remember them distinctly. I still see the confident smile around those lips which, so authoritatively and decidedly, uttered words of joy or grief.

When the steamer comes up among the mountains like a bark from fairyland, many a stranger comes to the church and pays a visit to this burial vault. He asks the kings’ names, and they echo with a dead and forgotten sound. He looks at the worm-eaten crown, and if he has a pious mind, there is sadness in his smile. Sleep on, ye Dead! The Moon remembers you, the Moon sends her cold beams in the night into your silent kingdom over which the wooden crown hangs.

THIRTIETH EVENING

Close to the highroad, said the Moon, stands an inn, and immediately opposite to it is a great wagon shed, the roof of which was being thatched. I looked through the rafters, and through the open trap door into the uncomfortable space below. A turkey cock was asleep on a beam, and a saddle was resting in an empty manger.

A travelling carriage stood in the middle of the shed. Its owners slept in it as safely as possible, while the horses were being fed and watered, and the driver stretched his legs, although—and I know it for a certainty—he had been fast asleep for more than half the journey. The door of the groom’s bedroom was open, the bed was topsy-turvy, and a candle guttered on the floor. The wind whistled cold through the shed, it was nearer daybreak than midnight. A party of strolling musicians were asleep in a stall. The father and mother, I daresay, were dreaming of the burning drops of liquid fire in their flask, and the pale girl about the burning tear-drop in her eye. A harp lay at their head, and a dog at their feet.

THIRTY-FIRST EVENING

It was in a little country town, said the Moon. I saw it last year, but that doesn’t matter, for I saw it so distinctly. Tonight I read about it in the papers, but the story is not nearly so intelligible in them. A bear-leader was sitting in the bar of a public-house eating his supper; his bear was tied up outside behind the woodshed. Poor bear! he wouldn’t harm a creature, though he looked fierce enough.

Three little children were playing in the light of my beams up in an attic, the eldest was perhaps six years old, the youngest not more than two! Flop, flop! a muffled sound was heard coming up the stairs, who could it be? The door flew open—it was the bear, great shaggy Bruin! He was bored by standing out there in the yard, and he had found his way upstairs. I saw it all, said the Moon. The children were very much frightened when they first saw the big furry animal; they each crept into a different corner, but he found them out. He snuffed at them all, but did not hurt them. “Why, it must be a great big dog,” they thought, and they began to pat him. He lay down upon the floor, and the smallest boy rolled about on the top of him, and played at hiding his golden locks in the bear’s long black coat. Then the biggest boy got out his drum, and played upon it as hard as ever he could; as soon as he heard it the bear got up on his hind legs and danced; it was a pretty sight. Each boy shouldered his gun, and the bear, of course, had to have one too, and he held it as tightly as any of them. This was indeed a rare playmate they had got, and no mistake. They marched up and down, “one, two; one, two!”

Just then someone came to the door and opened it, it was the children’s mother. You should have seen the terrible, speechless agony in her ashen face, with open mouth, and starting eyes. But the smallest boy nodded to her, he was ever so pleased, and cried out loud, in his baby way, “We are only playing soldiers, mother.” And then the bear-leader made his appearance.

THIRTY-SECOND EVENING

The wind blew strong and cold, the clouds were chasing by, and the Moon only appeared now and then.

I look down upon the flying clouds from the silence of space above! said she. I can see the clouds chasing over the earth. Just lately I was looking down into a prison, outside which stood a closed carriage; a prisoner was about to leave. My beams penetrated the grated window, and shone upon the inside wall. The prisoner was tracing some lines upon the wall; it was his farewell. He did not write words but a tune; the outpouring of his heart on his last night in this place. The door opened, and he was conducted to the carriage, he looked up at my round disc—clouds flew between us, as if he might not see my face nor I his.

He got into the carriage, the door was shut, the whip cracked, and off they went through the thick forest, where my beams could not reach. I looked in through the prison grating again, and my beams fell once more upon the wall where the melody was traced—his last farewell: where words fail, melody may often speak!—But my rays only lighted up a few isolated notes, the greater part will always remain dark to me. Was it a death hymn he wrote? or were they carolling notes of joy? Was he driving to meet his death, or to the embrace of his beloved? The beams of the Moon cannot read all that even mortals write. I look down on the flying clouds, from the silence of space above, and I see big clouds chasing across the earth.

THIRTY-THIRD EVENING

I am very fond of children, said the Moon, the little ones especially are so amusing. I often peep at them through the curtains when they least think I see them. It is so amusing to see them trying to undress themselves; first, a little round naked shoulder appears out of the frock, then one arm slips out. Or I see a stocking pulled off a dimpled little leg, firm and round, and then comes out a little foot made to be kissed, and I kissed it, said the Moon. I must tell you what I saw tonight. I looked in at a window where the blind was not closed, for there were no opposite neighbours. I saw a whole flock of little ones, brothers and sisters. One little girl is only four years old, but she knows “Our Father” as well as any of them, and her mother sits by her bed every evening to hear it. Then she kisses her and sits by her till she falls asleep, which generally happens as soon as she shuts her eyes.

Tonight the two eldest were rather wild; one of them hopped about on one leg in his long white nightshirt. The second one stood on a chair with the clothes of all the others heaped upon him; he said it was a tableau, and they must guess what it meant. The third and fourth were putting their toys carefully away in a drawer, and, of course, that has to be done, but their mother said they must be quiet, for the little one was going to say her prayers. I peeped in over the lamp, said the Moon. The little girl lay in bed among all the fine white linen, her little hands were folded, and her face quite grave and serious, and she began, “Our Father,” aloud. “But what is this,” said her mother, interrupting her in the middle. “When you have said, ‘give us this day our daily bread,’ you say something more which I can’t quite hear; what is it? You must tell me.” The little girl hesitated, and looked shyly at her mother. “What do you say after ‘give us this day our daily bread’?”  “Dear mother, don’t be angry, I only said, please put plenty of butter on it.”

[ 1840 ]

The Snow Queen

A TALE IN SEVEN STORIES

—

FIRST STORY

WHICH TREATS OF THE MIRROR
AND THE BROKEN PIECES

Well, now we’re going to begin. When we are at the end of the story we shall know more than we do now, for he was a bad Goblin! He was one of the very worst, for he was the devil. One day he was in a very good humour, for he had made a mirror which had this peculiarity: everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it shrank into almost nothing, but that all that was worthless and ugly was magnified and looked even worse than before. The most lovely landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best of people looked hideous, or stood on their heads and had no bodies; their faces were so distorted that no one would know them, and if anybody had one freckle it was sure to spread all over his nose and mouth. That was most amusing, said the Goblin. When a good pious thought passed through anyone’s mind it was shown again in the mirror, in such a way that the Goblin-chief chuckled at his crafty invention. All who went to his school—for he kept a goblin school—declared all round that a miracle had been worked. For at last, they asserted, one could see for the first time how the world and the people in it really looked. They ran about with the mirror, till at last there was not a land or a person that had not been seen in it distorted.

Next they wanted to fly up to heaven with it, to scoff at the angels and the Lord. The higher they flew with the mirror, the worse it grinned, till they could scarcely hold it. Higher and higher they flew, nearer to God and the angels, and then the mirror trembled so terribly in its grinning that it slipped out of their hands and fell down to the earth, where it was shattered into a hundred million billion and more splinters. After that it caused greater misfortune than before, for some of the splinters were hardly as big as a grain of sand, and these flew about all over the world, and whenever they flew into anyone’s eye they stuck there, and those people saw everything distorted, or had eyes only for the wrong side of a thing, for every little fragment had retained the same power as the whole looking-glass. A few people even got a tiny splinter of the mirror into their hearts, and that was terrible indeed, for such a heart became a block of ice. A few pieces of the glass were so large that they were used as windowpanes, but it was a bad thing to look at one’s friends through these panes; other pieces were made into spectacles, and when people put on these spectacles to see correctly and to be just, then things went all wrong; and then the Evil One laughed till his paunch shook: it delighted him so. But some little fragments of glass still floated about in the air. Now we shall hear!

SECOND STORY

A LITTLE BOY AND A LITTLE GIRL

In the big town, where there are so many houses and people that there is not room enough for everyone to have a little garden, and where most people therefore must be content with flowers in flowerpots, there were, however, two poor children who had a garden somewhat bigger than a flower-pot. They were not brother and sister, but they loved each other quite as much as if they had been. Their parents lived just opposite each other; they lived in two garrets, where the roof of one neighbour’s house joined that of the other, with the gutter running between them. In each house was a little window. You had only to step across the gutter to get from one window to the other.

Outside each window the parents had placed a big wooden box, in which grew the vegetables that they used and a little rose-bush; there was one in each box, and they grew splendidly. The parents then thought of placing the boxes across the gutter, so that they nearly reached from one window to another, and looked just like two walls of flowers. Sweet peas hung over the boxes, and the rose-bushes sent out long shoots, which clustered round the windows and bent towards each other; it was almost like a triumphal arch of flowers and leaves. As the boxes were very high, and the children knew that they must not climb on them, they were often allowed to go out on to the roof behind the boxes, and to sit upon their little stools under the roses, and there they could play happily.

In the winter there was an end of this amusement. The windows were sometimes frosted all over. But then they warmed coppers on the stove, and held the warm coins against the frosted pane; and this made a first-rate peep-hole, so round, so round! and out of each peeped a bright friendly eye, one from each window—it was the little boy and the little girl. His name was Kay and hers was Gerda.

In the summer they could get to each other at one jump, but in the winter they had to go down many stairs and up many stairs again, while the snow was falling outside.

“It is the white bees that are swarming,” said the old grandmother.

“Have they also a queen-bee?” asked the little boy, for he knew that there was one among the real bees.

“Yes, they have one,” said grandmother. “She always flies where they swarm thickest. She is the largest of them all, and never settles on the earth, but flies up again into the black sky. Many a winter’s night does she fly through the streets of the town, and looks in at the windows, and then they freeze fantastically and look like flowers.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that!” said both the children, and then they knew that it was true.

“Can the Snow Queen come in here?” asked the little girl.

“Let her try!” said the boy; “I’ll put her on the hot stove, and then she’ll melt.”

And the grandmother smoothed his hair, and told them some more tales.

In the evening, when little Kay was at home and half undressed, he climbed up on the chair by the window and looked out through the little hole. A few flakes of snow were falling outside, and one of them, the largest of all, settled on the edge of one of the flower-boxes. The snowflake grew larger and larger, till at last it became a maiden clothed in the finest white gauze, made of millions of star-like flakes. She was beautiful and delicate, but of ice—of blinding, sparkling ice. Yet she was alive; her eyes flashed like two bright stars, but there was no peace or rest in them. She nodded towards the window, and beckoned with her hand. The little boy was frightened, and jumped down from the chair, and the same moment it seemed as if a large bird flew by outside the window.

Next day it was clear and frosty, and then came the thaw, and with it the spring. The sun shone, the green shoots appeared, the swallows built their nests, the windows were opened, and the little children sat in their garden again, high up on the roof, at the top of the house.

How splendidly the roses bloomed that summer! The little girl had learned a hymn in which there was something about roses; and she thought of her own roses; so she sang it to the little boy, and he sang too:

Roses fade and die, but we

Our Infant Lord shall surely see.

And the little ones held each other’s hands, kissed the roses, and looked up at the bright sunshine and spoke to it, as if the Christ-child were there. What lovely summer days those were! How beautiful it was out there, by the sweet rose-bushes, which seemed as if they would never stop blooming!

Kay and Gerda sat and looked at the picture-book of beasts and birds. It was then, exactly as the clock struck five in the great church tower, that Kay said:

“Oh! Something has stabbed my heart! And now something has got into my eye!”

The little girl put her arms round his neck. He blinked his eyes. But no, there was nothing at all to be seen.

“I think it is gone,” he said; but it was not gone. It was one of those splinters of glass from the mirror—the goblin-mirror that we remember so well, the ugly glass that made everything great and good which was mirrored in it seem small and hideous, while the mean and the wicked things became distinct and large, and every fault was to be seen at once. Poor little Kay had also received a splinter right in his heart. And now that would soon become like a lump of ice. It did not hurt him any more, but the splinter was still there.

“Why are you crying?” he asked. “You look ugly like that. There’s nothing the matter with me. Oh, ugh!” he cried suddenly; “that rose is worm-eaten, and look—this one is quite crooked! They’re ugly roses, after all—like the box they stand in!”

And he kicked the box with his foot, and tore both the roses off.

“Kay, what are you doing?” cried the little girl.

And seeing her dismay, he tore off another rose and jumped in at his own window, away from dear little Gerda.

When afterwards she came with her picture-book, he said it was only fit for babies; and when grandmother told stories he was always sure to put in a but; and when he could manage it he would get behind her, put on a pair of spectacles, and talk just as she did; he could do it perfectly, and people laughed at him. Soon he could mimic the voice and walk of everybody in the street. Everything that was peculiar or ugly about them Kay would imitate. And people said, “He must certainly have a remarkable head, that boy!” But it was the glass that had got into his eye, the glass that had stuck in his heart, that caused all this, and even made him tease little Gerda, who loved him with all her heart.

His games now became quite different from what they were before; they became quite sensible. One winter’s day, when the snow was falling, he came out with a great burning-glass, held up the tail of his blue coat, and let the snowflakes fall upon it.

“Now look through the glass, Gerda,” he said.

And every flake of snow was magnified, and looked like a splendid flower, or a star with many points: it was lovely to see.

“Look, how cleverly they are made!” said Kay. “That’s much more interesting than real flowers; and there is not a single flaw in them—they are perfect—if only they would not melt.”

Soon after Kay came out with thick gloves on, and with his sled on his back. He shouted into Gerda’s ear, “I’ve got leave to go into the big square, where the other boys play,” and off he went.

In the big square the boldest among the boys often tied their sleds to the country people’s carts, and were dragged along a good way with them. It was great fun. At the height of their game, there came along a big sledge. It was all painted white, and in it sat somebody wrapped in a rough white fur, and with a white rough cap on. The sledge drove twice round the square, and Kay managed to fasten his little sled to it, and away he drove with it. It went faster and faster, straight into the next street. The driver turned round and nodded in a friendly way to Kay; it was just as if they knew one another. Every time Kay wanted to cast loose his little sled, the stranger nodded again, and so Kay stayed where he was, and so they drove out at the town gate. Then the snow began to fall so fast that the boy could not see a hand’s breadth before him, but still on he went. Then he hastily dropped the cord, so as to get loose from the big sledge, but it was no use, for his little sled was fast bound to the other, and they went on like the wind. Then he called out loudly, but nobody heard him; and the snow fell fast and the sledge flew on; every now and then it gave a jump, and they seemed to be flying over hedges and ditches. The boy was quite frightened. He wanted to say “Our Father,” but could remember nothing but the multiplication table.

The snowflakes became larger and larger; at last they looked like big white fowls. All at once they flew aside and the big sledge stopped, and the person who had driven it stood up. The fur and the cap were all made of snow; it was a lady, so tall and slender, and glittering white! It was the Snow Queen herself.

“We have travelled fast!” she said. “But you are shivering with cold! Creep under my bearskin.”

And she put him beside her in her own sledge, and wrapped the fur round him, and he felt as if he was sinking into a snowdrift.

“Are you still cold?” she asked, and then she kissed him on the forehead.

Ugh! that was colder than ice; it went right through to his heart, half of which was already a lump of ice; he felt as if he was going to die—but only for a moment; and then he felt quite well again, and he did not notice the cold any more.

“My sled! don’t forget my sled!”

That was the first thing he thought of; and it was bound fast to one of the white fowls, which flew behind them with the sled upon its back. The Snow Queen kissed Kay once more, and then he had forgotten little Gerda, and his grandmother, and everyone at home.

“Now you shall have no more kisses,” she said, “for if you did I should kiss you to death.”

Kay looked at her. She was so beautiful, he could not imagine a more wise or lovely face; she did not appear to be made of ice now, as before, when she sat outside the window and beckoned to him. In his eyes she was perfect; he did not feel at all afraid. He told her he could do mental arithmetic as far as fractions, and that he knew the number of square miles and the number of inhabitants in all countries. And all the time she smiled, and then it seemed to him that what he knew was not enough, and he looked up into the great space, and she flew with him high up upon the black cloud, and the storm blew and whistled; it seemed as though the wind sang old songs. They flew over forests and lakes, over sea and land: beneath them roared the cold wind, the wolves howled, the snow glistened; above them flew black screaming crows; but above all the moon shone bright and clear, and Kay gazed at it through the long, long winter night; by day he slept at the feet of the Snow Queen.

THIRD STORY

THE FLOWER GARDEN
OF THE WOMAN WHO KNEW MAGIC

But how did it fare with little Gerda when Kay did not return? What could have become of him? No one knew; no one could give information. The boys could only say that they had seen him tie his little sled to another very large one, which had driven along the street and out at the town gate. Nobody knew what had become of him; many tears were shed, and little Gerda cried long and bitterly. Then they said he was dead—he had been drowned in the river which flowed close by the town. Oh, those were long dark winter days indeed! Then came the spring, with its warm sunshine.

“Kay is dead and gone,” said little Gerda.

“I don’t believe it,” said the Sunshine.

“He is dead and gone,” she said to the Swallows.

“We don’t believe it,” they replied; and at last little Gerda did not believe it herself.

“I will take my new red shoes,” she said one morning, “those that Kay has never seen; and then I will go down to the river, and ask it about him.”

It was still very early; she kissed her old grandmother, who was asleep, took her red shoes, and went all alone out of the town gate to the river.

“Is it true that you have taken my little playmate? I will make you a present of my red shoes if you will give him back to me!”

And it seemed to her as if the waves nodded strangely; and then she took her red shoes, that she liked best of anything she possessed, and threw them both into the river; but they fell close to the bank, and the little wavelets bore them back to land again. It seemed as if the river would not take from her the dearest things she had because it had not got her little Kay. But she thought she had not thrown the shoes far enough out; so she climbed into a boat that lay among the reeds, and went to the farther end of the boat, and threw the shoes into the water again; but the boat was not made fast, and at the movement she caused, it drifted away from the shore. She noticed it, and hurried to get back, but before she reached the other end of the boat it was a yard from the bank, and was floating quickly away.

Then little Gerda was very much frightened, and began to cry; but no one heard her except the Sparrows, and they could not carry her to land. They flew along the bank, and sang, as if to console her, “Here we are! here we are!” The boat drifted on with the stream, and little Gerda sat quite still, in her stockings. Her little red shoes floated along behind, but they could not catch up with the boat, which drifted faster.

It was very pretty on both sides. There were beautiful flowers, old trees, and slopes with sheep and cows; but not a human being was to be seen.

“Perhaps the river will carry me to little Kay,” thought Gerda.

And then she became more cheerful, and stood up, and for many hours she watched the pretty green banks. At last she came to a big cherry orchard, where there was a little house with curious blue and red windows. It had a thatched roof, and in front stood two wooden soldiers, who presented arms to those who sailed past.

Gerda called to them, for she thought they were alive, but, of course, they did not answer. She came quite close to them; the river carried the boat in to the shore,

Gerda called out still louder, and then there came out of the house an old, old woman leaning on a crutch: she had on a big sun-hat, painted with the most lovely flowers.

“You poor little child!” said the old Woman. “How did you manage to come on the great strong river, and to float so far out into the wide world?”

And then the old Woman went right into the water, hooked the boat with her crutch, drew it to land, and lifted little Gerda out. Gerda was glad to be on dry land again, though she felt a little afraid of the strange old Woman.

“Come and tell me who you are, and how you came here,” she said. And Gerda told her everything; and the old Woman shook her head, and said, “Hm! hm!” And when Gerda had told her everything, and asked if she had not seen little Kay, the Woman said that he had not yet come by, but that he probably would soon come; she was not to be sorrowful, but taste her cherries and look at the flowers, for they were better than any picture-book, for each one of them could tell a story. Then she took Gerda by the hand and led her into the little house, and locked the door after them.

The windows were very high up, and the panes were red, blue, and yellow; the daylight shone in in a strange way, with all colours. On the table stood the finest cherries, and Gerda ate as many as she liked, for she had leave to do so. While she was eating them the old Woman combed her hair with a golden comb, and the hair curled and shone like lovely gold round the sweet little face, which was round and as blooming as a rose.

“I have long wished for such a dear little girl as you,” said the old Woman. “Now you shall see how well we shall get on together.”

And the more she combed little Gerda’s hair, the more Gerda forgot her playmate Kay; for this old Woman could work magic, but she was not a wicked witch. She only practised a little magic for her own amusement, and now only because she wanted to keep little Gerda. So she went into the garden, stretched out her crutch towards all the rose-bushes, and, beautiful as they were, they all sank into the black earth, and no one could tell where they had stood. The old Woman was afraid that if Gerda saw roses she would think of her own, and remember little Kay, and run away.

Then she took Gerda out into the flower garden. What fragrance was there, and what loveliness! Every flower you could think of was there in full bloom; there were those of every season; no picture-book could be gayer and prettier. Gerda jumped for joy, and played till the sun went down behind the tall cherry trees. Then she was put into a lovely bed with red silk pillows stuffed with blue violets, and she slept there, and dreamed as happily as a queen on her wedding-day.

Next day she could again play with the flowers in the warm sunshine; and thus many days went by. Gerda knew every flower; but, many as there were, it still seemed to her as if one were missing, but which one she did not know. One day she sat looking at the old Woman’s sun-hat with the painted flowers, and it happened that the prettiest of them all was a rose. The old Woman had forgotten to remove it from her hat when she made the others sink into the ground. But so it always is when one does not keep one’s wits about one.

“What, are there no roses here?” cried Gerda.

And she went among the beds, and searched and searched, but there was not one to be found. Then she sat down and cried; and her hot tears fell just upon a spot where a rose-tree lay buried, and when the warm tears moistened the earth the tree at once shot up again as blooming as when it had sunk; and Gerda embraced it, kissed the roses, and thought of the beautiful roses at home, and with them of little Kay too.

“Oh, how I have been wasting my time!” said the little girl, “I, who ought to have been looking for little Kay! Do you know where he is?” she asked the roses. “Do you think he is dead?”

“He is not dead,” said the Roses. “We have been in the ground. All the dead people are there, but Kay is not there.”

“Thank you,” said little Gerda; and she went to the other flowers, looked into their cups, and asked, “Do you not know where little Kay is?”

But every flower stood in the sun thinking only of her own story or fairy-tale. Little Gerda heard many, many of them; but not one knew anything of Kay.

And what said the Tiger-lily?

“Do you hear the drum ‘rub-a-dub’? There are only three notes, always ‘rub-a-dub’! Hear the funeral chant of the women! Hear the call of the priests! The Hindu woman stands in her long red robe on the funeral pile; the flames rise up round her and her dead husband; but the Hindu woman is thinking of the living one here in the circle, of him whose eyes burn hotter than flames, whose glances burn in her soul more ardently than the flames themselves which are soon to burn her body to ashes. Can the flame of the heart die in the flames of the funeral pile?”

“I don’t understand that at all!” said little Gerda.

“That is my story,” said the Lily.

What says the Convolvulus?

“Over the narrow mountain path hangs an old knight’s castle: the ivy grows thick over the crumbling red walls, leaf by leaf up to the balcony, and there stands a beautiful girl. She leans over the balustrade and gazes up the path. No rose on its stem is fresher than she; no apple blossom wafted by the wind floats more lightly along. How her costly silks rustle! Will he never come?

“Is it Kay you mean?” asked little Gerda.

“I am only talking of my own story—my dream,” replied the Convolvulus.

What said the little Snowdrop?

“Between two trees a board is hanging on ropes: it is a swing. Two pretty little girls, with dresses as white as snow and green silk ribbons on their hats, are sitting on it, swinging. Their brother, who is bigger than they are, stands on the swing with his arm round the rope to hold himself, for in one hand he has a little bowl, and in the other a clay pipe: he is blowing soap-bubbles. The swing moves, and the bubbles fly up with beautiful changing colours; the last one still hangs from the bowl of the pipe, swayed by the wind. The swing goes to and fro. A little black dog, light as the bubbles, stands up on his hind legs and wants to be taken on to the swing. It goes on, and the dog falls, and barks with anger: the bubble bursts. A swinging board and a shimmering foam-picture—that is my song!”

“It may be very pretty, what you’re telling me, but you speak so mournfully, and you don’t mention little Kay at all.”

What do the Hyacinths say?

“There were three beautiful sisters, transparent and delicate. The dress of one was red, of the second blue, and of the third pure white. Hand in hand they danced by the calm lake in the bright moonlight. They were not elves—they were human-born. It was so sweet and fragrant there! The girls disappeared in the forest, and the fragrance became sweeter still. Three coffins, with the three beautiful maidens lying in them, glided from the wood-thicket across the lake; the fireflies flew gleaming round them like little hovering lights. Are the dancing girls sleeping, or are they dead? The flower-scent says they are dead. The evening bell tolls their knell!”

“You make me quite sorrowful,” said little Gerda. “Your scent is so strong, I cannot help thinking of the dead maidens. Ah! is little Kay really dead? The Roses have been down beneath the ground, and they say no.”

“Ding, dong!” rang the Hyacinth bells. “We are not tolling for little Kay—we do not know him; we only sing our song, the only one we know.”

And Gerda went to the Buttercup, shining out among the green leaves.

“You are a little bright sun,” said Gerda. “Tell me, if you know—where shall I find my playmate?”

And the Buttercup shone so gaily, and looked back at Gerda. What song could the Buttercup sing? It was not about Kay.

“In a little courtyard God’s bright sun shone warm on the first day of spring. The sunbeams glided down the white wall of the neighbouring house. Close by grew the first yellow flower, shining like gold in the bright sunbeams. An old grandmother sat out of doors in her chair; her pretty granddaughter, a poor maid-servant, had come home for a short visit: she kissed her grandmother. There was gold, heart’s gold, in that blessed kiss, gold on the lips, gold on the ground, gold in the morning hour. See, that is my little story,” said the Buttercup.

“My poor old grandmother!” sighed Gerda. “Yes, she is surely longing for me and grieving for me, just as she did for little Kay. But I shall soon go home again and bring Kay with me. There is no use in my asking the flowers: they only know their own song, and give me no information.”

Then she tucked her little frock round her, that she might run the faster; but the Jonquil struck her on the leg as she jumped over it, and she stopped to look at the tall flower, and asked, “Do you, perhaps, know anything?”

And she bent close down to the flower. And what did it say?

“I can see myself! I can see myself!” said the Jonquil. “Oh! oh! how sweet my scent is! Up in the little attic stands a little dancing girl half dressed. She stands sometimes on one foot, sometimes on both; she seems to tread on all the world. She’s nothing but a delusion: she pours water out of a teapot on a bit of stuff—it is her bodice. ‘Cleanliness is a good thing,’ she says. Her white frock hangs on a hook; it has been washed in the teapot too, and dried on the roof. She puts it on and ties her saffron kerchief round her neck, and the dress looks all the whiter. Point your toes! Look how she seems to stand on a stalk! I can see myself! I can see myself!”

“I don’t care at all about that!” said Gerda. “It is no use your telling me!”

And then she ran to the end of the garden. The gate was locked, but she pressed against the rusty latch, and it gave way, the gate sprang open, and little Gerda ran with bare feet out into the wide world. She looked back three times, but no one was there to come after her. At last she could run no more, and she sat down on a big stone; and when she looked round she saw that summer was over—it was late in the autumn. No one could have known that in the beautiful garden, where there was always sunshine, and where the flowers of every season were always blooming.

“Alas! how I have lost my time!” said little Gerda. “It is already autumn! I must not stay any longer.”

And she got up to go on. Oh, how sore and tired were her little feet! And all around looked so cold and bleak; the long willow leaves were quite yellow, and the mist dripped from the trees like rain; one leaf dropped after another—only the sloe still bore fruit, but the fruit was sour, and set the teeth on edge. Oh, how grey and gloomy it looked out in the wide world!

FOURTH STORY

THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS

Gerda had to rest again soon; and there hopped across the snow, just in front of where she was sitting, a big crow. It stopped a long time to look at her, nodding its head; and then it said, “Caw! caw! Goo’ day! Goo’ day!” It could not say it better, but it meant to be kind to the little girl, and asked where she was going all alone in the wide world. The word ‘alone’ Gerda understood very well, and felt how much it expressed; and she told the crow the whole story of her life and fortunes, and asked if it had not seen Kay.

And the Crow nodded very gravely, and said:

“That may be! That may be!”

“What, do you believe so?” cried the little girl, and nearly smothered the Crow, she kissed it so.

“Gently, gently!” said the Crow. “I think I know: I believe it may be little Kay, but now he has certainly forgotten you for the Princess.”

“Does he live with a princess?” asked Gerda.

“Yes; listen!” said the Crow. “But it’s so difficult for me to speak your language. If you know crows’ language,* I can tell it much better.” [98]

“No, I never learned it,” said Gerda; “but my grandmother understood it, and could speak the language too. I only wish I had learned it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the crow. “I will tell you as well as I can, but it will be rather badly.”

And then the crow told her what it knew.

“In the country in which we now are there lives a princess who is quite wonderfully clever—but then she has read all the newspapers in the world, and has forgotten them again, she is so clever. Lately she was sitting on the throne—and that’s not so very amusing, they say—and she began to hum a song, and it was just this:

Why shouldn’t I be married?

‘Wait—there’s something in that!’ said she. And at once she felt she wanted to get married, but she wished for a husband who could answer when he was spoken to, not one who only stood and looked handsome, for that is wearisome. So she called all her maids of honour together, and when they heard what she wanted they were delighted. ‘I like that, now,’ said they; ‘I thought the very same thing myself the other day.’ You may be sure that every word I am telling you is true,” said the Crow. “I have a tame sweetheart who goes about freely in the castle, and she told me everything.”

Of course, the sweetheart was a crow too, for birds of a feather flock together, and one crow always chooses another crow.

“Newspapers were published directly, with a border of hearts and the Princess’s initials. One could read in them that every young man who was good-looking might come to the castle and speak to the Princess, and the one who spoke in a way that showed he was quite at home there, and who spoke best, would be chosen by the Princess for her husband. Yes, yes,” said the Crow, “you can believe me. It’s as true as I sit here. People came streaming in; there was a great crowding and running to and fro, but no one succeeded either on the first or second day. They could all speak well enough when they were out in the streets, but when they entered the palace gates, and saw the guards in silver, and at the top of the staircase the lackeys in gold, and the great lighted halls, they became confused. And when they stood in front of the throne where the Princess sat, they could do nothing but repeat the last thing she said, and, of course, she did not care to hear her own words again. It was just as if the people in there had taken some sleeping powder and had fallen asleep till they got into the street again, for not till then were they able to speak. There stood a whole row of them, from the town gate to the palace. I went out myself to see it,” said the crow. “They were hungry and thirsty, but in the palace they did not receive so much as a glass of lukewarm water. A few of the wisest had brought bread and butter with them, but they would not share with their neighbours, for they thought, ‘Let him look hungry, and the Princess won’t have him!’”

“But Kay, little Kay?” asked Gerda. “When did he come? Was he among the crowd?”

“Give me time! Give me time! We’re just coming to him. It was on the third day that there came along a little person, without horse or carriage, walking quite merrily up to the castle. His eyes sparkled like yours, he had fine long hair, but his clothes were shabby.”

“That was Kay!” cried Gerda, delighted. “Oh, then I have found him!” And she clapped her hands.

“He had a little knapsack on his back,” said the Crow.

“No, that must have been his sled,” said Gerda, “for he went away with a sled.”

“That may be so,” said the Crow, “for I did not look very closely. But this much I know from my tame sweetheart, that when he came in at the palace gate and saw the military guards in silver, and at the top of the staircase the lackeys in gold, he was not in the least abashed. He nodded, and said to them, ‘It must be tiresome standing on the stairs—I’d rather go in.’ The halls were ablaze with lights; chancellors and excellencies walked about with bare feet, and carried golden vessels. It was enough to make anyone solemn! And his boots creaked dreadfully, but he was not at all frightened.”

“That must have been Kay!” said Gerda. “I know he had new boots on; I’ve heard them creak in grandmother’s room.”

“Yes, they certainly creaked,” said the Crow. “And he went boldly in to the Princess herself, who sat on a pearl as big as a spinning-wheel; and all the maids of honour, with their maids and maids’ maids, and all the cavaliers, with their gentlemen followers and their gentlemen’s gentlemen, who themselves had a page apiece, were standing round; and the nearer they stood to the door, the prouder they looked. The gentlemen’s gentlemen’s pages, who always go in slippers, could hardly be looked at, so proudly did they stand in the doorway!”

“That must be terrible!” said little Gerda. “And yet Kay won the Princess?”

“If I had not been a Crow I would have taken her myself, although I am engaged. They say he spoke as well as I do when I speak crows’ language; so I heard from my tame sweetheart. He was merry and agreeable; he had not come to woo the Princess, but only to hear her wisdom. He admired her just as much as she admired him!”

“Yes, that must have been Kay!” said Gerda. “He was so clever, he could do mental arithmetic up to fractions. Oh, won’t you take me to the palace too?”

“Well, that’s easily said,” replied the Crow, “but how are we to manage it? I’ll talk it over with my tame sweetheart; she can probably advise us; but this I must tell you—such a little girl as you are will never get permission to go right inside!”

“Oh, yes, I shall,” said Gerda. “When Kay hears that I’m there, he’ll come out at once and fetch me.”

“Wait for me over there at the steps,” said the Crow; and he wagged his head and flew away.

It was late in the evening when the crow came back.

“Caw! caw!” he said. “I’m to greet you kindly from her, and here’s a little loaf for you. She took it from the kitchen. There’s bread enough there, and you must be hungry. You can’t possibly get into the palace, for you are barefooted, and the guards in silver and the lackeys in gold would not allow it. But don’t cry; you shall get in somehow. My sweetheart knows a little back staircase that leads up to the bedroom, and she knows where she can get the key.”

And they went into the garden, into the great avenue, where the leaves were falling one after the other; and when the lights in the palace were put out one after the other, the crow led little Gerda to a back door, which stood ajar.

Oh, how Gerda’s heart beat with fear and longing! It was just as if she had been going to do something wrong, and yet she only wanted to know if it was little Kay. Yes, it must be he. And she thought so earnestly of his clever eyes and his long hair: she could see how he smiled as he used to when they sat at home under the roses. He would surely be glad to see her; to hear what a long way she had come for his sake; and to know how sorry they had all been at home when he did not come back. Oh, what fear and what joy that was!

Now they were on the stairs. A little lamp was burning upon a cupboard, and in the middle of the room stood the tame Crow, turning her head on every side and staring at Gerda, who curtsied as her grandmother had taught her.

“My betrothed has spoken to me very favourably of you, my little lady,” said the tame Crow. “Your life story, your vita, as they call it, is really most touching. Will you take the lamp? Then I will go first. We will go straight along, for we shall meet nobody.”

“I feel as if someone were coming after us,” said Gerda, as she fancied something rushed by her. It seemed like a shadow on the wall; horses with flowing manes and thin legs, hunters, and gentlemen and ladies on horseback.

“They are only dreams,” said the tame Crow. “They are coming to carry the nobles’ thoughts out hunting. That’s all the better, for you may look the more closely at them in bed. But I hope, when you are taken into favour and are honoured, that you will show a grateful heart.”

“Of that we may be sure!” said the Crow from the wood.

They came now into the first room; the walls were hung with rose-coloured satin embroidered with flowers; and here again the dreams came flitting by them, but they swept by so quickly that Gerda could not see the high-born lords and ladies. Each room was more splendid than the last; one was almost bewildered! And then they came to the bedchamber. Here the ceiling was like a great palm tree with crystal leaves, and in the middle of the floor were two beds, each hung like a lily on a stalk of gold. One of them was white, and in that lay the Princess; the other was red, and in that one Gerda was to look for little Kay. She bent one of the red leaves aside, and she saw a brown neck. Oh, that must be Kay! She called his name out loud, and held the lamp over him. The dreams rushed on horseback through the room again—he awoke, turned his head, and—it was not little Kay!

The Prince was like him only in the neck; but he was young and handsome, and the Princess peeped out, blinking, from the white lily bed, and asked what was the matter. Then little Gerda cried, and told them her whole story, and all that the Crows had done for her.

“You poor little thing!” said the Prince and Princess.

And they praised the Crows, and said that they were not angry with them at all, but they were not to do it again. However, they should be rewarded.

“Will you fly away free?” asked the Princess. “Or would you rather have permanent posts as Court Crows, with the leavings of the kitchen as perquisites?”

And the two Crows bowed, and begged for permanent posts, for they thought of their old age, and said, “It is so good to have something put by for the old man,” as they put it.

And the Prince got up out of bed, and let Gerda sleep in it, and he could not do more than that. She folded her little hands, and thought, “How good men and animals are!” and then she shut her eyes and went quietly to sleep. All the dreams came flying by again, looking like God’s angels, and they drew a little sled, on which Kay sat and nodded; but all this was only a dream, and so it was gone again as soon as she awoke.

Next day she was clothed from top to toe in silk and velvet. She was invited to stay in the castle and enjoy herself, but she only begged them to give her a little carriage, and a horse, and a pair of little boots; and then she could drive out into the wide world and find Kay.

They gave her both boots and a muff, and she was prettily dressed; and when she was ready to start, a new coach of pure gold was there for her before the door. Shining like a star on it was the coat of arms of the Prince and Princess. Coachman, footmen, and the postilions—for there were postilions too—all had golden crowns on their heads. The Prince and the Princess themselves helped her into the carriage, and wished her good luck. The forest Crow, who was now married, accompanied her the first three miles. He sat by Gerda’s side, for he could not bear riding backward. The other Crow stood in the doorway, flapping her wings; she did not go with them, for she suffered from headache, that had come on since she had got her permanent appointment: she had had too much to eat. The coach was stocked with sugar-cakes, and under the seat there were ginger-nuts and fruit.

“Farewell! Farewell!” cried the Prince and Princess; and little Gerda wept, and the Crow wept. And they went on like that for the first three miles, and then the Crow said farewell too, and that was the saddest parting of all. And then he flew up into a tree, and beat his black wings as long as he could see the coach, which glittered like the bright sunshine.

FIFTH STORY

THE LITTLE ROBBER GIRL

They drove on through a dark forest, but the coach gleamed like a torch that dazzled the robbers’ eyes, so that they could not bear to look at it.

“It is gold! It is gold!” they cried, and rushed forward and seized the horses, killed the little postilions, the coachman, and the footmen, and then dragged little Gerda out of the carriage.

“She is fat—she is pretty—she has been fattened on nuts!” said the old robber woman, who had a long matted beard, and eyebrows that hung down over her eyes. “She’s as good as a little fatted lamb! How well she will taste!”

And she drew out her shining knife, which glittered in a horrible way.

“Oh!” screamed the old woman at the same moment; for her ear was bitten by her own little daughter, who hung on her back and was as wild and savage as an animal. “You ugly brat!” said her mother, and she had not time to kill Gerda then.

“She shall play with me!” said the little Robber Girl. “She shall give me her muff and her pretty dress, and sleep with me in my bed!”

And then she bit her again, so that the woman jumped high in the air and turned about, and all the robbers laughed and said: “Look how she dances with her cub!”

“I will go in the carriage!” said the little Robber Girl.

And she would have her own way, for she was so spoiled and obstinate; and she and Gerda sat in the carriage, and off they drove over stock and stone deep into the forest. The little Robber Girl was as big as Gerda, but stronger and more broad-shouldered, and she had a dark skin. Her eyes were quite black, and they looked almost mournful. She took little Gerda round the waist, and said:

“They shall not kill you as long as I don’t get angry with you. I suppose you are a princess?”

“No,” replied Gerda. And she told all that had happened to her, and how fond she was of little Kay.

The Robber Girl looked at her earnestly, and gave a little nod with her head, and said, “They shall not kill you even if I do get angry with you, for then I will do it myself.”

And then she dried Gerda’s eyes, and put her own hands into the beautiful muff that was so soft and warm.

Soon the coach stopped, and they were in the courtyard of a robber’s castle. Its walls had cracked from the top to the bottom; ravens and crows flew in and out of the open holes, and big bulldogs—each of which looked as if he could devour a man—jumped high in the air, but they did not bark, for that was forbidden.

In the great old smoky hall, a big fire was burning in the middle of the stone floor. The smoke went up to the ceiling, and had to find its own way out. A big cauldron of soup was boiling, and hares and rabbits were roasting on the spit.

“You shall sleep here tonight with me and all my little pets tonight,” said the Robber Girl.

They got something to eat and drink, and then went over into a corner, where there were lying some straw and some carpets. Overhead, sitting on laths and perches, were nearly a hundred pigeons. They all seemed to be asleep, but they moved a little when the two little girls came.

“They are all mine,” said the little Robber Girl; and she quickly seized one of the nearest, held it by the feet, and shook it till it flapped its wings. “Kiss it!” she cried, and thrust it in Gerda’s face. “There sit rascals from the wood,” she went on, pointing to a number of laths that had been nailed in front of a hole high up in the wall. “Those are wood pigeons, those two; they fly away at once if one does not keep them properly shut up. And here’s my old sweetheart ‘Bae.’” And she dragged out by the horns a reindeer that was tied up and had a polished copper ring round its neck. “We have to keep him fast too, or he’d run away from us. Every evening I tickle his neck with my sharp knife, and that frightens him terribly!”

And the little girl drew a long knife out of a crack in the wall and let it slide over the reindeer’s neck. The poor animal kicked out with its legs, and the Robber Girl laughed, and pulled Gerda into bed with her.

“Do you keep the knife with you while you’re asleep?” asked Gerda, and looked at it rather frightened.

“I always sleep with my knife,” replied the Robber Girl. “One never knows what may happen. But tell me once again what you told me before about little Kay, and why you went out into the wide world.”

And Gerda told it all over again, and the wood pigeons cooed above them in their cage, and the other pigeons slept. The little Robber Girl put her arm round Gerda’s neck, held her knife in the other hand, and slept so that anyone could hear her. But Gerda could not close her eyes at all—she did not know whether she was to live or die.

The Robbers sat round the fire, sang, and drank, and the old Robber Woman turned somersaults. It was a terrible sight for the little girl to see.

Then the Wood Pigeons said, “Coo! coo! We have seen little Kay. A white hen was carrying his sled. He sat in the Snow Queen’s sledge, which drove close by the forest as we lay in our nests. She blew upon us young pigeons, and all died except us two. Coo! coo!”

“What are you saying up there?” asked Gerda. “Where was the Snow Queen going? Do you know anything about it?”

“She was probably going to Lapland, where there’s always ice and snow. Ask the Reindeer that is tied up with the rope.”

“Yes, there is always snow and ice there, it is glorious and fine!” said the Reindeer. “There one runs free in the wide glittering valleys! There the Snow Queen has her summer tent; but her stronghold is up nearer the North Pole, on the island they call Spitzbergen.”

“Oh, Kay, little Kay!” sighed Gerda.

“Lie still, or I shall stick the knife into you!” said the Robber Girl.

In the morning Gerda told her all that the Wood Pigeons had said, and the robber girl looked very serious, and nodded her head, and said:

“No matter, no matter! Do you know where Lapland is?” she asked the Reindeer.

“Who should know better than I?” said the animal, and its eyes shone in its head. “There was I born and bred! There have I leaped about over the snowfields!”

“Listen!” said the Robber Girl to Gerda. “You see all our menfolk have gone. Only mother is here still, and she’ll stay; but towards noon she drinks out of the big bottle, and then she sleeps for a little; then I’ll do something for you.”

Then she sprang out of bed, and clasped her mother round the neck and pulled her beard, saying: “Good morning, my own dear nanny-goat!” And her mother tweaked her nose till it was red and blue; but that was all done out of pure love.

When the mother had drunk out of her bottle and was taking a little nap, the Robber Girl went to the Reindeer, and said:

“I should like very much to tickle you a few times more with the knife, for then you are so funny; but never mind. I’ll untie your rope and set you free, so that you may run to Lapland; but you must use your legs well, and carry this little girl to the palace of the Snow Queen, where her playmate is. You’ve heard what she told me, for she spoke loud enough, and you were listening.”

The Reindeer jumped high for joy. The Robber Girl lifted little Gerda up, and had the sense to tie her on, and even to give her her own little cushion to sit on. “It doesn’t matter,” said she, “and there are your fur boots for you, for it’s growing cold; but I shall keep the muff, for it’s so very pretty. Still, you shall not freeze, for all that: here are my mother’s big mittens—they’ll reach right up to your elbows. Put them on! Now your hands look just like my ugly mother’s!”

And Gerda wept for joy.

“I can’t bear to see you whimpering,” said the little Robber Girl. “You ought to be looking delighted! And here are two loaves and a ham for you, so you need not starve.”

These were tied on the Reindeer’s back. The little Robber Girl opened the door, called in all the big dogs, and then cut the rope with her knife, and said to the Reindeer, “Now run, but take good care of the little girl!”

And Gerda stretched out her hands, with the big mittens, towards the little Robber Girl, and said, “Farewell!”

And off flew the Reindeer over stumps and stones, away through the great forest, over marshes and steppes, as fast as it could go. The wolves howled and the ravens croaked. “Hiss! hiss!” went the air, while up in the sky red lights quivered like flames of fire.

“Those are my old Northern Lights,” said the Reindeer. “Look how they flash!” And then he ran on faster than ever, day and night. The loaves were eaten, and the ham too, and now they reached Lapland.

SIXTH STORY

THE LAPP WOMAN AND THE FINN WOMAN

At a little hut they stopped. It was very humble; the roof sloped right down to the ground, and the door was so low that the family had to creep on their stomachs when they wanted to go in or out. No one was in the house but an old Lapp woman, cooking fish over an oil lamp; and the Reindeer told her all Gerda’s history, but his own first, for that seemed the more important, and Gerda was so numbed with cold that she could not speak.

“Oh, you poor creatures!” said the Lapp woman. “You’ve a long way to run yet! You must go more than a hundred miles into Finmark, for the Snow Queen is there, staying in the country, and burning blue lights every evening. I’ll write a few words on a dried codfish, for I have no paper, and I’ll give you that to take to the Finn woman up there. She can give you better information than I can.”

And when little Gerda had been warmed, and had had something to eat and drink, the Lapp woman wrote a few words on a dried codfish, bidding Gerda to take good care of it, tied her on the Reindeer again, and away they went. Flash! flash! went the beautiful blue Northern Lights all night long.

At last they got to Finmark, and knocked at the chimney of the Finn woman, for she had no door at all.

There was such a heat inside that the Finn woman herself went about almost naked. She was little and very grimy. She at once loosened little Gerda’s things and took off her mittens and boots, or else it would have been too hot for her. Next she laid a piece of ice on the reindeer’s head, and read what was written on the codfish. She read it three times, and then she knew it by heart; so she put the fish into the soup-kettle, for it was good to eat, and she never wasted anything.

And then the reindeer told his own history first, and little Gerda’s after, and the Finn woman blinked with her wise eyes, but said nothing at all.

“You are so clever,” said the Reindeer. “I know you can tie all the winds of the world together with a bit of thread; if the seaman undoes one knot he has a good wind; if he undoes the second it blows hard; but if he undoes the third and the fourth there comes such a tempest that the forests are blown down. Will you not give the little girl a draught, so that she may get twelve men’s strength, and overcome the Snow Queen?”

“Twelve men’s strength!” said the Finn woman. “Much good that would be!”

But she went to a shelf and took down and unrolled a large skin. Strange characters were written upon it, and the Finn woman read until the perspiration ran down her forehead.

But the Reindeer begged again so hard for little Gerda, and Gerda looked at the Finn woman with beseeching eyes so full of tears, that she began to blink with her own, and drew the Reindeer into a corner, and whispered to him, while she laid fresh ice upon his head:

“Little Kay is certainly at the Snow Queen’s, and finds everything there to his taste and liking, and thinks it the best place in the world; but that is because he has a splinter of glass in his eye and a little grain of glass in his heart. These must be got out, or he will never be human again, and the Snow Queen will keep her power over him.”

“But can’t you give little Gerda something that will give her power to conquer all this?”

“I can give her no greater power than she has already. Don’t you see how great that is? Don’t you see how man and beast are obliged to serve her, and how with her bare feet she has got on so well in the world? She must not be told of her power by us: it is in her heart, and there it will remain, because she is such a dear innocent child. If she herself cannot reach the Snow Queen and remove the bits of glass from little Kay, we can’t help her! Two miles from here the Snow Queen’s garden begins; you can carry the little girl that far. Then set her down by the big bush with the red berries that stands in the snow. Don’t stand there gossiping, but hurry back here again!”

And the Finn woman lifted little Gerda on to the reindeer, who ran off as fast as he could.

“Oh, I have left my boots! I have left my mittens!” cried Gerda, as soon as she felt the biting cold. But the Reindeer dared not stop: he ran on till he came to the bush with the red berries. There he put Gerda down, and kissed her on the mouth. Big bright tears ran down the creature’s cheeks; and then he ran back, as fast as he could. There stood poor Gerda without shoes, without gloves, in the midst of the terrible icy Finmark.

She ran on as fast as she could; then she was met by a whole regiment of snowflakes; but they did not fall from the sky, for that was quite bright, and shone with the Northern Lights. The snowflakes ran along the ground, and the nearer they came the larger they grew. Gerda still remembered how large and curious the snowflakes had appeared when she looked at them through the burning-glass. But here they were far larger and much more terrible—they were alive! They were the Snow Queen’s advance guard and had the strangest shapes. Some looked like ugly great porcupines, others like knots of snakes, that stretched out their heads, and others like little fat bears whose hair stood on end. All were dazzling white: all were living snowflakes.

Then little Gerda said the Lord’s Prayer; and the cold was so great that she could see her own breath, which came out of her mouth like smoke. Her breath became thicker and thicker, and formed itself into little bright angels, who grew and grew as soon as they touched the earth. All had helmets on their heads and shields and spears in their hands. Their number increased more and more, and when Gerda had finished her prayer, a whole legion stood round about her, and thrust their spears at the terrible snowflakes, so that these were shattered into a hundred pieces. Little Gerda could now go safely and fearlessly on her way. The angels rubbed her hands and feet, and then she did not feel the cold so much, and she hurried on to the Snow Queen’s palace.

But now we will see what Kay is doing. He certainly is not thinking of little Gerda, and least of all that she is standing in front of the palace.

SEVENTH STORY

OF THE SNOW QUEEN’S CASTLE AND WHAT HAPPENED THERE AT LAST

The walls of the palace were made of the drifting snow, and the windows and doors of the cutting winds. There were more than a hundred halls, all just as the snow had drifted. The largest of them extended for several miles; they were all lit up by the strong Northern Lights, and how wide and empty, how icy cold and glittering they all were! There never was any merriment there, not even a little bears’ ball, at which the storm could have played the music, while the polar bears walked about on their hind legs and showed off their pretty manners; never any little games of kiss-in-the-ring or touch-last; never any little coffee parties among the young lady arctic foxes. Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen. The Northern Lights flamed so brightly that they could be counted both when they were highest in the sky and when they were lowest. In the middle of this empty endless snow hall was a frozen lake. It had cracked into a thousand pieces, but each piece was so exactly like the rest that it was a perfect work of art. In the middle of the lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home, and then she said that she sat on the Mirror of Reason, and that this was the only one, and the best in the world.

Little Kay was quite blue with cold—indeed, nearly black; but he did not feel it, for she had kissed away his icy shiverings, and his heart was like a lump of ice. He was dragging some sharp flat pieces of ice to and fro, joining them together in all kinds of ways, for he wanted to make something out of them. It was just like when we have little tablets of wood, with which we make patterns, and call them a “Chinese puzzle.” Kay was making patterns too—and very artistic ones. It was the Ice Puzzle of Reason. In his eyes the patterns were very remarkable and of the highest importance; that was because of the speck of glass in his eye. He laid out whole patterns, so that they formed words—but he could never manage to make the word he wanted—the word “eternity.”

The Snow Queen had said: “If you can make that word, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.”

But he could not.

“Now I must fly away to warm countries,” said the Snow Queen. “I will go and peep into the black cauldrons.” She meant the volcanoes Etna and Vesuvius, as they are called. “I’ll whiten them a little. That’s necessary; it will be good for the lemons and the grapes.”

And away flew the Snow Queen, and Kay sat all alone in the great empty mile-long ice hall and gazed at his pieces of ice, and thought and thought till crackles were heard inside him. He sat so stiff and immovable that one might have thought he was frozen.

It was then that little Gerda entered the castle by the great gate. Here cutting winds kept guard, but she said the evening prayer, and the winds dropped as if they wanted to go to sleep; and she went on into the great empty cold halls, and she saw Kay. She recognized him, and flew to him, and embraced him, and held him fast, and called out:

“Kay, dear little Kay! At last I have found you!”

But he sat quite still, stiff and cold. Then little Gerda wept hot tears, which fell upon his breast. They penetrated into his heart, they thawed the lump of ice, and melted the little piece of glass in it. He looked at her, and she sang the hymn:

Roses fade and die, but we

Our Infant Lord shall surely see.

Then Kay burst into tears. He wept so that the splinter of glass was washed out of his eye. And then he knew her, and cried joyfully: “Gerda, dear little Gerda! Where have you been all this time? And where have I been?” And he looked all around him. “How cold it is here! How empty and vast!”

And he held fast to Gerda, and she laughed and wept for joy. There was such joy that even the pieces of ice danced about them; and when they were tired and lay down again they formed themselves into the very letters the Snow Queen meant when she said that if he found them out he should be his own master, and she would give him the whole world and a new pair of skates.

And Gerda kissed his cheeks, and they became blooming. She kissed his eves, and they shone like her own. She kissed his hands and feet, and he became well and merry. The Snow Queen might come home now; there stood his discharge, written in shining blocks of ice.

And they took each other by the hand and went out of the great palace. They talked of the grandmother, and of the roses on the roof; and wherever they went the winds sank to rest and the sun came out; and when they came to the bush with the red berries, the Reindeer was standing there waiting. He had brought with him another young Reindeer, whose udder was full, and who gave the children warm milk and kissed them on the mouth. Then they carried Kay and Gerda, first to the Finn woman, where they warmed themselves thoroughly in the hot room, and received instructions for their journey home, and then to the Lapp woman, who had made clothes for them and got their sledge ready for them.

The Reindeer and the young one ran free by their side, and followed them as far as the boundary of the country, where the first green leaves were budding. There Kay and Gerda took leave of the two reindeer and the Lapp woman. “Farewell!” they all said. And once more they heard the birds twitter and saw the forest all decked with green buds. Out of it came riding a young girl on a splendid horse, which Gerda knew, for it had drawn her golden coach. She had a bright red cap on her head and pistols in her belt. It was the little Robber Girl, who had grown tired of staying at home, and wished first to go north and, if she didn’t like that, then somewhere else. She knew Gerda at once, and Gerda knew her too; it was a joyful meeting.

“You are a fine fellow to go gadding about!” she said to little Kay. “I should like to know whether you deserve that anybody should run to the end of the world after you!”

But Gerda patted her cheeks, and asked after the Prince and Princess.

“They’ve gone to foreign countries,” said the Robber Girl.

“But the Crow?” said Gerda.

“Why, the Crow is dead,” answered the other. “The tame sweetheart has become a widow, and goes about with a bit of black worsted round her leg. She complains most sadly, but it’s all talk. But now tell me how you have fared, and how you got hold of him.”

And Gerda and Kay told their story.

“Snip-snap-snurre-basselurre! it’s all right at last then!” said the Robber Girl. And she took them both by the hand, and promised that if she ever came through their town she would come and pay them a visit. And then she rode away into the wide world.

Gerda and Kay went hand in hand, and as they went the spring became lovely with flowers and green leaves. The church bells rang, and they recognized the high steeples and the great town in which they lived. On they went to their grandmother’s door, and up the stairs, and into the room, where everything stood in the same place as before. The big clock was going “Tick! tick!” and the hands moved; but as they went in through the door they noticed that they had become grown-up people. The roses out on the roof gutter were blooming at the open window, and there stood their little children’s stools, and Kay and Gerda sat down, each on their own, and held each other by the hand. They had forgotten the cold empty grandeur of the Snow Queen’s castle like a bad dream. Grandmother was sitting in God’s bright sunshine, and read aloud from the Bible, “Except ye become as little children,ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And Kay and Gerda looked into each other’s eyes, and all at once they understood the old hymn:

Roses fade and die, but we

Our Infant Lord shall surely see.

There they both sat, grown up and yet children—children at heart—and it was summer, warm lovely summer.

[ 1845 ]

The Marsh King’s Daughter

—

The storks tell their little ones a good many tales about the moor and marsh. As a rule these are suited to the age and understanding of the hearers; the very youngest are satisfied if they have “cribble, crabble, plooramoora” said to them, and think it an excellent story, but the elder ones want something with a deeper meaning, or at least something to do with their own family. Of the two oldest and longest tales which have been preserved among the storks, one is known to all of us—that of Moses, whom his mother placed in the Nile, and who was found by the King’s daughter, received a good education and became a great man, and of whom it was afterwards not known where he was buried. That is a well-known story.

The second tale is still unknown, perhaps because it is almost an inland one. It has been handed down for thousands of years, from mouth to mouth, from stork-mamma to stork-mamma, and each of them has told it better and better, till at last we shall tell it best of all.

The first Stork-pair who told it, and who really took part in it, had their summer residence on the wooden house of the Viking, which stands on the wild heath in Wendsyssel; that is to say, if we wish to speak out of the abundance of our knowledge, hard by the great moor in the district of Hjörring, up by the Skagen, the northern point of Jutland. It is said that, once upon a time, this all formed part of the sea, but that there had been an upheaval; the moorland now extends for miles on all sides, surrounded by damp meadows and treacherous swamps, by turf-bogs covered with blackberries and stunted trees. There is always a mist floating over this region, and seventy years ago it was still inhabited by wolves. It is fitly called the “Wild Moor,” and one can easily think how dreary and impassable it must have been, and how much marsh and lake there was a thousand years ago. In detail there was exactly the same to be seen here as there is still: the reeds were of the same height, and bore the same kind of long leaves and bluish-brown feathery plumes that they do now; the birch stood there with its white bark and its fine loosely hanging leaves just as it does now; and as regards the living creatures that dwelt here—well, the fly wore its gauzy dress of the same cut as now, and the favourite colours of the stork were white and black, with red stockings. The people, on the other hand, wore coats cut differently from those of today, but everyone who strode across the treacherous moorland, were he huntsman or follower, master or servant, shared the same fate a thousand years ago as befalls those who venture on it today. He sank and went down to the Marsh King, as they called him, who ruled down in the great moor kingdom. “Gungel-king” or Quagmire King he was also called, but we like the name Marsh King better, and that is what the storks call him too. Very little is known of the Marsh King’s rule, but perhaps that is a good thing.

Near the moorland, hard by the great arm of the sea that stretches from the German Ocean and the Kattegat, and which is called the Lym Fjord, stood the wooden house of the Viking, with its stone water-tight cellars, its tower, and its three projecting stories. The Stork had built his nest on the roof, and there Stork-mamma hatched her eggs, and was certain that her sitting would come to something.

One evening Stork-papa stayed out rather late, and when he came home he looked very excited and flurried.

“I have something horrible to tell you!” he said to Stork-mamma.

“Well, don’t!” she said; “remember that I am hatching eggs, and you might agitate me; and that has an effect on the eggs.”

“You must hear it,” he continued. “She has arrived—the daughter of our Egyptian host. She has ventured to make the journey here—and she’s gone!”

“She who sprang from the race of the fairies! Do tell me all about it! You know that I cannot bear to be kept long in suspense when I’m hatching eggs.”

“You see, mother, she after all believed what the doctor said and what you told me; she believed that the moor flowers here would heal her sick father, so she flew here in swan’s feathers in company with the other Swan Princesses who come to the North every year to make themselves younger. She has come here, and she is gone!”

“You are much too long-winded!” said Stork-mamma; “the eggs might catch cold. I can’t bear to be kept in such suspense.”

“I have been watching,” continued Stork-papa; “and this evening, as I went into the reeds, there where the marsh ground will bear me, three swans approached. Something in their flight seemed to say to me, ‘Look out! that’s not altogether a swan, that’s only a swan’s feathers!’ Yes, mother, I am just like you—you know whether a thing is right or wrong.”

“Certainly,” she said; “but tell me about the princess; I have heard enough about the swan’s feathers.”

“Here, in the middle of the moor, there’s something like a lake, you know,” said Stork-papa. “You can see a bit of it if you raise yourself a little. There, by the reeds and the green slime, lay a great alder stump; upon this the three swans sat down, flapped their wings, and looked about themselves. One of them cast her swan’s feathers off, and I immediately recognised her as the Princess from our house in Egypt. There she sat with no other covering than her long black hair; I heard her beg the two others to look after the swan’s feathers while she dived down into the water to pluck the flower that she thought she saw there. The others nodded, picked up the empty feather dress and took it on their backs. ‘Hallo! I wonder what they are going to do with it!’ I thought, and she probably thought the same. She got an answer, too, a practical answer—both rose and flew away with her swan’s plumage. ‘Dive down,’ they cried. ‘You will never see Egypt again; stay here in the moor.’ And with that they tore the swan’s plumage into a thousand pieces, so that the feathers whirled about like a snow-storm—and then away they flew, the two faithless Princesses!”

“That is indeed terrible!” said Stork-mamma; “I can’t bear to hear any more of it—but do tell me what happened next.”

“The Princess wept and wailed aloud; and her tears falling on the alder stump, the latter rose, for it was not a real alder stump, but the Marsh King, he who lives and rules in the depths of the moor. I saw it myself—how the tree-stump turned itself round, and then it was no longer a tree-stump: it stretched out its long slimy branches like arms. At this the poor child was terribly frightened, and jumped up and ran away. She hurried across the green slimy marsh, but that will not bear even me, much less her; she sank immediately, and the alder stump dived down too—it was he that dragged her down. Great black bubbles rose up out of the slimy swamp, and then every trace of them vanished. Now the Princess is buried in the wild moor, and will never take a flower to Egypt. Your heart would have broken to see it, mother!”

“You ought not to tell me anything of this sort at such a time; it might have a bad effect on the eggs. The Princess will soon find some means of escape. Someone is sure to help her. Now if it had been you or I, or even any of our family, it would have been all over with us!”

“But still I shall go and see every day whether anything happens,” said Stork-papa; and so he did.

A long time passed, when one day he saw a green stalk shooting up out of the deep marsh. As soon as it reached the surface of the water, a leaf sprang forth and grew broader and broader. Close by it a bud appeared, and as Stork-papa flew over the stalk one morning the bud opened by the power of the strong sunbeams, and in the cup of the flower lay a beautiful child—a little girl—looking as if she had just come out of a bath.

The little girl resembled the Egyptian Princess so much that for the first moment or two the Stork really thought it was she, but on second thought it seemed to him more probable that it must be the daughter of the princess and the Marsh King, and that was why she lay in the cup of the water-lily.

“But she cannot possibly remain lying there,” thought Stork papa, “and in my nest there are too many persons already. But I have an idea! The Viking’s wife has no children, and how often she has wished to have a little child! They always say that the stork brings the little children, and now I will do so for once in real earnest. I’ll fly with the child to the Viking’s wife—what rejoicing there will be!”

So the Stork lifted the little girl out of the flower, flew to the wooden house, and picking a hole in the window with his beak, laid the charming child in the arms of the Viking’s wife; then he flew to Stork-mamma and told her what he had seen and done, and the little storks listened too, for they were big enough to do so.

“So you see, the Princess is not dead, she has sent the little one up here, and now it is provided for.”

“I said so from the first!” cried Stork-mamma; “but now just think a little of your own family. The time for our departure is drawing near. I already begin to feel an itching in my wings. The cuckoo and the nightingale have already gone, and I heard the quails say that they would be off too, as soon as the wind was favourable. Our little ones will get through the autumn manoeuvres well enough unless I am mistaken in them.”

The Viking’s wife was overjoyed when she woke next morning and found the dear little child in her arms. She kissed and caressed the infant, but it cried terribly and struggled and kicked, appearing not to be at all pleased. At last it cried itself to sleep, and as it lay there so still, it looked wonderfully beautiful. The Viking’s wife was extremely pleased, and felt light in body and soul; her heart bounded within her, and she felt that her husband and his men who were absent would return as unexpectedly and as suddenly as the child had come.

She and the whole household had therefore enough to do in preparing everything for the reception of her lord. The long coloured tapestries which she and her maids had themselves worked, and into which they had woven images of their deities—Odin, Thor, and Freia—were hung up; the slaves polished the old shields that served as ornaments, and cushions were placed on the benches, and dry wood laid on the fireplace in the middle of the hall, so that the flame might be kindled in a moment. The Viking’s wife herself set to work too, so that she was very tired when evening came, and soon fell asleep.

When she awoke early in the morning, she was terribly startled to find the child vanished. She jumped up from her couch, lit a pine torch, and looked all round the room; and behold! on that part of the couch where her feet had rested, lay, not the child, but a great ugly frog. At this sight a horrible feeling came over her; she seized a heavy stick to kill the frog; but it looked at her with such strangely mournful eyes that she could not strike the blow. Once more she looked all round the room while the frog croaked in a low feeble manner. The sound made her shudder; and springing from her couch, she ran to the little shutter that served as a window and quickly flung it open. At that moment the sun shone forth, and cast its beams through the opening on to the couch and upon the big frog, and suddenly—behold! it seemed as if the wide mouth contracted and became small and rosy, the limbs moved and stretched, and took their lovely shape, and it was her own sweet little child that lay there and no hideous frog.

“What is this?” she said; “have I had a bad dream? Surely it is my own lovely cherub that is lying there!” and she kissed her and pressed her to her heart, but the child kicked and struggled, and bit like a little wild cat.

Not on that day nor on the following one did the Viking return, although he was certainly on his way home; but the wind was against him, blowing towards the south favourably for the storks. A favourable wind for one is a contrary wind for another.

After a few days and nights had passed, it became clear to the Viking’s wife that her child was under a terrible spell. During the day she was as beautiful as a little fairy, though she had a bad savage temper; at night, however, she was a hideous frog, quiet and mournful, with sorrowful eyes. Here were two natures which changed inwardly as well as outwardly with the sunlight; this was because by day the little girl had the outer form of her real mother, but the disposition of her father—at night, on the contrary, her paternal descent made itself visible in the shape of her body, while the mind and heart of her mother became dominant within her. Who would be able to break this spell that some wicked witchcraft had wrought?

The Viking’s wife was in great sorrow and trouble about it, and still her heart clung to the little creature of whose condition she felt she would not dare to tell her husband on his return; for
he would probably, according to the custom of those times, have the child put out upon the highway, so that anyone who liked might take it. The good Viking’s wife could not find it in her heart to let this happen, so she resolved that the Viking should only see the child in bright daylight.

One morning there was a great rustling of stork’s wings up on the roof; more than a hundred pairs of storks had rested there from the grand manoeuvres, and were now soaring up to travel towards the south.

“All the males fall in!” was the order; “wives and children too!”

“How light we feel!” cried the young Storks in chorus; “we are itching down to our very toes, as if we were filled with nothing but live frogs. Oh, how beautiful it is to go travelling abroad.”

“Mind you keep close to us as you fly,” cried papa and mamma. “Don’t open your mouth so much, it’s bad for the chest.”

And away flew the Storks.

At the same moment the blast of the war trumpets sounded across the heath—the Viking had landed with his warriors. They were returning home richly laden with booty, from the Gallic court, where the people, as in the land of the Britons, sang in terror:

“Deliver us from the wild Northmen!”

Life and boisterous merriment now entered the Viking’s castle on the moorland. The great cask of mead was carried into the hall, the pile of wood was set alight, and horses were killed; there was to be a great feast. The priest who offered up the sacrifices sprinkled the slaves with the warm blood to consecrate them, the fire crackled, the smoke curled up to the roof and the soot fell in flakes from the rafters; but they were used to all that. The guests were invited and received handsome presents; quarrels and treachery were forgotten. The company drank deep and threw the bones into each other’s faces—that was a sign of good humour. The Skald, a kind of minstrel—who, however, was also a warrior and who, having taken part in the Viking’s expedition knew of what he was singing—sang a song in which all heard their warlike deeds recounted, and in which special praise was given to each. Every verse ended with the refrain:

Gold and possessions will flee away,

Friends and foes must die one day;

Every man on earth must die,

But a glorious name will never die.

With that, they beat their shields, and hammered the table with knives and bones, till the walls rang again.

The Viking’s wife sat upon the dais in the great hall where they feasted; she wore a silken dress, gold armlets and great amber beads. She was in grand array, and the singer mentioned her too in his song, and spoke of the treasure of gold that she had brought her rich husband. The latter was heartily delighted with the lovely child, which he had only seen in the daytime in all her loveliness, and the savage ways of the little creature pleased him especially. He said that the girl might grow up into a powerful woman of doughty deeds who would stand by her husband. She would not even blink if a practised hand were to strike off her eyebrows with a sharp sword by way of a jest.

The cask of mead was emptied and a fresh one brought in, for these were people who liked to enjoy everything in plenty. They certainly knew the old proverb—“The cattle know when they must leave the pastures, but a foolish man knoweth not the measure of his own stomach”—oh yes! they knew all about that; but one knows one thing and does another. They also knew that “even the welcome guest may outstay his welcome,” but still they sat there, for bacon and mead are good things; all went merrily, and at night the serfs slept in the warm ashes, and dipped their fingers in the sooty grease and licked them. These were the good old times!

Once more that year the Viking went forth, even though the autumn storms were already beginning to blow. He went with his men to the shores of Britain, calling that a mere pleasure trip across the water, and his wife remained behind with the little girl. This much is certain, that the foster-mother soon got to love the poor frog with the gentle eyes and deep sighs almost more than the beauty who struck out and bit.

The raw damp autumn mist which kills the leaves in the wood already lay upon heath and forest. “Birds Featherless,” as the snow is called, fell in heavy masses, and winter was fast coming on. The sparrows took possession of the stork’s nests and talked about the absent owners in their own fashion; but the Stork-pair and their little ones—what, indeed, had become of them?

The Storks were now in the land of Egypt, where the sun sent out its warm rays as it does with us on a fine midsummer day. Tamarinds and acacias bloomed all over the country, and Mahomet’s crescent shone brightly down from the cupolas of the temples, where, upon the slender minarets, sat many a stork pair resting after their long journey. Great flocks divided among themselves the nests which lay close to each other on venerable pillars, and on the ruined temple arches of forgotten cities. The date-palm lifted its screen on high as if it wanted to be a sun shade; the greyish Pyramids stood out like shadows in the clear air of the distant desert where the ostrich sped swiftly along, and the lion gazed with his great grave eyes at the marble Sphinx that lay half buried in the sand. The waters of the Nile had receded, and the whole river bed was swarming with frogs, a sight that was exactly suited to the taste of the Stork family. The young ones thought it was an optical illusion, so delightful did they think everything.

“That’s how it is here, and that’s how we always live in our warm country,” said Stork-mamma, and the young ones felt their mouths water.

“Is there anything more to be seen?” they asked; “can we go any farther in the land?”

“There’s nothing more to be seen there!” answered Stork-mamma. “Beyond this district there are only immense forests whose branches grow entwined, whilst prickly, trailing plants bar one’s steps on all sides; there only the elephant with his clumsy feet can make a path for himself, and the snakes there are too large, and the lizards too quick for us. If you want to go to the desert, you’ll get your eyes full of sand at the best of times, but if it blows great guns you will be enveloped in a pillar of sand. Here it is best. Here there are frogs and locusts. Here I shall stay, and you too!”

And they stayed there. The parents sat in the nest which rested on the slender minaret, and at the same time busily occupying themselves in smoothing and cleaning their feathers, and in whet ting their beaks on their red stockings. Now and then they stretched out their necks and bowed gravely, lifting their heads with their high foreheads and fine smooth feathers, out of which their brown eyes peeped wisely forth. The young females strutted about among the juicy reeds, glanced slyly at the other young storks, made acquaintances, and gulped down a frog at every third step, or dangled a little snake at the end of their beaks; this they thought looked pretty, besides tasting nice. The young males picked quarrels, beat each other with their wings, hacked away with their beaks, and even stabbed each other till the blood gushed forth. In this way, soon this and then that couple from among the young ladies and gentlemen was engaged, and that was just what they wanted, and their only object in life; then they occupied a new nest, and soon got into fresh quarrels, for in warm countries everybody is hot-tempered and hasty. But still it was very pleasant, and the old people especially were delighted, for whatever the young ones do is so prettily done. There was sunshine every day, and plenty to eat; there was nothing but pleasure to think of. But in the rich castle, at the Egyptian host’s, as they called him, there was no pleasure to be found.

The rich and mighty lord reclined upon his couch in the middle of the great hall with the gaily painted walls—it seemed as if he were lying in a tulip; but he was stiff and crippled in all his limbs, and lay stretched out like a mummy. His family and servants stood around him; he was not dead, but he could hardly be said to be alive. The healing marsh flower from the north, which was to have been sought and brought home by those who loved him most dearly, never came. His beautiful young daughter who had flown in swan’s feathers across sea and land, far up into the north, was never to return.

“She is dead for ever,” the two Swan-maidens had said on their return, and they had made up a story which ran as follows:

“We three together,” they said, “flew high up into the air. A hunter saw us, and shot an arrow at us; it hit our young friend and sister; and singing her farewell song, she slowly sank down, a dying swan, into the woodland lake. On the shore of the lake, under a weeping birch tree, we laid her in the cold earth. But we had our revenge. We bound some fire under the wings of the swallow who had its nest beneath the thatched roof of the hunter; the house burst into flames, and the hunter was burned with the house. The blaze could be seen right across the lake, as far as the weeping birch, where she now lies in the earth. She will never return to the land of Egypt.”

Thereupon the two wept; and when Stork-papa heard the story, he rattled his beak, so that it could be heard a long way off.

“All lies and deception!” he cried; “I should like to run my beak deep into their breasts.”

“And perhaps break it off!” added Stork-mamma; “then you would look well. Think of yourself first, and then of your family—the rest doesn’t concern us.”

“Still, I’ll sit on the edge of the open cupola tomorrow when the wise and learned men assemble to deliberate upon the sick man’s condition; perhaps they’ll get a little nearer the truth.”

The wise and learned men came together and talked a great deal upon all kinds of things out of which the Stork could make no sense, and nothing came of it either for the sick man or for the daughter in the marshy moor. But still we will just hear what they had to say, for we have to listen to so much in this world.

It would, however, be as well to hear what had happened years before, for then we shall be better versed in the matter, and will know at least as much as Stork-papa.

•  •  •

“Love begets life! The highest love begets the highest life! Only by love can this life be saved!”

This is what had been said; and it was very wisely and beautifully said, thought the learned men.

“That is a beautiful idea!” Stork-papa immediately said.

“I don’t quite understand it,” replied Stork-mamma, “and that is not my fault, but that of the idea; but let that be as it may, I have something else to think of.”

Then the learned men had spoken of the love for this and the other, and the distinction between such love and that which lovers feel—and of that existing between parents and children, and of the love of light for the plants when the sunbeam kisses the earth and the plants sprout forth—it was all so elaborately and learnedly expounded that it was an impossibility for Stork-papa to follow it, let alone repeat it. He became quite full of thought about it, half-closed his eyes, and stood on one leg the whole of the following day thinking: the burden of all that learning quite weighed him down.

But one thing Stork-papa understood. All, high and low, had spoken out of their inmost heart and said that it was a great misfortune for thousands of people, indeed for the whole country, that this man was lying there ill and could not be cured, and that it would spread joy and blessings if he were to recover. But where did the flower grow which could bring him health? They had all searched for it in learned books, in twinkling stars, in storm and wind; they had searched for it in every byway they could think of, and at last the sages and the learned men, as we have already Said, had concluded that “Love begets life, even the life of a father;” in this they had surpassed themselves, and said more than they understood. Then they repeated it, and wrote down as a prescription “Love begets life.” But how the mixture which had been prescribed was to be prepared—that was a difficulty they could not get past. At last they agreed that help must come through the Princess, through her who clung to her father with her whole soul, and they even devised how the difficulty was to be overcome. Yes, days and years had now passed since that night when the Princess had betaken herself by the waning light of the new moon’s brief rays to the marble Sphinx, had scraped away the sand from the pedestal, and had gone through the long passage that leads into the depths of one of the great pyramids where one of the mighty kings of old, surrounded by splendour and glory, lies in the wrappings of a mummy. There she was to place her head on the dead king’s breast, and then it would be made clear to her where life and health for her father were to be found.

All this she had accomplished, and had learned in a dream that she must bring home from the deep lake on the moorland heath, far north in the land of Denmark—the very spot had been accurately described to her—the lotus flower that takes root in the depths of the water, and that by this her father would be healed. She had therefore flown in swan’s plumage from the land of Egypt to the heath, to the wild moor.

Do you see? all this Stork-papa and Stork-mamma knew, and now we also know more about it than we did before. We know that the Marsh King drew her down to himself, and know too that she is dead forever to her loved ones at home. One of the wisest men among them, too, said just what Stork-mamma did, “She will be able to get herself out of the difficulty,” and with that they resolved to be satisfied and wait for what might turn up, for they knew of nothing better to do.

“I should like to get away the swan’s feathers from the two faithless Princesses,” said Stork-papa; “then at least they would not be able to fly up to the wild moor again and do mischief. I could hide the two suits of swan’s feathers up there, till someone has a use for them.”

“But where will you hide them?” asked Stork-mamma.

“Up in our nest on the wild moor,” he replied. “I and our young ones will take it in turns to carry them along with us on our flight, and if they are too heavy for us, there are plenty of places on the way where we can hide them till our next journey. One suit of swan’s plumage would certainly be sufficient for the princess, but two are always better. In those northern countries one cannot have too many clothes when travelling.”

“No one will thank you for it,” said Stork-mamma, “but you are master. Except at hatching-time I have nothing to say.”

•  •  •

In the Viking’s castle on the wild moor, whither the storks directed their flight when spring approached, they had given the little girl the name of Helga; but this name was far too soft for a temper such as was wrapped up in the most beauteous form. Every month this temper showed itself in sharper outlines, and in the course of years, during which the Storks were continually making the same journey—in autumn to the Nile, and in spring to the moorland lake—the child grew up into a big girl; and before anyone was aware of it, she was a lovely maiden of sixteen. The shell was beautiful, but the kernel was hard and harsh; harder even than most were in those stern, dark days.

She took a pleasure in sprinkling with her white hands the foaming blood of the horses killed for the sacrifices; in her wild moments she would bite off the head of the black cock that the high priest was about to kill, and to her foster-father she said in full earnest:

“If your enemies were to tear down the roof of your house, while you lay heedlessly buried in sleep, and I were to see or hear it, I would not wake you, even if I could. I could never bring myself to do so, for my ears are still burning with the blow that you—yes, you—gave me years ago. I have not forgotten it.”

But the Viking thought she spoke in jest; for, like all others, he was bewitched by her beauty, and did not know that Helga’s temper and form changed, or how, without a saddle, she sat like a statue upon her horse as it rushed along on its wild career, and she did not dismount even when it fought with other horses. She would often plunge from the steep banks, dressed as she was, into the rushing stream, and swim down the bay to meet the Viking when his boat steered for home. She would cut off the longest lock of her beautiful hair and plait it into a string for her bow.

“Self-made is well-made!” she would say.

The Viking’s wife possessed a strong will and character, even for those days, but compared to her daughter she was like a weak, timid woman; she knew, however, that it was an evil charm that lay upon the unfortunate child.

Apparently from pure malice, Helga would frequently sit on the railings round the well, and when she saw her mother standing on the balcony or come into the courtyard, she would beat the air with arms and legs, and then suddenly slip down into the deep well; there with her frog-like nature, she would dive beneath the water, and rising, climb up like a cat, and come into the hall dripping with water, so that the green leaves strewn upon the floor floated in the stream that flowed from her.

One thing only imposed a check upon Helga, and that was the evening twilight. Then she would become quiet and thoughtful, and allow herself to be advised and guided, and at that time her inward feelings would draw her towards her mother. When the sun sank, and both the inner and the outer transformation took place, she sat there quiet and sad, shrivelled up into the form of a frog. Her body was indeed much larger than that of one of those animals, and it was therefore the more hideous to behold. She looked like a wretched dwarf with the head of a frog and with web-fingers. Her eyes wore a very mournful expression; voice she had none, only a hollow croak, almost like the sobs of a dreaming child. Then the Viking’s wife would take her on her lap, and forgetting the hideous form, gaze only into the mournful eyes, and say:

“I could almost wish that you were always my dumb frog-child; you are more terrible when you are clothed in beauty.”

And the Viking’s wife wrote Runic charms against witchcraft and disease, and threw them over the wretched girl; but no cure showed itself.

“It is hardly credible that she was so small, and that she lay in the cup of a water-lily,” said Stork-papa; “now she is quite grown up and the very cut-out of her Egyptian mother—ah! we shall never see her again. After all she was not able to get out of the difficulty, as you and the wise men said she would. Year in, year out, have I flown across the great moorland in all directions, but she never gave a sign that she lived. Yes, I’ll tell you now how every year, when I came here a few days before you to mend the nest, and to put this and that in order, I used to fly to and fro across the lake for a whole night, as if I were a bat or an owl, but all in vain. The two coats of swan’s feathers which I and the young ones dragged up here out of the Nile country have therefore not been used; we had trouble enough to carry them up here in three journeys, and now they lie here at the bottom of the nest, and should a fire break out someday, and the wooden house be burned, they would be lost.”

“And our good nest would be lost too,” exclaimed Stork-mamma; “you think less of that than of your wretched feathers and your moor-princess. You had better go down into the marsh and stay with her. You are a bad father to your own children; I said that as soon as I hatched our first brood. I only hope that neither we nor our young ones may get an arrow into our wings from that wild girl. Helga does not in the least know what she does. She might take into consideration that we have lived here longer than she has; we never forgot our obligations, and paid our tribute every year—a feather, an egg, and a young one, as we should. Do you think I still go down into the courtyard and wander about everywhere as I once used to do, and as I still do in Egypt, where I am almost a friend of the people, and that I can go so far as to peep into the pots and kettles as I do there? No, I sit up here till I get quite angry with her—the chit!—and I get angry with you too! You ought just to have left her lying in the water-lily; then she would have perished long ago.’

“You make yourself out worse than you are,” said Stork-papa. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

With that he gave a hop, and taking two vigorous strokes with his wings, stretched out his legs behind him, and flew, or rather sailed away, without moving his wings. He had already gone some distance when he took a powerful stroke. The sun shone brightly on his fine plumage, and his neck and head were stretched proudly forth—there was a swing and a go in his movements.

“After all, he’s handsomer than any of the others,” said Stork-mamma, “but I will not tell him so.”

•  •  •

The Viking came home early that autumn, laden with booty and bringing prisoners with him. Among these was a young Christian priest, one of those who despised the gods of the North.

There had been much talk of late, both in the hall and in the cottage, of the new religion which was spreading far and wide in the south, and which had indeed been brought as far as Hedeby on the Schlei by Saint Ansgarius. Even Helga had heard of the belief in the White Saviour, who had out of love for mankind laid down His life for their redemption; but with her it had all gone in at one ear and out of the other, as the saying is. It seemed as if she only understood the meaning of the word love when she lay crouching down in the locked chamber in the miserable form of a frog; but the Viking’s wife had heard the story, and the tidings of the Son of the one true God, and had been wondrously moved by it.

The men, on their return from their sea-voyages, had told of the splendid temples hewn out of beautiful stone, which had been erected to glorify Him whose service meant love. Some heavy vessels, artistically wrought out of massive gold, had been taken and brought home. The fragrance of spices still clung to them, for they were incense vessels, which the Christian priests swung before the altar, on which no blood flowed, but where the wine and the consecrated bread was changed into the blood of Him who had laid down his life for the sake of generations still unborn. They had taken the young Christian priest down into the deep dungeons of the castle, and had bound his hands and feet with strips of bark.

The Viking’s wife said that he was as beautiful to behold as Baldur, [99] and his distress touched her, but Helga declared that he ought to have cords drawn through his heels and be tied to the tails of wild oxen.

“Then I would let loose the dogs and—hurrah! over moor and marsh and across the heath! That would be a merry sight! And merrier still would it be to follow him in his course!”

But the Viking would not suffer him to die such a death; he intended to have him sacrificed on the morrow, on the death-stone in the grove as a despiser and foe of the high gods.

For the first time a human being was to be sacrificed here.

Helga begged for the privilege of sprinkling the images of the gods and the assembled people with the blood of the priest. She sharpened her glittering knife, and when one of the great fierce dogs that ran about the Viking’s castle sprang past her, she thrust the knife into his side. “Only to see if it’s sharp enough,” she said, and the Viking’s wife gazed mournfully at the wild wicked girl; and when night fell, and the beauty of form and soul exchanged places in her daughter, she spoke to Helga of her sorrow, in eloquent words that came from the depths of her grieved heart. The hideous frog, in the form of a monster, stood before her; and fixing upon her its sad brown eyes, listened to her words, and seemed to understand them with human intelligence.

“Never, not even to my lord and husband, has a word passed my lips of what I suffer through you,” said the Viking’s wife; “my heart is full of sorrow for you. Stronger and greater than I ever imagined is a mother’s love. But love never entered into your feelings—your heart is like the cold wet plants of the marsh.”

Then the miserable form trembled, and it seemed as if these words touched an invisible bond between the body and the soul, for great tears came into its eyes.

“Your time of trial will one day come.” said the Viking’s wife, “and it will be a terrible time for me too. It had been better if you had been put out on the highroad, and the night wind had lulled you to sleep.”

The Viking’s wife wept bitter tears, and went away in anger and sorrow, passing behind the skin which hung loose over the rafter and divided the hall.

The frog sat huddled up in a corner all alone. An unbroken stillness reigned; but at short intervals a half-stifled sigh escaped from Helga’s breast; it seemed as if a pain and a new life had been born in her heart. She took a step forward, listened, and then taking another step, grasped with her clumsy hands the heavy bar that was laid across the door. Softly and laboriously she pushed back the door, and just as softly did she draw the bolt that secured the latch, then seizing the flickering lamp that stood in the ante-chamber of the hall. It seemed as if a stronger will lent her power; she drew back the iron bolt from the trapdoor leading to the cellar, and crept down to the prisoner. He was asleep; she touched him with her cold clammy hand, and when he awoke and saw the hideous form, a shudder passed over him as if he had seen a ghost. Drawing her knife, she cut the cords that bound his hands and feet, and beckoned him to follow her.

He uttered some holy names, made the sign of the cross, and as the form remained motionless, he spoke as follows:

“Blessed are they who help the needy, for the Lord will deliver them in their hour of need! Who art thou? Whence this animal shape which yet is so full of kind merry?’

The frog-woman beckoned him to follow, and led him through a lonely corridor, concealed by curtains, to the stable, where it pointed to a horse. He swung himself upon its back, but the she jumped up too, placing herself before him and holding on by the horse’s mane. The prisoner understood her, and at a swift trot they rode out on to the open heath along a path which he would never have found alone.

He forgot the hideous form, and felt only how the Lord’s mercy and kindness showed itself through the medium of the monster; he prayed devoutly, and sang sacred lays. At this the unhappy maiden trembled. Was it the effect of prayer and song, or was this shudder called forth by the chilly dawn that was approaching? What were her feelings? She rose, and attempted to stop the horse and jump down; but the Christian priest held her back with all his might, and sang a sacred song, thinking this might break the spell that held her bound in the hideous form of a frog. The horse galloped along more wildly; the heavens became streaked with red, the first sunbeams pierced the clouds, and with the bright stream of light the change in form took place. Helga was again the beauteous maiden with the fiendish, wicked mind. The priest was holding a most lovely young woman in his arms, and this terrified him; he jumped down from the horse and compelled it to stop. This seemed to him a new and dangerous piece of sorcery; but Helga had also dismounted with a single leap, and stood on the ground. Her short gown reached only to her knees; she snatched the sharp knife from her girdle, and rushed quick as lightning upon the astonished priest.

“Only let me get at you!” she cried. “Let me get at you, and my knife shall enter your body. You are pale as straw, you beardless slave!”

She pressed in upon him, and they struggled together in fierce combat, but an invisible power seemed to sustain the Christian. He held her fast, and the old oak by which they stood came to his aid, its roots half loosened from the earth acting as bonds for the maiden’s feet, which had become entwined in them. Hard by, a spring gushed forth, and the priest sprinkled Helga’s face and breast with the fresh water, bidding the unclean spirit go forth, and blessing her in Christian fashion; but the water of faith has no power where its spring does not also flow from within. And yet the power of the Christian became evident even here, for he contended against the struggles of the evil power with more than the simple might of man. His holy actions overpowered her; her arms fell to her side, and she gazed with astonished eyes and pallid cheeks upon him who appeared to be a mighty magician and practised in secret arts. He seemed to her to be uttering mysterious runic charms and to be making secret signs in the air. She would not have flinched if he had raised a glittering axe or a sharp knife against her, but now that he made the sign of the cross over her she sat there like a tamed bird, her head bowed upon her breast.

Then he spoke to her in gentle words of the deed of love that she had performed for him in the night, when she had come to him in the form of a hideous frog to loosen his bonds and lead him out to light and life. She too was bound, he said, in closer bonds than those which had held him, but she too should be led to light and life, and that by him. He would take her to Hedeby, to the holy Ansgarius, and there in the Christian town the spell would be removed. But she should not ride before him on the horse, even if she offered to sit there of her own accord.

“You must sit behind me, not before me! Your magic beauty has a power that is born of evil—I fear it, although I am certain to conquer in the name of the Lord.”

He knelt down, and prayed devoutly and fervently. It seemed as if his prayer consecrated the quiet wood into a holy church; the birds sang, as if they belonged to the new congregation, and the wild mint smelt sweetly as if to fill the place of the incense. In a loud voice the priest recited the words:

“May He appear to us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and direct our steps in the paths of peace.”

He told her of the deep love that pervaded the whole of nature; and while he spoke, the horse that had carried them both in wild career stood still before the tall bramble bushes, and plucked at them, so that the ripe juicy berries fell down upon Helga’s hands, offering themselves for refreshment.

She patiently allowed herself to be lifted on the horse, and sat there like a somnambulist, neither completely asleep nor wholly awake. The Christian bound two branches together with bark, in the form of a cross, and held it on high as they rode through the wood, which got thicker as they went on, and at last became totally trackless wilderness.

Blackthorn-bushes barred the way, so that they had to ride round them. The spring did not grow into a stream, but into a stagnant swamp, around which the horse had also to be led. There was strength and refreshment in the cool forest air, and no mean power lay in the gentle words that were uttered in faith and Christian love from an inward yearning to lead the poor maiden to light and life.

The rain-drops, they say, hollow out the hard stone, and the waves of the sea round the rugged corners of the rocks. The dew of mercy, administered to Helga, softened what was hard and smoothed what was rough within her. It could not be seen in her, it is true—she did not know it herself; but does the germ in the bosom of the earth, when the refreshing dew and the warm sunbeams fall upon it, know that it carries within it growth and blossom?

As a mother’s song enters into a child’s mind, and it babbles the words after her without understanding them, but later they crystallize into thoughts and become clearer and clearer with time. In this way the Word worked in the heart of Helga.

They rode out of the dense forest across the heath and again through pathless woods, and towards evening they came across a robber-band.

“Where did you steal that charming maiden?” cried the robbers, seizing the horse by the bridle and dragging down both the riders. The priest had no other weapon than the knife he had taken from Helga, and with this he struck out to right and left; one of the robbers aimed a blow at him with his axe, but the young priest sprang aside and eluded the glittering blade, which sank deep into the horse’s neck, so that the blood gushed forth and the animal fell to the ground. Then Helga, as if she were suddenly waking out of her long deep reverie, threw herself hastily upon the groaning animal.

The priest placed himself before her to defend and protect her; but one of the robbers brought down his heavy iron hammer with such a crash upon the Christian’s head, that blood and brains were scattered all around, and he fell lifeless to the ground.

The robbers seized beautiful Helga by her white arms and her slender waist; at that moment the sun went down and its last ray disappeared, and she was changed into the form of a frog. The greenish mouth spread itself over half the face, the arms became thin and clammy, and a broad hand with webbed fingers spread out in the shape of a fan. Then the terrified robbers let her go, and she stood among them a hideous monster, and as it is the nature of the frog to do, she sprang on high, higher than her own height, and disappeared in the thicket. The robbers began to see that this must be either an evil trick of the spirit Loki, [100] or hidden witchcraft, and they hurried away from the spot in terror.

•  •  •

The full moon was already rising. Soon it shone upon and illumined the earth, and out of the thicket crept poor Helga in the wretched form of the frog. She stopped before the body of the Christian priest and before her dead horse, and gazed at them with eyes that seemed to weep, while from the frog’s mouth came a croaking that sounded like a child bursting into tears. She threw herself first upon one and then upon the other, fetched water in the hollow of her hand which could hold a good deal on account of the webbed skin, and poured it over them; but dead they were and dead they remained, that she saw. Soon wild beasts would come and tear their bodies, but no! that must not be.

She therefore dug up the earth as much as she could, for she wanted to make them a grave. To do this she had only the branch of a tree and her two hands, while the webbed skin that grew between her fingers got torn and the blood flowed over them. At last she saw that her efforts would not be successful, so she fetched some more water and washed the dead man’s face, covered it with fresh green leaves, and gathering together some large branches she spread them over him, scattering dead leaves between the boughs. Then she brought the heaviest stones she could lift, laid them over the dead body and filled up the openings with moss. In this manner, she thought, the mound would be strong and well secured. The night had passed in this hard work—the sun burst forth, and there stood beautiful Helga in all her loveliness, with bleeding hands, and for the first time with tears on her maidenly cheeks. Then in the change that came over her, it seemed as if two natures were striving within her. She trembled from head to foot, and looked about her as if she were awakening from a terrible dream. Then she rushed to a slender tree, clung to it for support, and in another moment climbed up like a cat into the topmost branches. There she sat like a startled squirrel, remaining the whole day long in the solitary stillness of the wood, where all is quiet and dead, as they say—dead. Butterflies fluttered around in play, and close to her were numerous ant-hills, each crowded with many hundreds of busy little creatures hurrying to and fro. In the air danced myriads of gnats, swarm upon swarm, and hosts of buzzing flies, lady-birds, gold beetles and other little winged insects; the earth-worm crept up out of the damp ground and the moles popped out—for the rest, a deathlike silence reigned all around. No one noticed Helga but the magpies, who flew with cries round the tree-top in which she sat; the birds hopped close up to her on the boughs in bold curiosity, but a glance from her eye was sufficient to put them to flight They could, however, make nothing of her, neither could she understand herself.

When evening drew near and the sun was sinking, her transformation called her to fresh activity. She slid down from the tree, and as the last sunbeam vanished she stood there in the shrivelled form of the frog with the torn webbed skin on her hands. But now her eyes were radiant with a splendour that they had scarcely possessed even in the maiden’s lovely form—they were the gentle modest eyes of a girl that looked out from the frog’s face. They gave proofs of deep feeling and of a human heart; and the lovely orbs overflowed in tears, beautiful tears that brought relief.

Yonder, on the mound she had raised, there still lay the cross made of twigs, the last work of him who now lay dead and cold beneath it. The idea to take up the cross seemed to come to Helga of itself; she planted it between the stones over him and the dead horse.

Sorrowful remembrances caused the tears to burst forth, and in this sad state she traced the same sign in the sand all round the grave, thus making a kind of ornamental border. As she made the sign of the cross with both hands, the webbed skin fell off like a torn glove, and when she washed her hands in the spring and gazed in wonder at their fair whiteness, she again made the same sign in the air between her and the grave. Her lips trembled, her tongue moved; and the name of our Saviour, which she had heard spoken and sung so frequently during her ride through the wood, now fell audibly from her. Then the frog-skin dropped off, and she was once more the young beauty; but her head sank wearily and her limbs required rest—she slept.

Her sleep, however, was short. Towards midnight she awoke; before her stood the dead horse, so radiant and full of life that the fire gleamed forth from his eyes and the wound in his neck; close beside the animal stood the murdered Christian priest—“more beautiful than Baldur,” the Viking’s wife would have said—and yet he seemed to come in flames of fire.

A look so earnest, so piercing and so full of justice, shone out of the great gentle eyes that it seemed to penetrate into every corner of the heart.

Beautiful Helga trembled before this glance, and her memory awoke with a power as if the Day of Judgment had come. All the kindness that had been shown her, every tender word that had been said, sprang up before her; she understood now that it had been love that had sustained her in those days of trial during which every creature formed of the spirit and of dust—soul and clay—fights and struggles. She recognised that she had only obeyed the impulse of her inclinations, and had done nothing for herself; everything had been given her, everything had been guided by Providence. She bowed humbly, confessing her own deep imperfection before Him who can read every fold of the heart, and at that moment there shot through her a ray from the flame of truth—the flame of the Holy Spirit.

“Thou daughter of the earth!” said the Christian priest, “out of the earth, out of the marsh didst thou come forth—from the earth shalt thou again arise. The sunbeam within thee, conscious of its origin, will return thereunto, for it is not a ray of light proceeding from the sun’s body, but a ray that comes from God. I come from the land of the dead. Thou too shalt travel through the deep valleys into the radiant mountain-land where mercy and perfection dwell. I will not lead thee to Hedeby to receive Christian baptism, for thou must break the surface of the water that covers the deep moorland, and draw up to the light the living root of thy being and of thy birth: thou must exercise thine energies, before the consecration may be given thee.”

He lifted her upon the horse, and handed her a golden censer like the one she had formerly seen in the Viking’s castle, and a strong, sweet fragrance rose from it. The open wound in the forehead of the murdered priest shone like a brilliant diadem; he took the cross from the grave and held it on high as they sped on through the air, over the rustling wood, over the hills where the warriors of old lay buried with their dead chargers. The iron figures rose, sprang forward, and planted themselves on the summits of the hills; the bright circlet of gold with its golden knot shone upon the brow of each in the moonlight, and their mantles fluttered in the wind. The dragon that sat guarding hidden treasures, raised his head and gazed after the riders. The goblins and mountain-sprites peeped forth from beneath the hills and the ridges of the fields, flitting to and fro with red, blue, and green flames, like the sparks dying out in a piece of burned paper.

Over wood and heath, over river and marsh they flew along, up to the wild moor; over this they swept in great circles. The Christian priest raised on high the cross, which glittered like gold, and from his lips fell pious prayers. Beautiful Helga joined in the hymns, like a child lisping its mother’s song. She swung the censer, and a fragrance so strong and so miraculous streamed from it that the reeds and rushes of the moor burst forth into blossom. Every seed shot up out of the deep ground; everything that had life rose up. A veil of water-lilies spread itself out like a worked carpet of flowers, and upon this lay a sleeping woman, young and wondrous fair. Helga thought it was her own image that she saw reflected in the still waters; but it was her mother she beheld, the marsh king’s wife, the princess from the banks of the Nile.

The dead Christian priest commanded the slumbering woman to be lifted up on the horse, but the latter sank under the burden, as if its body were a pall fluttering in the wind. The sign of the cross, however, strengthened the airy phantom, and now the three rode away from the lake to the firm land.

Then the cock crowed in the Viking’s castle, and the phantom forms dissolved and floated away on the breeze, but mother and daughter stood opposite each other.

“Is it my own reflection that I see in the deep water?” asked the mother.

“Is it my own reflection that is cast upon the gleaming mirror?” cried the daughter; and they approached each other, and were locked in a close embrace. The mother’s heart beat quickest, and she understood what the quickened pulses meant.

“My child! The flower of my own heart! My lotus-flower of the deepest waters!”

And she embraced her child anew and wept; her tears were a fresh baptism of life and love for Helga.

“I came hither in the feathers of a swan, and here I cast the plumage off,” said the mother; “I sank through the treacherous moor deep down into the ground, which closed like a wall around me. But soon I felt a fresh stream; a power drew me down deeper, ever deeper, and I felt sleep pressing upon my eyelids. I slept, and dreams surrounded me—it seemed as if I lay again in the Pyramids of Egypt, but before me there still stood the swaying alder-stump which had inspired me with such terror on the surface of the marsh above. I gazed at the cracks and wrinkles in the stump, and they shone in colours and assumed the forms of hieroglyphics; it was the case of a mummy that I had before me. At last this burst, and out stepped the thousand-year-old king, the mummy form, black as pitch—a shining black, like that of the wood-snail, or of the rich black slime of the marsh; it was the Marsh King, or the mummy of the Pyramids—I knew not which. He wound his arms around me, and it seemed as if I must die. I only returned to life when my bosom became warm, and I found upon it a little bird which beat its wings, twittered and sang. The bird flew from my breast up towards the dark heavy roof, but a long green band still bound us together. I heard and understood the tones of its longing:

“‘Freedom! Sunlight! To father!’

“Then I thought of my father and the sunny light of home, my life and my love, and I loosened the band and let the bird fly away—home to father. Since that hour I have dreamed no more; I slept a long and deep sleep indeed, till within this hour, sweet tones and fragrance raised me and delivered me.”

Where did the green band from the mother’s heart to the wings of the bird flutter now, whither had it been wafted? Only the Stork had seen it. The band was the green stalk, the bow was the radiant flower, the cradle of the child that had grown up so lovely, and that was once more pressed to its mother’s heart.

And while the two were locked in each other’s arms, Stork-papa flew around them in smaller and smaller circles, finally darting away in rapid flight to his nest. Bringing thence the coats of swan’s feathers that he had saved so many years he threw one to each, the feathers closed around them, and they soared up from the earth, two white swans.

“Now we will talk together,” said Stork-papa—“now we understand each other, even though the beak of one bird is differently formed from that of the other. It is exceedingly fortunate that you came tonight; tomorrow we should already have been up and away, mother, myself and the little ones—we are flying towards the south. Yes, you may look at me! I am your old friend out of the Nile country, and so is mother too, though she shows it more in her heart than with her beak. She always declared the Princess would manage to help herself out, and I and the youngsters carried the swan’s feathers up here. But how glad I am, and how lucky it is that I am still here! At break of day we shall be off, a large company of storks. We shall fly first, do you fly close behind us, then you will not lose your way; I and the little ones will keep an eye on you, too.”

“And the lotus-flower that I was to bring,” said the Egyptian princess, “will fly besides me in the swan’s plumage. I shall bring with me the flower of my heart; and thus the riddle has been solved. Homeward! Homeward!”

But Helga declared that she could not leave the Danish land without having once more seen her foster-mother, the kind Viking’s wife. Every tender recollection, every kind word, every tear that her foster-mother had wept, rose up in her memory, and at that moment it almost seemed as if she loved that mother best.

“Yes, we must go to the Viking’s castle,” said Stork-papa; “mother and the young ones are waiting for us there. What eyes they will make, and how they will rattle their beaks! Yes, mother doesn’t say much; she’s very brusque, but she means well. I’ll just give a rattle, so that they’ll know we’re coming.”

And Stork-papa rattled in first-class style, and he and the swans flew off to the Viking’s castle.

In the castle everyone was still fast asleep. The Viking’s wife had not retired to rest till very late on the preceding evening. She was very anxious about Helga, who had vanished with the Christian priest three days ago. Helga must have assisted him in his flight, for it was her horse that was missing from the stables; but by what power was all this brought about?

The Viking’s wife thought of the miracles that were said to be performed by the White Saviour, and by those who believed in Him and followed Him. Her fleeting thoughts shaped themselves into a vision, and it seemed to her that she was still sitting awake on her couch and that darkness reigned without. The storm drew near; she heard the sea roaring and rolling in the east and west, like the waves of the North Sea and the Kattegat. The immense snake that encircled the earth in the depths of the ocean quaked convulsively. [101] It was the night of the downfall of the gods—Ragnarök, as the heathens called the Day of Judgment, when all was to pass away, even the great gods. The war-horn sounded, and over the rainbow [102] rode the gods, clad in steel, to fight the last combat. Before them flew the winged Valkyries, and the phantoms of the dead champions brought up the rear. The whole sky around them was ablaze with northern lights, though darkness conquered in the end. It was a terrible hour.

And close to her the terrified Viking’s wife seemed to see Helga sitting on the floor in the hideous form of the frog, trembling and clinging to her foster-mother, who took her on her lap and pressed her lovingly in her arms, hideous as she was. The air re-echoed with the blows of swords and clubs, and with the whistling of arrows, as if a hailstorm were passing over them. The hour was come when heaven and earth were to burst, the stars fall, and all sink into Surtar’s sea of fire; but she knew that a new earth and a new heaven would come, that wavy fields of corn would stand where now the sea rolls over the dreary depths, that the ineffable God would reign! And up to him ascended Baldur, the gentle, the kind, redeemed from the kingdom of the dead; he came—the Viking’s wife saw him, she recognised his countenance—it was the imprisoned Christian priest. “White Christian!” she cried aloud, and with this cry she pressed a kiss upon the forehead of the hideous frog-child. Then the frog-skin fell off, and Helga stood before her in all her beauty, lovely and gentle as she had never been before, and with beaming eyes. She kissed her foster-mother’s hand, blessing her for all the care and love bestowed on her during the days of trial and sorrow, for the thoughts she had instilled and awakened in her, and for uttering the name which she repeated: “White Christian.” Then beautiful Helga arose, a mighty swan, and her wings spread themselves out with a rustling noise like that of a troop of birds of passage in their flight.

Then the Vikings wife awoke and she still heard the same strong beating of wings out in the air. She knew it was about the time when the storks migrate, and that it must be those whose flight she heard. She wished to see them once more and to bid them farewell on their departure. She rose from her couch and stepped out upon the balcony, and now she saw the gable of the house crowded with storks, and all around the castle, over the tall trees, bands of them were wheeling in great circles; but opposite to her and the balcony, by the well where Helga had so often sat and alarmed her by her wildness, sat two swans gazing at her with intelligent eyes. She remembered her dream—it still filled her thoughts as if it were a reality, and she thought of Helga in the form of a swan, thought of the Christian priest, and suddenly felt her heart rejoice.

The swans flapped their wings and bent their necks as though they also wished to send her a greeting, and the Viking’s wife spread her arms out towards them as if she understood all this, and smiling through her tears stood sunk in deep thought.

Then all the storks rose with a rustling of wings and a rattling of beaks to start on their journey to the south.

“We shall not wait for the swans,” said Stork-mamma; “if they want to go with us, let them come. We cannot sit here till the plovers start. There is something fine after all in travelling in families in this way—not like the finches and partridges, where the cock-birds and the hens fly in separate parties, which, to tell the truth, is not at all proper. And what kind of stroke do the swans call that?”

“Well, everyone flies in his own fashion,” said Stork-papa; “the swans fly on the slant, the cranes in a triangle, and the plovers in a snake’s line.”

“Don’t talk of snakes when we are flying up here,” said Stork-mamma; “that creates desires in the young ones that can’t be gratified.”

•  •  •

“Are those the high mountains that I have heard about?” asked Helga, in the swan’s plumage.

“Those are thunder-clouds that float beneath us,” answered her mother.

“What white clouds are those that rise so high?” asked Helga once more.

“Those are the mountains perpetually covered with snow, which you see yonder,” said her mother; and they flew across the Alps towards the blue Mediterranean.

•  •  •

“Africa’s land! Egypt’s strand!” joyfully cried the daughter of the Nile in her swan’s form, as from the lofty sky she caught sight of her native land looking like a yellowish wavy streak.

And all the birds spied it too and hastened their flight.

“I scent Nile mud and wet frogs,” said Stork-mamma; “it makes my mouth water. Ah! now you’ll taste something, and you’ll see the marabou, the ibis, and the crane. They all belong to our family, but they are by far not so beautiful as we. They think themselves very grand, especially the ibis; but he has been spoiled by the Egyptians, who make a mummy of him and stuff him with spices. I would rather be stuffed with live frogs, and so would you, and that you shall be too. Better to have something in one’s inside whilst one is alive than to be the subject of pomp when one is dead. That’s my opinion, and mine is generally the right one.”

“The storks have come,” they said in the rich house on the banks of the Nile, where the royal lord lay on soft cushions under a leopard skin in the open hall, not alive and yet not dead, hoping and waiting for the lotus-flower from the deep moorland in the far north. Relatives and servants stood around his couch.

Into the hall flew two beautiful swans; they had come with the storks. They cast off the dazzling white feathers, and there stood two charming female forms, as like each other as two drops of dew. They leaned over the pale, old invalid, and threw back their long hair, and as fair Helga bent over her grandfather, his cheeks reddened, his eyes sparkled, and life came back to his benumbed limbs. The old man arose well and young again; his daughter and grandchild embraced him as if in a joyful morning greeting after a long, painful dream.

•  •  •

Joy reigned throughout the whole house and in the Stork’s nest too—in the latter, it is true, principally on account of the good food, consisting of numbers of frogs that seemed to spring in shoals out of the earth. And while the learned men hastily wrote down the story of the two princesses and of the flower of health, as an important event and a blessing for the royal house and the country, the Stork-pair told the story to their family in their own way, but only after they had all eaten their fill, for till then they had something else to do than to listen to stories.

“Now you will at last be made something,” whispered Stork-mamma, “there’s no doubt about it.”

“What should I be made?” said Stork-papa. “What have I done? Nothing at all!”

“You have done more than the others. Without you and the little ones, the two Princesses would never have seen Egypt again or have effected the old man’s cure. You will be made something. They will certainly give you a doctor’s degree, and in future our little ones will be born with it, and their children after them, and so on. You already look like an Egyptian doctor—in my eyes!”

The wise and learned men developed the fundamental idea, as they called it, that ran through the whole event: “Love begets life!” This phrase they expressed in different ways. The warm sunbeam was the Egyptian princess who had descended to the Marsh King, and from this embrace sprang the flower.

“I can’t repeat the words so very exactly,” said Stork-papa, who had been listening on the roof, and was now telling what he had heard to his own family. “What they said was so complicated, so wise and so deep, that rank and presents were immediately bestowed upon them; even the head cook received a special mark of distinction—probably for the soup.”

“And what did you get?” asked Stork-mamma. “Surely they will not forget the most important one, and that you certainly are! The learned men have done nothing throughout the whole matter but use their mouths; but you will certainly get your due.”

Late in the night, when the gentle peace of sleep lay upon the now happy house there was still someone awake—not Stork-papa; although he stood on one leg, and slept as he kept guard—it was Helga. She stood leaning out over the balcony and gazing up into the clear sky, where the great gleaming stars seemed to her larger and purer in lustre than those she had seen in the north, though they were the same. She was thinking of the Viking’s wife in the wild moorland region, of her foster-mother’s gentle eyes, and the tears she had wept over the poor frog-child that now dwelt in splendour under the brilliant stars in the glorious spring air by the waters of the Nile. She was thinking of the love that dwelt in the breast of the heathen woman, of the love begotten for a wretched creature—a savage beast when in human form, and loathsome in its animal shape. She gazed at the gleaming stars, and thought of the radiance that had shone out from the forehead of the dead man when she flew with him through the wood and across the moor. Tones rang in her ears, words she had heard pronounced as they rode along, and she was borne wondering and trembling through the air, words from the great Fountain of love, the highest love, that embraces all mankind.

Much had indeed been bestowed, attained, and won! Fair Helga was absorbed day and night in thoughts of her great happiness, and stood lost in contemplation of it, like a child that hurriedly turns from the giver to the beautiful gifts it has received; she seemed to lose herself in the ever-increasing bliss that might and, she felt sure, would come. Had she not been borne by miracles to greater and greater joy? And one day she was so led away by this idea that she no longer remembered the Giver. It was the exuberance of youth unfolding its wings in bold flight. Her eyes were sparkling; but suddenly a loud noise in the courtyard below checked her thoughts in their wild career. There she saw two great ostriches running round very quickly in narrow circles; she had never seen this animal before—this great, fat, clumsy bird, whose wings looked as if they had been clipped, and the creature itself as if it had suffered violence. She asked what had happened to the animal, and now for the first time she heard the legend that the Egyptians tell of the ostrich.

Once, they say, the ostriches were a race of fine handsome birds, with large strong wings, when one evening the large birds of the forest said to the ostrich:

“Brother, shall we fly tomorrow, God willing, to the river to drink?”

And the ostrich answered, “I will.”

At daybreak they flew off, first winging their way upwards, high up towards the sun, to the eye of God—ever higher and higher, the ostrich far in advance of all the other birds. The ostrich flew proudly up towards the light, confident of its strength, but, forgetful of the Giver, it had neglected to say “God willing!” and it sank miserably to the ground. The ostrich and all its race has never been able to fly again since; it speeds along when startled, and rushes round in narrow circles. This legend is a warning to mankind that in their thoughts and efforts, in all their actions, they should say “God willing!”

Helga bowed her head in deep meditation, and gazed at the timid circling ostrich, who took a silly pleasure in seeing its own great shadow on the white sunlit wall. And a deep earnestness took root in her heart and mind. A life very rich in present and future happiness was given and won; what was still to happen, yet to come? The best—“God willing!”

•  •  •

Early in the spring, when the storks again flew northwards, fair Helga slipped off her golden bracelet, scratched her name upon it, and beckoning Stork-papa to come to her, placed the golden band round his neck and begged him to deliver it to the Viking’s wife; from this the latter would, no doubt, understand that her foster child was alive and happy, and thought of her.

“That’s heavy to carry!” thought Stork-papa, when he had it round his neck; “but gold and honours are not to be thrown away. ‘The stork brings good fortune;’ that they will have to admit up yonder.”

“You lay gold and I lay eggs,” said Stork-mamma; “but you lay only once, I lay every year. But neither of us gets any thanks for it. That’s what hurts me!”

“But we have the knowledge of having done good, mother!” said Stork-papa.

“You can’t hang that round your neck,” retorted Stork-mamma; “it gives neither a good wind nor a good meal.”

The little nightingale that sang in the tamarind tree was soon about to depart for the north too. Fair Helga had often heard it singing up yonder by the wild-moor; now she wanted to give it a message, for since she had flown in swan’s plumage she understood the language of the birds; and as she had repeatedly spoken it with the storks and the swallows, she felt sure the nightingale would understand her. So she begged the nightingale to fly to the beech-wood on the peninsula of Jutland, where the mound of stones and twigs had been reared—she begged it to ask all the little birds to build their nests round the grave, so that their songs should be heard there for ever and ever. And the nightingale flew away—and Time flew too.

•  •  •

In autumn the eagle stood upon the pyramid, and saw a stately train of richly laden camels approaching, of richly clad warriors on foaming Arab steeds that shone white as silver, with red quivering nostrils, and great thick manes that hung down almost over their slender legs.

Rich guests—a royal prince from Arabia, handsome as a prince should be, entered the stately house upon the roof of which the stork’s nest now stood empty; they who dwelt in the nest were now in the far north, but would soon return. And they returned on the very day that was so full of joy and pleasure. A marriage was being celebrated here, and fair Helga was the bride, radiant in silk and jewels; the bridegroom was the young prince from Arabia, and the happy pair sat at the upper end of the table between mother and grandfather.

But the bride was not looking at the bridegroom, with his manly bronzed cheeks around which a black beard curled; she did not gaze into his dark fiery eyes that were fixed on her, but far away at the twinkling star that gleamed down from the heavens.

Then the rustling of strong wings was heard in the air. The storks were coming home, and the old Stork-pair; tired as they were from the journey and in want of repose, at once flew down upon the balustrade of the verandah, for they already knew what festivities were going on. As soon as they reached the frontier they had heard that Helga had had their figures painted on the wall—for did they not belong to her story too?

“That is very nice and thoughtful,” said Stork-papa.

“It’s very little,” replied Stork-mamma; “they could not have done less.”

When Helga caught sight of them, she got up, and came out upon the verandah to stroke their backs. The old Stork-pair wagged their heads and bent their necks, while even the youngest of the young ones felt much honoured by this reception.

Helga gazed up at the gleaming star that shone ever brighter; and between it and herself there floated a form, purer even than the air and visible through it. It floated quite close to her—it was the dead Christian priest; he too came to her wedding feast came from the kingdom of heaven.

“The splendour and glory there outshines all that is known on earth,” he said.

And fair Helga prayed more beseechingly and more fervently than she had ever prayed before, that she might be allowed to gaze in upon it for only a single moment—to catch only one glimpse of the kingdom of heaven and all its glory.

The priest carried her up amidst splendour and glory, in a wavy sea of melody and thoughts. Not only around her, but within her, was such brightness and music as words cannot express.

“Now we must go back,” said he; “you will be missed.”

“Only one look more!” she begged. “Only one short minute!”

“We must go down to the earth. The guests will all depart.”

“Only one look more! The last!”

And again Helga stood on the verandah; but the marriage torches outside had vanished, the lights in the festive hall were extinguished, the storks were gone—nowhere a guest to be seen—no bridegroom—all as though swept away in those few short minutes.

Terror came over her. She strode through the great empty hall into the next chamber; there slept strange warriors. She opened a side door that led into her own chamber, and as she thought to step in there, she suddenly found herself in the garden—but it had never looked like that here before; the sky gleamed red—it was the dawn.

Only three minutes in heaven, and a whole night on earth had passed!

Then she caught sight of the Storks; and calling to them, she spoke their language, and Stork-papa turned his head towards her, listened and approached.

“You speak our language,” he said; “what do you wish? Why are you—a strange woman—here?”

“It is I, Helga! Don’t you know me? Three minutes ago we spoke together yonder on the verandah.”

“You’re making a mistake,” said the Stork; “you have dreamed all that.”

“No, no,” she said, and reminded him of the Viking’s castle and the great sea, of the journey hither.

Then Stork-papa blinked his eyes.

“Why, that’s an old story that I have heard tell of my great-grandfather’s time! There certainly was such a princess here from the land of Denmark, but she disappeared on the evening of her wedding-day many hundred years ago, and never came back. You can read it for yourself on the monument in the garden yonder; swans and storks have been inscribed upon it, and at the top you will find yourself in white marble.”

It was so. Helga saw it, understood it, and fell upon her knees.

The sun burst forth in splendour; and as once the frog-covering used to vanish at its rays and the lovely form appear, so now there rose in the baptism of light a form of beauty, brighter and purer than the air—a ray of light that rose up to its Father.

The body crumbled into dust: a faded lotus-flower lay where Helga had stood.

•  •  •

“Well, that was a new end to the story,” said Stork-papa; “I had certainly not expected that. But I am very pleased with it.”

“I wonder what the youngsters will say to it,” observed Stork-mamma.

“Yes, that’s the most important, after all!” said Stork-papa.

[ 1858 ]

The Ice Maiden

—

I

LITTLE RUDY

Let us visit Switzerland and wander through that glorious mountain-land where the forests climb up the steep rocky walls; let us ascend to the dazzling snow-fields above, and descend again to the green valleys beneath, through which streams and rivulets rush along as hastily as if they could not reach the sea and disappear fast enough. The sun sends its scorching rays into the deep valley, and also falls upon the heavy masses of snow up above, so that in the course of years these melt into glimmering blocks of ice, and are formed into rolling avalanches and piled-up glaciers. Two such glaciers lie in the broad ravines below the Schreckhorn and the Wetterhorn, near the little mountain town of Grindelwald. They are wonderful to behold, and for that reason they attract every summer many strangers from all parts of the world. They come across the high snow-covered mountains, and through the deep valleys, and then they have to ascend for several hours; as they ascend, the valleys seem deeper and deeper, until they appear as if viewed from a balloon. Above them the thick clouds often hang like a heavy veil around the mountain peaks, whilst down in the valley where numerous brown wooden houses lie scattered about, there may still be a stray sunbeam, bringing into brilliant relief a patch of green, as if it were transparent. Down below the waters go roaring along, dashing themselves into foam, while up above they ripple and purl, looking like silver ribbons streaming down the rocks.

On both sides of the ascending road there are wooden houses. Every house has its potato-patch, and this is indispensable, for there are many mouths to feed in the cottages, children, who are always ready for their meals, being plentiful. They pop up in all directions and crowd round the traveller, whether he is on foot or driving; the whole troop of children carry on a trade, offering for sale pretty little carved houses, models of those that are built here in the mountains. Whether there be rain or sunshine, the children are there with their wares.

Some twenty years ago there often stood here, but always at a little distance from the other children, a little boy who was also desirous of doing some business. He used to stand there looking very grave and holding his box of carved goods tightly with both hands as if he really had no wish to give it up; but it was this very gravity and the fact of his being such a very little fellow that led people to notice him, call him up to them, and buy most from him—he himself did not know why. An hour’s walk higher up the mountain lived his grandfather who cut out the pretty little houses, and there in the old man’s room stood a great cupboard crowded with all kinds of carved things, nut-crackers, knives and forks, boxes with leaf-work and leaping chamois—in fact, a haven of delight for any child. But the boy—Rudy was his name—looked with greater pleasure and longing at the old gun which hung down from one of the beams in the roof, and which his grandfather had promised him he should one day have, when he was tall and strong enough to use it.

Small as he was, the boy had to mind the goats, and if ever there was a good goatherd who knew how to climb, it was Rudy; he even clambered a little higher than the goats, for he loved to take the birds’ nests from the tree-tops. He was bold and daring, but he was only seen to smile when he stood near a roaring waterfall, or heard the thunder of a rolling avalanche. He never played with the other children; he only came near them when his grandfather sent him down the mountain to sell things. And Rudy did not care particularly about selling; he preferred climbing about alone among the mountains, or sitting with his grandfather and hearing him tell of the olden days, and of the people in the village of Meiringen nearby, where he had been born. The old man said that the race who lived had not always been there; that they were Wanderers, and had come from the far north, where their ancestors had lived and had been called Swedes. Rudy was very proud of knowing this, but he also learned a good deal from other sources, such as those members of the family who belonged to the animal world.

There was a large dog, called Ajola, who had belonged to Rudy’s father, and there was also a tom-cat. The tom-cat especially Rudy held in high honour, for he had learned climbing from him.

“Come out upon the roof with me!” the Cat had said, very distinctly and intelligibly too; for young children, before they are able to speak, understand fowls and ducks very well. Cats and dogs then speak as intelligibly as our parents, but we have to be very young; at that age even grandfather’s stick neighs and becomes a whole horse with head, legs, and tail. Some children keep this intelligence much longer than others, and of these it is said that they are very backward, and have remained children too long a time. People say many strange things!

“Come out upon the roof with me, Rudy!” was about the first thing that the Cat had said, and Rudy had understood. “All that people say about falling down is mere fancy; you will not fall unless you are afraid. Come on! Put one of your paws here, and the other there; then feel with your fore-paws. You must use your eyes and be nimble in your paws. If you come to a hole, jump over and hold tight; that’s what I do!”

And so little Rudy did too; that is why he so often sat on the sloping roof with the tom-cat, and up in the tree-tops, and even up on the high ledges of the rocks where the Cat could not follow him.

“Higher up!” said Tree and Bush. “Look how we climb, how high we reach, and how we hold fast even to the very narrowest ledges.”

Rudy reached the mountain-tops even before the sun touched them, and there he drank his morning draught, the fresh invigorating mountain air—God’s own gift, and of which mankind can only read the recipe, in which is included fresh fragrance from the mountain herbs, and from the mint and thyme of the valley. All that is heavy is absorbed by the lowering clouds, and these being diffused over the pine-tops by the wind, the spirit of the fragrance becomes air, light and ever fresh; this was Rudy’s morning draught.

The sunbeams—those daughters of the sun who bring blessings with them—kissed his cheeks, while Giddiness stood on the watch without daring to approach him: the swallows from his grandfather’s house, (there were no less than seven nests) flew up to him and the goats, singing: “We and you! You and we!” They brought greetings from home, from his grandfather, and even from the two hens, the only birds in the house, though Rudy was not intimate with them.

Young as he was he had travelled, and no short journey either for such a little fellow. He was born in the Canton of Valais and had been carried across the mountains; he had recently walked as far as the Staubbach, which flutters in the wind like a silver veil before the snow-clad dazzling white mountain of the Jungfrau. He had also been to the great glaciers at Grindelwald; but that was a sad story, for his mother had found her death there, and there, his grandfather used to say, little Rudy had lost all his childish merriment. His mother had written in a letter, that before the boy was a year old, he laughed more than he cried. But from the time that he fell into the crevasse in the ice, a great change had come over him. His grandfather seldom spoke about the matter, but it was known all over the mountain.

Rudy’s father had been a postillion, and the great dog which was now in his grandfather’s hut had always accompanied him in his journeys across the Simplon down to the Lake of Geneva. Some relatives of Rudy on his father’s side still lived in the Rhone valley, in the Canton Valais; his uncle was a famous chamois-hunter and a well-known Alpine guide. Rudy was only a year old when he lost his father, and his mother now longed to return with her child to her relatives in the Bernese Oberland. Her father lived a few hours’ journey from Grindelwald; he was a wood-carver, and his trade enabled him to live comfortably.

In the month of June she set out homewards with her child, in the company of two chamois hunters, across the Gemmi pass to reach Grindelwald. They had already accomplished the greater part of the journey and had crossed the high ridges and come into the snow-field; already they perceived their native valley with all its well-known raftered houses, and had now only to cross one great glacier. The snow had recently fallen and hid a crevasse—not one of those, it is true, which reach down to the abyss below where the water rushed along, but still far deeper than a man’s height. The young woman, who was carrying her child, slipped, sank down and disappeared; not a cry, not a groan was heard—nothing but the weeping of the babe.

More than an hour passed before her two companions obtained some ropes and poles from the nearest hut to aid them in their efforts, and after much exertion two dead bodies, as they appeared to be, were brought up out of the crevasse. Every means was tried to revive them. With the child they were successful, but not with the mother, and so the old grandfather received into his house only his daughter’s son—an orphan, the boy “who laughed more than he cried.” It seemed, however, as if the laughing had gone out of him, and the change must have taken place in the crevasse, in the cold unearthly ice-world, where the souls of the condemned are imprisoned until the Day of Judgment, as the Swiss peasant believes.

The glaciers appear as if a rushing stream had been frozen in its course and pressed into blocks of green crystal, which, balanced one upon another, form a wondrous palace of crystal for the Ice Maiden, the queen of the glaciers. She, who slays and crushes, is half a child of the air, half the mighty ruler of the stream: thus she is able to speed, with the swiftness of the chamois, to the highest peaks of the snow-clad mountains, where the bold climber must first cut footsteps for himself in the ice. She sails upon a thin pine twig down the rushing stream, bounding from one rock to the other, with her long snow-white hair fluttering about her, and her blue-green robe shining like the water in the deep Swiss lakes.

“To crush and to hold fast is in my power!” she cries. “A beautiful boy they stole from me—a boy whom I had kissed, but not kissed to death. He is again among the living; he tends the goats upon the mountain, climbing upwards, ever higher, away from others, but not from me. He is mine—I will have him!”

She gave the Spirit of Giddiness orders to act for her, for it was summertime and too hot for the Ice Maiden in the green valley where the mint grows; so the Spirit—or rather, Spirits, for there were many of them—went up hill and down dale. This Spirit has many brothers, a whole troop of them, and the Ice Maiden chose the strongest among the many who exercise their power both within and without. They sit on the railings of steps and towers, they run like squirrels along the brink of the precipice, and jumping over parapets and bridges they tread the air as the swimmer does the water, luring their victims onwards and down into the abyss. The Spirit of Giddiness and the Ice Maiden both grasp after mankind as the octopus grasps after all that comes near it. The Spirit was to seize Rudy.

“Seize him, indeed!” said the Spirit; “I can’t do it. That monster of a cat has taught him to climb. This boy has a power of his own that keeps me at a distance, and I am unable to get at him when he hangs from a branch over an abyss; however much I should like to tickle the soles of his feet, or send him flying head over heels through the air, I cannot manage it.”

“We’ll manage it someday,” said the Ice Maiden. “You or I! I will, I will!”

“No, no!” rang out all around her, like a mountain echo of the pealing of the church bells; but it was the chant of a harmonious choir of other spirits of Nature—kind, loving spirits, the daughters of the rays of the sun. These encamp every evening in a circle around the mountain peaks, and spread out their rose-coloured wings which, becoming redder and redder with the sinking sun, cast a glow over the lofty peaks, which is called by men the Alpine glow. When the sun has sunk they retire into the mountain tops, right into the white snow, where they slumber till the sun rises, when they again come forth. They are particularly fond of flowers, butterflies, and people, and among the latter they had taken a great fancy to Rudy.

“You shall not catch him! You shall not have him!” they said.

“I have caught bigger and stronger ones than he,” said the Ice Maiden.

Then the daughters of the sun sang a song of the wanderer whose cloak the storm had torn away; the wind had taken the covering but not the man. “You can seize him, but you cannot hold him, you children of strength; he is stronger, more ethereal than even we. He ascends higher than our mother the sun; he possesses the magic word that binds winds and waters, and that compels them to serve and to obey him. You loosen the heavy oppressive weight, and he soars higher.”

Glorious were the tones of the bell-like choir.

Every morning the sun’s rays came through the one little window in the grandfather’s hut, and shone upon the sleeping child. The daughters of the sun’s rays kissed him, for they wished to thaw, melt, and dispel the icy kisses that the queenly maiden of the glaciers had given him as he lay in his dead mother’s lap in the deep crevasse, and from which he had been saved as by a miracle.

II

THE JOURNEY TO THE NEW HOME

Rudy was now eight years old. His uncle, who lived on the other side of the mountains, in the Rhone valley, wished to have the boy with him, so that he might learn something and get on better. His grandfather also thought this was for the best, and let him go.

So Rudy took his departure. Besides his grandfather there were several others to whom he had to bid farewell. First there was Ajola, the old dog.

“Your father was the postillion and I was the post-dog,” said Ajola. “We used to travel backwards and forwards across the mountains, and I know both the men and the dogs on the other side. Talking was never much in my line, but now that we shall probably not be able to exchange a word for a long time, I will say a little more than usual. I will tell you a story that has been running in my head a long time and that I have ruminated upon at some length; I don’t understand it, and you will not understand it either, but that doesn’t matter. But this much I have made out of it: things are not dealt out quite equally in this world, either to dogs or to mankind. We are not all born to lie in people’s laps or to drink milk. I have not been accustomed to it; but I have seen a little dog travelling in a post-chaise and occupying the place of a human being. The lady who was his mistress, or whose master he was, carried a feeding-bottle full of milk with her, from which she fed the dog; she also gave him some sweets, but as he only sniffed at them and would not eat them, she gobbled them up herself. I was running along in the mud at the side of the carriage as hungry as a dog can be, and chewing the cud of my own thoughts, which seemed to tell me that things were not quite as they should be—but there is much that is not. Would you like to lie in laps and drive in carriages? I wish it for you from the bottom of my heart. But you can’t bring it about yourself; I never could, either by barking or whining.”

These were Ajola’s words, and Rudy threw his arms round his neck and kissed him heartily on his wet nose; then he took the Cat in his arms, but he struggled to be free.

“You are getting too strong for me, and I don’t want to use my claws against you. Climb away over the mountains, for I have taught you how! But never imagine that it is possible to fall; in this way you will always have a sure footing.”

With that the Cat sprang away, for he did not want Rudy to read in his eyes how sorry he was.

The Hens were strutting about in the hut; one of them had lost its tail, a traveller who pretended to be a sportsman, having shot it off, mistaking the poor fowl for a bird of prey.

“Rudy is going over the hills!” said one of them.

“He is in a great hurry, too,” said the other, “and I’m not fond of saying good-bye;” and with that they both hopped away.

He also bade farewell to the Goats, who bleated and wanted to follow him; it was very touching.

Two able guides of the district, who were going across the mountains near the Gemmi, took Rudy with them on foot. It was a stiff journey for such a little fellow, but he was very strong, and his courage did not sink.

The Swallows flew a little way with them. “We and you! You and we!” they sang. The road led across the rushing Lütschine, which falls from the dark clefts of the Grindelwald glacier in numerous small streams. The trunks of fallen trees and blocks of stone serve here as bridges. Having reached the alder wood on the other side, they began to ascend the mountain where the glacier had loosened itself from the side of the rock, and now they marched along the glacier over blocks of ice and round them. Sometimes Rudy went on hands and knees, sometimes upright; his eyes sparkled with joy, and he trod so firmly in his iron-tipped mountain shoes that it seemed as if he wished to leave behind him the impression of each footstep. The black earth which the mountain stream had cast upon the glacier gave it the appearance of being somewhat thawed, but still the bluish green glassy ice shone through. They had to go round the little pools which had formed themselves, dammed up by blocks of ice, and in making one of these circuits they came near a great boulder which lay rocking on the edge of a crevasse in the ice; the stone lost its balance and, rolling down, the echo of its fall thundered up out of the deep abyss of the glacier.

The way continued to lead uphill; the glacier itself extended upwards like a stream covered with blocks of ice heaped up one on the other, and wedged in between two steep walls of rock. Rudy thought for a moment how he had lain with his mother deep down in one of these heart-chilling crevasses, as he had been told; but such thoughts were soon banished, and the story left no more impression upon him than the many others he had been told. Now and then, when the men thought the way was somewhat too difficult for the lad, they lent him a hand, but he did not tire, and on the slippery ice he stood as firmly as a chamois. They now came to rocky ground, sometimes striding between bare cliffs, sometimes passing between fir trees and out again into the green meadows, always through ever-changing scenery. All around them towered the snow-clad mountains, whose names—the Jungfrau, the Monk, and the Eiger—were known to every child in the country.

Rudy had never been up so high before, and had never trodden the wide-spreading sea of snow which now lay before him with its motionless billows, from which the wind occasionally carried away a snowflake as it blows along the foam from the waves of the sea. The glaciers stand here hand-in-hand, as it were; each of them is a palace of crystal for the Ice Maiden, whose pleasure and vocation it is to seize and to bury the unwary traveller. The sun shone warm and the snow glittered as if it had been strewn with sparkling blue-white diamonds. Innumerable insects, especially butterflies and bees, lay dead in heaps upon the snow; they had ventured too high, or the wind had carried them up till they expired in the cold. Around the Wetterhorn there hung a threatening cloud, looking like a bundle of fleecy black wool, and sinking with the weight of what it contained within it—a “Föhn,” one of the most violent storms when it breaks loose.

The impression of the whole journey, the night passed on the mountain, the wild track, the deep chasms where the water had slowly worn away the rock for an incalculably long period of time—all this impressed itself indelibly upon Rudy’s memory.

A deserted stone building on the other side of the sea of snow offered shelter for the night. Here they found some charcoal and branches of pine trees. A fire was soon kindled and a shakedown bed of some kind arranged; the men sat near the fire smoking their pipes and drinking the warm spiced beverage which they had themselves prepared, and of which Rudy also got his share. Tales were told of the mysterious state of the Alpine land, of the strange gigantic snakes in the deep lakes, of the spectral host that carry off sleepers at night through the air to the wonderful floating city of Venice, and of the wild shepherd who drives his black sheep over the pastures; if these had not been seen, the tinkling of their bells and the uncanny bleating of the flocks had undoubtedly been heard. Rudy listened with intense curiosity, but without any fear, for that he did not know; and while he listened he fancied he heard the weird bellowing of the spectral herd. It became more and more distinct, and the men hearing it too, sat listening to it in silence, telling Rudy not to go to sleep.

It was a “Föhn”—that violent hurricane that hurls itself from the mountains down into the valley, which snaps trees in its fury as if they were mere reeds, and which carries the wooden huts from one bank of a river to the other as we move men on a chess-board.

After the lapse of an hour they told Rudy that it was now all over, and that he might go to sleep; wearied by his long march, he slept as if it had been his bounden duty to do so.

The next morning they again started on their way. The sun that day shone upon mountains, glaciers, and snow-fields that were all new to Rudy. They had entered the Canton Valais, and were upon that side of the range which is seen from Grindelwald, but still far distant from his new home.

Other ravines, other pastures, woods, and rocky paths unfolded themselves, and other houses and other people were seen. But what kind of beings were these? They were misshapen, uncanny wretches and podgy yellowish faces, their necks hanging down like bags with great ugly lumps of flesh. They were the cretins—-dragging their miserable bodies along, and looking with stupid eyes at the strangers; the women were even more hideous than the men. Were these the people in his new home?

III

THE UNCLE

In his uncle’s house, where Rudy now lived, the people were, thank Heaven, such as he had been accustomed to see. There was only one cretin, a poor imbecile lad, one of those unfortunate creatures who in their destitute state are always travelling about in the Canton Valais from house to house, and who stay a few months in each family. Poor Saperli happened to be there when Rudy arrived.

Rudy’s uncle was still a brave hunter, and could also earn his living as a cooper; his wife was a lively little woman with a face like a bird, eyes like an eagle, and a long neck covered all over with down.

Everything here was new to Rudy—dress, manners and customs, and even the language; but this his young ear would soon learn to understand. Things here looked quite prosperous compared to his former home with his grandfather. The room was larger; the walls were adorned with chamois horns and brightly polished guns; over the door hung a picture of the Virgin Mary, in front of which stood some fresh alpine roses and a burning lamp.

His uncle was, as we have already mentioned, one of the ablest chamois-hunters of the whole district, and also one of the best guides. Rudy was now to become the pet of this household; it is true there was one already—an old dog who had formerly been used for hunting, but was now too blind and deaf to be of any use. But his good qualities of earlier days had not been forgotten, and he was therefore considered as one of the family and well taken care of. Rudy stroked the dog, who, however, did not take up easily with strangers, and such Rudy was at first. But he did not long remain so, and soon won his way to everybody’s heart. “It’s not so bad in Canton Valais,” said his uncle. “We have chamois here, which do not die off so fast as the wild goats, and things are much better than they used to be. Whatever they may say about the good old days, I think ours are better, and a hole having been made in the bag, we get a current of air now through our confined valley. Something better always turns up when worn-out things are done away with.”

When his uncle became very communicative, he would relate stories of his youthful days, and even go back to the stirring times of his father, when Valais was still, as he expressed it, a closed bag, full of sick people, miserable cretins. “But the French soldiers came, and they were capital doctors, killing both the disease and the sufferers. The French were good at conquering in more ways than one, and even their girls were not behindhand at it.” In saying this the uncle would nod at his wife, who was French by birth, and laugh. “The French had even tried their hand at conquering stones, and had succeeded well too. They had cut a road through the solid rock across the Simplon—such a road that I can say to a child of three years old, ‘Just go down to Italy; only mind you keep to the highroad,’ and the child will come to Italy safe enough, if he followed my directions.” Then the uncle would sing a French song, shout “Hurrah!” and “Long live Napoleon Bonaparte!”

Here Rudy for the first time heard of France and of Lyons, the great city on the Rhone, where his uncle had been. His uncle said that before many years had passed Rudy would become an able chamois-hunter, and that he had the right stuff in him for it; he taught him how to hold a gun, how to aim and fire. During the hunting season he took him to the mountains and made him drink the warm blood of the chamois, which prevents the hunter from becoming giddy; he also taught him to know the time when the avalanches are likely to roll down the different mountains—at noontide or in the evening, according as the sun’s rays took effect. He taught him to observe the movements of the chamois when leaping, so that he might always come down firmly on his feet; he showed him how to hold himself up by his elbows, hips, and legs if there was no other support in the crevice of the rock, and how it was even possible, if necessary, to hang on by one’s neck. He told him that the chamois were cunning and posted sentinels, but that the hunters must be more cunning than they, and put them off the scent.

One day, when Rudy was out hunting with his uncle, the latter hung his coat and hat on his alpenstock, and the chamois mistook the coat for the man. The mountain path was very narrow, indeed it was scarcely a path at all, but only a narrow shelf along the yawning abyss. The snow that lay here was half thawed; and as the earth crumbled away beneath one’s tread, Rudy’s uncle lay down and crept forward. Every fragment that detached itself from the rock fell bounding from one side of the chasm to the other till it found a resting-place at the bottom. Rudy stood about a hundred paces behind his uncle on a firm projecting point of rock; from this post he could see a great vulture circling in the air and remain hovering above his uncle, whom the bird wished to hurl into the abyss with a blow from its wing, in order to make him its prey. The hunter had only eyes for the chamois, which with its young was to be seen on the other side of the chasm; Rudy kept his gaze fixed on the bird, for he understood what it wanted, and therefore stood ready to discharge his gun. Suddenly the chamois made a spring and his uncle fired and struck the animal with the deadly bullet, but the young kid escaped as cleverly as if it had had a long life’s experience in danger and flight. The great bird, frightened by the report of the gun, winged its way in another direction, and Rudy’s uncle knew nothing of the danger through which he had passed till he was told of it by the lad.

As they were now wending their way homewards in the best of humours, the uncle whistling a song of his youthful days, they suddenly heard a peculiar noise very near them; they looked around them, and there, high up on the slope of the mountain, the covering of snow rose and fell in billows like the motion of a large sheet of linen when the wind plays under it. The crust of snow, only a little while before as smooth and firm as a marble slab, suddenly burst, resolving itself into a foaming cataract which rushed down with a roar like that of distant thunder. It was an avalanche rolling, not over Rudy and his uncle, but near them—all too near!

“Hold fast, Rudy!” cried his uncle; “hold fast with all your might!”

Rudy threw his arms round the trunk of the nearest tree, his uncle climbing up above him and holding fast to the branches, while the avalanche rolled along a few feet distant from them. But the rush of air that swept along with it like the wings of the storm, snapped the trees and bushes all around as if they had been only dry reeds, hurling them far and wide. Rudy lay crouched upon the ground. The tree to which he held fast looked as though it had been sawn in two, and the upper part had been flung far off; there amidst the shattered branches lay his uncle with his head dashed to pieces. His hand was still warm, but his face was not recognisable. Rudy stood pale and trembling; it was the first shock of his life, the first terror he had ever experienced.

Late in the evening he reached home with the fatal tidings—that home which was now a house of mourning. The wife could find no words nor tears: it was only when they brought the body home that her grief found utterance. The poor cretin crept into his bed, and was seen no more the whole of the next day; it was only towards evening that he came up to Rudy.

“Will you write a letter for me?” he asked. “Saperli can’t write, but Saperli can take the letter to the post-office.”

“A letter from you?” asked Rudy. “And to whom?”

“To our Lord Christ!”

“To whom do you say?”

And the idiot, as the cretin was called, looked with a touching expression at Rudy, folded his hands, and said solemnly and piously:

“Jesus Christ! Saperli wants to send Him letter; ask Him let Saperli lie dead and not master of the house here.”

Rudy pressed his hand and said:

“The letter would not go, and cannot bring him back to us.”

It was no easy task for Rudy to make Saperli understand how impossible it was.

“Now you are the support of the house,” said his aunt and foster-mother, and such Rudy became.

IV

BABETTE

Who is the best shot in the Canton Valais? That the chamois well knew. “Beware of Rudy!” they might have said.

And who is the handsomest hunter? “Why, Rudy!” said the girls; but they did not add: “Beware of Rudy!”

Not even the sober mothers said that, for he nodded in quite as friendly a way to them as to the young girls. He was so brave and merry, his cheeks so brown, his teeth so white, and his black eyes so sparkling; he was altogether a handsome fellow, and twenty years old. He did not mind the coldest ice-water when he went swimming, and he would turn and twist about in it like a fish. He could climb better than anyone else, sticking to the cliffs like a snail, and what kind of muscles and sinews he had was evident when he jumped, an art which he had first learned from the cat and afterwards from the chamois. Rudy was the best guide to whom one could trust oneself, and he could have made a good income by that calling. For the cooper’s trade, which his uncle had also taught him, he had no inclination, his greatest pleasure being chamois-hunting, which brought in money too. Rudy would be a good match, it was said, if he only did not aspire beyond his station. He was such a dancer that the girls dreamed about him, and more than one carried him about in her waking thoughts too.

“He kissed me while we were dancing,” said Annette, the schoolmaster’s daughter, to her dearest friend; but she ought not to have told this even to her dearest friend. Such secrets are not easily kept; they are like sand in a sieve, they run through. It was soon known that Rudy, brave and good as he was, kissed when he danced, and yet it was not her he had kissed whom he would have liked to kiss most of all.

“Oho!” said an old hunter; “he has kissed Annette. He has begun with A, and he’ll kiss right through the alphabet.”

A kiss while dancing was all that the busy tongues could find to say about him up to the present; he certainly had kissed Annette, and yet she was by no means the flower of his heart.

Down in the valley near Bex, amidst the great walnut trees, by a small rushing mountain stream, lived the rich miller. The dwelling-house was a large three-storied building with small turrets; its roof was of thin wood covered with tin plates, which shone both in sunshine and moonshine. On the highest turret was a weathercock—a glittering arrow piercing an apple—an allusion to William Tell’s feat. The mill looked very neat and prosperous, and could be easily drawn and described, but the miller’s daughter could neither be drawn nor described—so at least Rudy would have said. And yet her image was engraved on his heart, and the eyes in this image blazed so that they kindled a fire there. It had burst out suddenly, like other fires; and the strangest part of it was that the miller’s daughter, the pretty Babette, had no suspicion of it, for she and Rudy had never spoken a word to each other.

The miller was rich, and these riches placed Babette very high and made her a difficult catch. “But,” thought Rudy, “nothing is so high that one may not reach it. All one has to do is to climb on, and one cannot fall if one doesn’t think of it.” This had been one of his earliest lessons.

It happened once that Rudy had some business to transact at Bex; it was a long journey, for in those days there was not yet any railway. From the Rhone glacier, along the foot of the Simplon, amidst the varying landscape presented by the numerous mountain heights, stretches the broad valley of Valais with its noble stream, the Rhone, which often overflows its banks, covering fields and roads and destroying everything in its course. Between the towns of Sion and St. Moritz, the valley takes a turn, making a bend like an elbow, and becomes so narrow behind St. Moritz that there is only room for the bed of the river and the narrow carriage road. An old tower stands like a sentinel before the Canton Valais which ends here, and from it can be seen, across the stone bridge, the toll-house on the other side; it is the boundary of the Canton Vaud and the next town, not very distant in Bex. At every step can be seen an increasing luxuriance in the vegetation; it is as if we were in a garden of chestnut and walnut trees. Here and there cypress and pomegranate blossoms peep forth, and it is as sunny and warm here as if one were in Italy. Rudy arrived in Bex, and after having finished his business took a walk about the town, but not even a miller’s boy, let alone Babette, could he see. This was not as it should be.

Evening came on, and the air was laden with the fragrance of wild thyme and the blossoming limes, while the wooded mountain slopes seemed to be covered with a shimmering sky-blue veil. Far and wide reigned a stillness, not as of sleep or death, but as if the whole of Nature were holding its breath, as if she were posing for her image to’ be photographed on the blue vault of heaven. Here and there amidst the trees in the green fields stood the posts supporting the telegraph wires that ran through the silent valley. Against one of these leaned an object so motionless that it might have been mistaken for the trunk of a tree; it was Rudy, standing there as still as everything at that moment around him. He was not asleep, neither was he dead; but just as great events in the world, and matters of vital importance to individuals, often fly along the telegraph lines without the wires indicating it by the slightest quiver or sound, so were thoughts of mighty importance passing through Rudy’s mind: the happiness of his life, the one thought that now constantly occupied him. His eyes were fixed on one point—a light that glimmered through the foliage from the parlour of the miller’s house, where Babette lived. Rudy stood there so still that one would have thought he was taking aim at a chamois, but he himself was at that moment like the chamois, which will often stand as if hewn out of the rock, for minutes together, and then, when a stone rolls down, suddenly bound forward and rush away. And so it was with Rudy; an idea had just flashed through his mind.

“Never despair!” he cried. “A visit to the mill to say good evening to the miller and good evening to Babette. One can’t fail as long as one has confidence. Babette must see me some time or other if I am to be her husband!”

Rudy laughed, for he was in a merry mood, and strode towards the mill; he knew what he wanted—he wanted Babette.

The stream flowed along over the yellow pebbles, and willows and lime trees hung over the rolling waters, as Rudy went up the path leading to the miller’s house. But as the children sing:

“There was no one at home but the cat!”

The cat standing on the steps arched her back and said “Meow.” But Rudy had no mind for this kind of talk; he knocked, but no one heard him, no one opened the door for him. “Meow,” said the cat again; and if Rudy had still been a child, he would have understood that language and known that the cat wanted to say, “There is no one at home here.” But, as it was, he had to go across to the mill, and there he was told that the miller had gone to Interlaken, and taken Babette with him, to the great shooting festival which was to commence the following day, and which lasted a whole week. People from all the German cantons would be there. Poor Rudy! we may well say. He had not chosen a lucky day for his visit to Bex, and he might go back now. He did so, too, marching back through St. Moritz and Sion to his home in the valley; but he did not despair. When the sun rose the next morning, it found him in the best of spirits, for those, unlike the sun, had never sunk.

“Babette is in Interlaken,” said Rudy to himself; “many days’ journey from here. It is a long way if one follows the highroad, but it is not so far if one cuts across the mountains, and that road just suits a chamois-hunter. I have been that way before, it leads to my home where I lived with my grandfather when I was a boy. And there is a shooting match at Interlaken! I’ll go and try to get the first prize, and I’ll be with Babette, when I’ve made her acquaintance.”

With his light knapsack, containing his Sunday best, upon his back, and his gun and game-bag slung across his shoulder, Rudy started to take the shortest way across the mountains, which was no mean distance after all. But the festival was only to commence that day and lasted the whole week and more; and he had been told that during that time the miller and Babette would stay with their relatives in Interlaken. So Rudy crossed the Gemmi, intending to descend near Grindelwald. He strode merrily onwards in the fresh, light, invigorating mountain air. The valley sank lower and lower and the horizon extended; one after another the snowy peaks rose, and soon the whole Alpine range lay there in its dazzling purity. Rudy knew every mountain; he was now approaching the Schreckhorn, which stretches its white-powdered stone finger high up into the blue sky.

At last he had crossed the highest ridge, and now the pastures sloped down to the valley which had been his home. Both the air and his mind were light. Hill and dale were luxuriant in flowers and foliage, and his heart was full of those youthful feelings in which old age and death are out of the question: in which all is life, power, and enjoyment! He felt as free and as light as a bird. The swallows flew past him, and sang as they had sung in his childhood: “We and you! You and we!” All sang of flight and joy.

Beneath him lay the velvety green meadows, dotted with brown wooden cottages, while the murmuring Lütschine rolled along. He beheld the glacier with the green crystal edges and the soiled snow, and looking down into the deep crevasses saw both the upper and the lower glacier. The sound of the church bells came up to him as if they wished to ring him a welcome to his home; his heart beat faster, and became so filled with old memories that Babette was quite crowded out for a moment.

He once more strode along the road where, when a little boy, he had stood with the other children and sold carved toy-houses. Yonder, behind the fir trees, still stood his grandfather’s house, but strangers lived in it now. Children came running up towards him and wanted him to buy; one offered him a mountain rose, which Rudy took as a good omen and thought of Babette. Soon he had crossed the bridge where the two streams unite; here the foliage was thicker, and the walnut trees afforded a pleasant shade. Soon he saw the waving flags bearing a white cross on a red ground, the standard both of the Swiss and the Danes; and before him lay Interlaken.

“It is indeed a splendid town and has no equal,” thought Rudy.

It was a little Swiss town in its Sunday dress. It was not like other towns, a sombre heap of heavy stone houses, looking cold and pretentious. No, here it looked as if the wooden houses had come down from the mountains into the green valley, and had ranged themselves side by side along the clear river which flows along swift as an arrow; they were a little irregular, but still formed a handsome street. The grandest of all the streets had certainly grown very much since Rudy had been here as a boy. It seemed to him as if it had been made up of all the pretty little houses which his grandfather had carved, and with which the cupboard at home had been filled, and that these had increased very much in size, like the old chestnut trees. Every house was called an hotel, and had a deal of carved woodwork around the windows and balconies; the projecting roofs were gaily painted, and before each house was a flower garden leading on to the broad paved highroad. This was lined by houses on one side only; otherwise the fresh green meadow in which the cows grazed, with the tinkling Alpine bells on their necks, would have been hidden. This meadow was encircled by high mountains which receded a little as if it were in the centre, so that the snow-clad glittering peak of the Jungfrau, the most beautifully shaped of all Swiss mountains, could be distinctly seen.

What a number of finely dressed ladies and gentlemen from foreign parts! What a crowd of country-people from the different cantons! Every marksman wore his number in a band round his hat. There was music and singing of all kinds: hand organs, trumpets, shouting and noise. The houses and bridges were adorned with emblems and verses. Flags and banners were waving, and shot upon shot was being fired. That was the sweetest music to Rudy’s ears, and amidst all this turmoil he quite forgot Babette, for whose sake he had come.

The marksmen were crowding round the targets, and Rudy was soon among them. He proved himself the best shot, and was more fortunate than any of them; for he always hit the bull’s eye.

“Who can the stranger be?” people asked. “He speaks the French of Canton Valais, and he also makes himself understood very well in our German,” said some.

“He is said to have lived in the neighbourhood of Grindelwald when he was a boy,” said one of the sportsmen.

The young stranger was full of life, too; his eyes sparkled, and his aim and his arm were steady, therefore he always hit the mark. Good fortune brings courage, and courage Rudy always had. He soon had a circle of friends gathered round him; everyone honoured him and paid him homage. Babette had quite vanished from his thoughts. Suddenly a heavy hand was laid upon his shoulder, and a deep voice said to him in French: “Aren’t you from the Canton Valais?”

Rudy turned round and saw a stout man with a ruddy, pleased face; it was the wealthy miller of Bex. His great body hid dainty little Babette, who, however, soon came to the fore with her bright dark eyes.

It had flattered the wealthy miller that it was a marksman from his own canton who had proved to be the best shot, and was honoured by everyone. Rudy was certainly born under a lucky star; those whom he had come all this way to see, but had forgotten when on the spot, now sought him out.

When people meet others from their part of the country far from home they always speak and make each other’s acquaintance. Rudy, by his shooting, was the first man in the festival, just as the miller at home in Bex was first by reason of his money and his fine mill. So the two men shook hands, which they had never done before; Babette too held out her hand to Rudy frankly, and he pressed it, and looked at her so hard that she blushed deeply.

The miller spoke of the long way they had come, and of the many large towns they had seen; in his opinion they had performed quite a journey, having travelled by steamer, rail, and coach.

“I came the shorter way,” said Rudy. “I came over the mountains. There is no road too high for a man to pass along.”

“But he may break his neck!” said the miller; “and you look just the kind of man to break your neck someday, you are so daring.”

“Oh, a man does not fall unless he is afraid of falling,” said Rudy.

The miller’s relations in Interlaken, with whom the miller and Babette were staying, invited Rudy to come and see them—for was he not of the same canton as the miller? This invitation was very acceptable to Rudy; good fortune favoured him, as it always does those who depend upon their own efforts and remember that “Providence gives us the nuts, but does not crack them for us.” Rudy was treated by the miller’s relations as if he belonged to the family, and they drank to the health of the best shot; Babette clinked glasses with Rudy too, and he returned thanks for the toast.

In the evening they all went for a walk along the beautiful road past the stately hotels and under the old walnut trees, and there were so many people and such crowding that Rudy was obliged to offer Babette his arm. He told her how happy he was to have met people from the Canton Vaud, for Vaud and Valais were good neighbourly cantons. He expressed his pleasure so heartily that Babette could not resist squeezing his hand. They walked on side by side as if they had been old acquaintances, she chatting on, and Rudy thinking how admirably she commented upon the dress and walk of the foreign ladies. She said that she really did not want to make fun of them, for she knew that they might be good, upright people; she herself had a godmother who was a grand English lady. Eighteen years before, when Babette was christened, the lady was staying at Bex, and having acted as god-mother to her had given her the costly brooch which she was now wearing. Her godmother had twice written to her, and this year they were to have met her and her daughter here in Interlaken; “the daughters were old maids—nearly thirty,” said Babette, who was only eighteen.

The sweet little mouth was not still for a moment, and everything that Babette said sounded in Rudy’s ears as matters of the greatest importance, while he in his turn told her all he had to tell—how often he had been in Bex, how well he knew the mill, and how often he had seen Babette, while she had most probably never noticed him, and lastly how he had gone to the mill filled with thoughts he could not express, and found her and her father gone to a place far away—not so far, however, but that one could clamber over the wall to it by a short cut.

All this he said, and much more; he told her how fond he was of her, and that he had come here for her sake and not on account of the shooting.

Babette became silent when she heard all this; it seemed as if he were asking her to bear too much.

Whilst they wandered on, the sun sank behind the great mountain wall.

The Jungfrau stood out in all her glory, encircled by the dark green wreath formed by the neighbouring heights. Everyone stood still to gaze at the beautiful sight; even Rudy and Babette enjoyed it too.

“Nowhere is it more beautiful than here!” said Babette.

“Nowhere!” said Rudy, looking at Babette.

“Tomorrow I must return home!” he said, a few moments later.

“Come and see us at Bex!” whispered Babette, “my father will be very pleased.”

V

ON THE WAY BACK

What a number of things Rudy had to carry when the following day he set out to cross the mountains on his way home! He had three silver cups, two fine guns, and a silver coffee-pot; the pot would be useful when he set up housekeeping. But all this was of minor importance; he carried, or rather was carried homewards across the mountains by something much weightier. The weather was raw, dark, and inclined to rain, and the clouds descended like a mourning veil upon the mountain heights, shrouding their glittering peaks. From the woods below came the sound of the axe, and down the mountain slope rolled the trunks of trees that looked from the heights like thin sticks, but which were nevertheless as stout as ship’s masts. The Lütschine murmured monotonously, the wind whistled, and the clouds sailed along. Suddenly Rudy found a young maiden walking at his side; he had not noticed her till she was quite close to him. She was also about to ascend the mountain. The maiden’s eyes had a peculiar power that compelled one to look into them; they were so strange, so clear, so deep and unfathomable.

“Have you a sweetheart?” asked Rudy; all his thoughts ran on love.

“I have none,” answered the maiden, with a laugh, but she did not seem to be speaking the truth. “Don’t let us go a long way round,” she said. “We must keep more to the left; it is a shorter way.”

“Oh, yes!” said Rudy, “and fall into a crevasse. You don’t know the way better than that, and want to be the guide?”

“I know the way well enough!” said the maiden, “and I have my thoughts collected. Yours are no doubt down in the valley. Up here one should think of the Ice Maiden; men say she bears their race no goodwill.”

“I do not fear her,” said Rudy, “she had to give me up when I was still a child, and I shall not give myself up to her now that I am older.”

The darkness increased, the rain came down, snow fell, and the lightning was quite blinding.

“Give me your hand,” said the maiden, “I will help you to mount,” and he felt the touch of her icy fingers.

“You help me!” exclaimed Rudy, “I do not want a woman’s help in climbing yet.” And he strode on more quickly away from her.

The snow-flakes covered him as with a veil, the wind whistled, and behind him he heard the maiden laughing and singing, and the sound was most strange to hear.

“It must be a spectre in the service of the Ice Maiden,” thought Rudy, who had heard such things talked about when, still a boy, he had passed the night up here in his journey over the mountains.

The snow no longer fell so thickly, and the cloud lay beneath him; looking back, no one was to be seen, but he heard sounds of mocking laughter, which were not those of a human voice.

When Rudy at last reached the topmost plateau, from which the path leads down into the Rhone valley, he saw two bright stars shining in the clear blue heavens in the direction of Chamouny; and he thought of Babette, of himself, and of his good fortune, and his heart glowed at the thought.

VI

THE VISIT TO THE MILL

“What grand things you have brought home!” said his old foster-mother, and her strange eagle-eyes sparkled as she wriggled and twisted her skinny neck more strangely and quickly than ever.

“You are a lucky fellow, Rudy! I must kiss you, my sweet boy.”

And Rudy allowed her to kiss him, but it was written in his face that he forced himself to put up with these little domestic afflictions.

“How handsome you are, Rudy!” said the old woman.

“Don’t talk such nonsense!” said Rudy, with a laugh, but he was pleased all the same.

“I must say it again,” said the old woman; “you are a lucky fellow.”

“Well, you may be right,” said he, thinking of Babette.

Never had he felt such a longing to get down into the deep valley.

“They must have come home!” he said to himself; “it is already two days over the time when they had intended to be back. I must go to Bex.”

So to Bex he went, and found them at home in the mill. He was received very kindly, and they had brought him greetings from the family in Interlaken. Babette did not say much; she had become very silent, but her eyes spoke and that was quite enough for Rudy.

At other times the miller had always led the conversation, and was accustomed to hear people laugh at his jokes and sayings for was he not the wealthy miller? But now he seemed to prefer listening to Rudy’s adventures, as the latter told of the difficulties and dangers that the chamois-hunter has to endure on the lofty mountain peaks—how he has to creep along the flimsy ledges of snow which are only cemented by the force of wind and weather to the edge of the cliff, and across the frail bridge that the snowdrift has thrown over the deep ravines.

The eyes of the brave Rudy sparkled as he spoke of the life of a hunter, of the cunning of the chamois and of their bold leaps, of the powerful “Föhn” and the rolling avalanches. He noticed that at every fresh description, the miller became more and more interested, and that he was especially moved by what he heard of the vulture and the royal eagle.

Not far off, in the Canton Valais, there was an eagle’s nest, very skilfully built under a high projecting ledge of rock. In that nest was a young eagle, but it was impossible to get at it. An Englishman had a few days before offered Rudy a whole handful of gold if he brought him the young eagle alive. “But everything has its limits,” said Rudy; “the eagle is not to be had, it would be madness to attempt it.”

The wine flowed freely and the conversation too, but the evening seemed much too short for Rudy, although it was past midnight when he left the miller’s after this, his first visit.

The lights in the windows of the miller’s house still shone for a short time through the green branches; out of the open skylight in the roof came the Parlour Cat, while along the water-pipe came the Kitchen Cat to meet her.

“Is there any news at the mill?” asked the Parlour Cat. “Here in the house there is a secret engagement. Father knows nothing of it yet. Rudy and Babette have been treading on each other’s paws under the table all the evening; they trod on me twice, but I didn’t mew, for that would have attracted attention.”

“I should have mewed though,” said the Kitchen Cat.

“What suits the kitchen would not suit the parlour,” said the Parlour Cat. “But I am curious to know what the miller will say when he hears of the engagement.”

Yes, what the miller would say—that Rudy would also have liked to know, but it was impossible for him to wait long to hear it. When a few days later the omnibus rattled over the Rhone bridge between the cantons of Valais and Vaud, Rudy was sitting in it in as good spirits as ever, indulging in pleasant thoughts of the favourable answer he expected to receive that evening.

And when evening came, and the omnibus was driving back along the same road, Rudy was again sitting inside, whilst the Parlour Cat was running about in the mill with the news.

““Have you heard it, you in the kitchen? The miller knows all now. It has come to a fine end. Rudy came here towards the evening; and there was a great deal of whispering and secret talk between him and Babette, as they stood in the passage before the miller’s room. I was lying at their feet, but they had neither eyes nor thoughts for me. ‘I will go to your father at once,’ said Rudy, ‘that is the most honourable way.’ ‘Shall I go with you?’ asked Babette; ‘it will give you courage.’ ‘I have courage enough,’ said Rudy; ‘but if you are there, he must be friendly, whether he will or not.’ Upon that they went in, Rudy treading heavily on my tail. He’s very clumsy; I mewed; but neither he nor Babette had ears to hear. They opened the door and entered together. I was in first and sprang upon the back of a chair, for I didn’t know how Rudy would open the ball. However, the miller opened it with a mighty kick, and the other was out of the house and up the mountain to the chamois in a jiffy. Master Rudy will have to aim at those now, and give up aiming at our Babette.”

“But do tell me what they said,” said the Kitchen Cat.

“‘What they said’? Why, everything that people say when they go a-wooing: ‘I love her, and she loves me. And if there is milk enough in the can for one, there is enough for two.’ ‘But she is too far above you,’ said the miller, ‘she sits on heaps of grit—gold grit, as you know. You will never reach her.’ ‘There is nothing too high for a man to reach if he only has the will,’ answered Rudy, for he is a bold fellow. ‘But you yourself said a little while ago that you couldn’t reach the young eagle; well, Babette is still higher than that nest.’ ‘I’ll take them both,’ said Rudy. ‘I’ll give you Babette if you bring me the young eagle alive,’ said the miller, laughing till the tears stood in his eyes. ‘But now I thank you for your visit, Rudy; come again tomorrow when there’s no one at home. Good-bye, Rudy!’ And Babette said good-bye too, but as mournfully as a little kitten that cannot see its mother yet. ‘A man’s word is his bond,’ said Rudy. ‘Don’t cry, Babette; I shall bring the young eagle.’ ‘You’ll break your neck, I hope,’ said the miller, ‘and we shall then be spared your company here.’ That’s what I call a mighty kick. And now Rudy is gone and Babette sits and weeps, but the miller sings German songs that he learned on his last journey. I’m not going to pull a long face about the matter—that will not do any good.”

“Still there’s a chance left for all that,” said the Kitchen Cat.

VII

THE EAGLE’S NEST

From the mountain path a voice trolled out some joyous and vigorous notes, giving proofs of good humour and undaunted courage. It was Rudy going to see his friend Vesinand.

“You must help me. I must take the young eagle out of the nest at the top of the cliff; we will take Nagli with us.”

“Will you not have a try to reach the moon first? It would be just as easy,” said Vesinand. “You seem to be in good spirits.”

“Of course I am. I am thinking of marrying. But to be serious, I will tell you how matters stand.”

And soon both Vesinand and Nagli knew Rudy’s intentions.

“You are a bold fellow,” they said. “It can’t be done; you’ll break your neck.”

“I shall not fall as long as I don’t think of it,” said Rudy.

They set out about midnight, carrying with them poles, ladders, and ropes. The road lay through forest and underbrush, over rolling stones, leading ever higher and higher in the dark night. Water foamed beneath them and trickled down from above, while damp clouds hung in the air. At last the hunters reached the edge of the precipice, where it was even darker, for the rocky walls almost met, and the sky could only be seen through the narrow crevice at the top; close beside them yawned the abyss with the foaming waters beneath. The three sat down on the stones to await the dawn, for when the parent eagle flew out they would have to shoot the old bird before they could think of obtaining possession of the young one. Rudy crouched down, as motionless as if he had been part of the stone on which he was sitting, holding his gun cocked ready to fire, and his gaze fixed steadily upon the highest point of the cliff, where the eagle’s nest was hidden beneath the overhanging rock. The three hunters had a long time to wait. But now they heard a loud rustling high above them, and a great hovering object darkened the air. Two guns took aim as the black body of the eagle flew out of the nest. A shot was fired; for a moment only the wide-spreading wings moved, then the bird slowly sank, crushing the branches and bushes in its way. For a moment it seemed as if it would completely fill the chasm, and drag the hunters down in its fall by its bulk and its great outstretched pinions; but at last it lay in the abyss beneath.

Now the hunters moved themselves. Three of the longest ladders were bound together; it was thought that they would reach far enough. They were fixed on the ground as close to the edge of the precipice as safety would permit, but they did not reach far enough; and higher up, where the nest was protected by the projecting ledge, the cliff was as smooth as a wall. After consulting together, they determined to bind two ladders together, and by letting them down into the chasm from above, make them communicate with the three set up below. With great difficulty they dragged the two ladders up, binding them fast with ropes to the top; they were then let out over the projecting ledge, and hung swaying there over the abyss. Rudy was already seated on the lowest rung. It was a bitterly cold morning, and clouds of mist were rising up out of the dark ravine. Rudy sat there like a fly upon a piece of swinging straw which a bird, while making its nest, had dropped upon the edge of some tall factory chimney; but the fly can fly away if the straw gives way, whilst Rudy could only break his neck. The wind whistled round him, and beneath him in the abyss foamed the waters of the thawing glacier, the palace of the Ice Maiden.

He now made the ladder swing to and fro, like the spider swings its body when it wants to seize anything in its long wavy threads; and when Rudy for the fourth time touched the top of the ladders set up from below he had grasped it, bound them securely together with skilful hands—but they swayed and rattled as if they hung on worn-out hinges.

The five long ladders, which seemed to reach up to the nest, and which stood up perpendicularly against the cliff, looked like a waving reed; and now the most dangerous part of the work was to be accomplished. There was climbing to be done as only a cat can climb, but that was just what Rudy understood, for he had learned it from the cat; he did not even know the Spirit of Giddiness was in the air behind him, trying to grasp him with its octopus-like arms.

When he at length stood upon the topmost rung of the ladder, he saw that it did not reach high enough to enable him to look into the nest, and that he could only get up to it by using his hands.

He first tried the strength of the stout interwoven branches that formed the nethermost part of the nest; and having secured a firm hold on one of the strongest, he swung himself up from the ladder, and hanging on to the branch soon had his head and shoulders in the nest. He was met by a suffocating stench of carrion, for in the nest were sheep, chamois, and birds, all in a putrid state. The Spirit of Giddiness, who had little power over him, blew the poisonous vapours into his face, in order to make him dizzy and faint, whilst down in the black yawning gulf the Ice Maiden herself, with her long pale greenish-white hair, sat by the rushing waters staring at him with eyes as deadly as two gun-barrels.

“Now I’ll have you,” she was thinking.

In a corner of the nest he saw the eaglet, a great strong bird, but still unfledged. Rudy kept his gaze riveted upon it, and holding on with all his might with one hand, he with the other threw a noose over the young eagle. It was caught—alive, its legs fixed in the tightly drawn cord.

Rudy slung the noose with the bird across his shoulder, so that the creature hung a good way beneath him whilst he held on to a rope flung out to help him, until his toes touched the topmost rung of the ladder.

“Hold tight! Don’t think it possible to fall and you will not do so!” It was the old lesson; and Rudy acting on it, held tight, clambered down, and being convinced that he could not fall, of course did not.

Then arose loud and joyous hurrahs, as Rudy landed on the firm rock with his young eagle.

VIII

WHAT NEWS THE PARLOUR CAT HAD TO TELL

“Here is what you asked for!” said Rudy, as he came into the miller’s house at Bex, and placing a large basket on the floor, took off the cloth that covered it. Two yellow eyes set in black rings glared forth, flashing fire, and so wild that they seemed to wish to burn and penetrate everything they beheld; the short strong beak was opened to bite, and the neck was red and covered with young feathers.

“The young eagle,” cried the miller. Babette shrieked and sprang back, but could not take her eyes either from Rudy or from the eagle.

“You are not easily frightened!” said the miller.

“And you are a man of your word,” said Rudy. “We both have our characteristics.”

“But how is it that you did not break your neck?” asked the miller.

“Because I held tight,” replied Rudy. “And that I do still. Now I shall hold Babette tight.”

“First see that you get her,” said the miller, laughing; and Babette knew that was a good sign.

“We must get him out of the basket—it is terrible the way he glares. But how did you manage to get him?” Rudy had to describe the capture, and the miller opened his eyes wider and wider.

“With your courage and your good fortune you can support three wives!” said the miller.

“I thank you!” cried Rudy.

“It is true, you have not got Babette yet!” said the miller, slapping the young Alpine hunter good-humouredly on the shoulder.

“Do you know the latest news in the mill?” said the Parlour Cat to the Kitchen Cat. “Rudy has brought us the young eagle and takes Babette in exchange. They kissed each other, and the old man saw it. That’s as good as an engagement. The old man was quite good-natured about it; he drew back his claws, took his afternoon nap, and left the two to sit and chatter. They have so much to talk about that they will not have finished by Christmas.”

And they had not finished by Christmas either. The wind whisked away the yellow leaves, and the snow whirled through the valley as well as on the high mountains. The Ice Maiden sat in her stately castle, which increases in size in winter; the cliffs stood there covered with frost, and icicles, as thick as trees and as heavy as elephants, hung down, where in summer the water veil of the mountain streams flutters in the breeze; fantastic garlands of crystal ice hung glittering upon the snow-powdered pine trees. The Ice Maiden rode upon the howling wind away over the deepest valleys. The snow-blanket reached right down as far as Bex, and the Ice Maiden, coming down there, beheld Rudy sitting at the miller’s; he sat indoors that winter much more than was his wont, for he was generally near Babette. The wedding was to take place the following summer; his ears often tingled, for friends spoke a good deal about it. In the mill all was sunshine, and there bloomed the loveliest Alpine rose, the merry, laughing Babette, beautiful as the coming spring—the spring which makes all the birds sing of summertime and marriage.

“How those two are always sitting stuck together there,” said the Parlour Cat. “I am tired of their mewing!”

IX

THE ICE MAIDEN

Spring had unfolded her fresh green garlands of walnut and chestnut trees, and beautifully did they rear their stately heads along the banks of the Rhone from the bridge at St. Moritz as far as the Lake of Geneva. The river rushes along with wild speed from its source under the green glacier—the ice-palace, where the Ice Maiden dwells, whence she soars on the keen wind to the highest snow-field to bask in the warm sunshine on the snow-covered pools. Here she sat gazing fixedly down into the deep valleys where the people were busily moving about like ants on a sunlit stone.

“Beings of mental power, as the Children of the Sun call you,” said the Ice Maiden, “you are only vermin. One rolling snowball—and you, your houses and cities, are crushed and wiped out.” She raised her proud head higher and looked far and wide with her death-dealing eyes. From the valley beneath arose a rolling sound: rocks were being blasted—the work of men. Roads and tunnels for railways were being laid down.

“They are playing at being moles,” she said; “they are digging passages under the earth: hence this noise, like the reports of a gun. When I move my castles, the noise is greater than the roar of thunder.”

Out of the valley ascended a wreath of smoke moving forwards like a fluttering veil. It formed the waving plumes of the engine, which was dragging along the newly opened line the train that looked like a winding serpent with carriages for its joints. It shot past swift as an arrow.

“They pretend to be the masters down there, these mental powers,” said the Ice Maiden. “But the powers of mighty Nature are still the ruling ones.”

She laughed and sang, making the valley tremble.

“An avalanche is falling,” cried the people.

But the Children of the Sun sang still louder of the ruling power of human thought which places a yoke upon the ocean, levels mountains and fills up valleys, and is lord over the powers of Nature.

A party of travellers came across the snow-field where the Ice Maiden sat; they had bound themselves fast to each other by ropes, that they might form a heavier body upon the slippery surface of the ice, at the edge of the deep abyss.

“Vermin!” said the Ice Maiden. “You lords of the powers of Nature!” And she turned her gaze from the party and looked scornfully down into the deep valley where the train was rushing along.

“There they sit, these thoughts! But they are in the power of Nature’s forces. I can see them, one and all. One sits proudly alone, like a king, while the others are all heaped up together. Here again half of them are asleep, and when the steam-dragon stops, they get out and go their ways. The thoughts go out into the world!” And she laughed.

“There goes another avalanche!” said the people down in the valley.

“It will not reach us,” said two who sat together on the back of the dragon—two souls but one mind—as they say. They were Rudy and Babette, and the miller was there too.

“Like baggage,” he said; “I am there as a necessary encumbrance.”

“There sit the two,” said the Ice Maiden. “Many chamois have I crushed, millions of Alpine roses have I snapped and broken, and not even spared the roots. I will destroy them—these thoughts, these powers of mind.”

And again she laughed.

“There goes another avalanche,” said those down in the valley.

X

THE GODMOTHER

At Montreux, one of the nearest towns, which with Clarens, Vevey, and Crin encircle the north-east part of the Lake of Geneva, resided Babette’s godmother, the grand English lady, with her daughters and a young gentleman, a relation of theirs. They had only lately arrived, but the miller had already visited them, announced Babette’s engagement, and told them about Rudy and the young eagle and the visit to Interlaken—in short, the whole story. It had pleased them very much, and made them feel very kindly towards Rudy, Babette, and the miller too; they also insisted upon all three coming over to Montreux, and that is why they had come. Babette was to see her godmother, and her godmother was to see Babette.

At the little town of Villeneuve, at one end of the Lake of Geneva lay the steamer that made the journey to Vevey, below Montreux, in half an hour. These shores have often been celebrated in song. Here, under the walnut trees, by the deep blue lake, Byron sat, and wrote his melodious verses of the prisoner in the dark rocky castle of Chillon. There, where Clarens with its weeping willows is reflected in the water, Rousseau wandered, dreaming of Heloise. The Rhone flows along at the foot of the high snow-capped mountains of Savoy, and here, not far from its mouth, lies a little island in the lake, so small that, seen from the shore, it looks like a ship upon the water. The island is a rock which about a hundred years ago a lady caused to be dammed up, and covered with earth; she also planted three acacia trees which now overshadow the whole island. Babette was enchanted with this spot, which appeared to her the loveliest in the whole voyage; she would very much have liked to land there, it was so beautiful. But the steamer went on and did not stop till it reached Vevey.

The small party walked slowly up from here between the white sun-lit walls that enclose the vineyards around the little mountain town of Montreux, where the peasant’s houses are shaded by fig trees, and where laurels and cypresses grow in the gardens. Half-way up the mountain stood the hotel in which Babette’s godmother resided.

The reception was very cordial. The godmother was a pleasant woman with a round, smiling countenance; as a child she must certainly have resembled one of Raphael’s cherubs. Even at her age her head was still that of an angel, richly crowned with silver locks. Her daughters were fine, elegant girls, tall and slender. The young cousin whom they had brought with them was clad in white from head to foot; he had golden hair and golden whiskers so large that they might have been shared among three gentlemen; he immediately paid Babette the greatest attention.

Richly bound books, music and drawings lay strewn about on the large table. The doors leading to the balcony stood open, affording a lovely view of the great lake, which lay so clear and still that the mountains of Savoy, with their towns, woods and snowy peaks were reflected in it.

Rudy, who was at other times so lively and gay, did not in the least feel himself at home; he moved about as if he were walking on peas over a slippery floor. The time seemed as long and tedious to him as if he were on a treadmill. And then they had to go out for a walk. That was just as slow and tedious; Rudy could have taken two steps forward and one backwards to keep pace with the others. They walked down to Chillon, the gloomy old castle on the rocky island, merely to see the instruments of torture, the dungeons in which people were buried alive, the rusty chains hanging from the walls of rock, the stone benches for those condemned to death, the trapdoors through which the unfortunate creatures were hurled down and impaled upon iron spikes amidst the surge. They called looking at all this pleasure. It was a place of execution, made famous by Byron’s lines. But Rudy could not forget its original use. He leaned out of one of the great stone windows and looked down into the deep blue water and across to the little island with the three acacias, wishing himself there away from the whole chattering party. Babette however was unusually lively; she had amused herself famously, she said, and thought the cousin perfection itself.

“Yes, a perfect fop!” said Rudy; it was the first time that Rudy had said anything that did not please Babette. The Englishman had given her a little book as a souvenir of Chillon; it was Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” translated into French so that she could read it.

“It may be a good book,” said Rudy, “but I don’t like the finely combed fellow who gave it you.”

“He looked just like a flour-sack without any flour,” said the miller, laughing at his own wit.

Rudy laughed too, and said that that was just what he was like.

XI

THE COUSIN

When, a few days later, Rudy went to pay a visit to the mill, he found the young Englishman there. Babette was just placing a dish of boiled trout before him, which she had doubtless herself garnished with parsley to make it look nice and appetising. But Rudy thought all this quite unnecessary. What did the Englishman want there? What was his business there? To be treated and waited upon by Babette? Rudy was jealous, and that made Babette happy. It pleased her to study every corner of his character—both the strong and the weak spots. Love was to her as yet only a game, and she played with Rudy’s whole heart.

It must, however, be said that in him was centred all her happiness and all her life; he was her one thought, and her ideal of all that was good and noble in the world. Still, the darker his looks grew, the more her eyes laughed; she would even have kissed the fair Englishman with the golden whiskers if by doing so she could have enraged Rudy and sent him rushing away, for that would have proved how much he loved her. This was certainly not right in Babette, but then she was only nineteen years old. She did not reflect much on her conduct, and still less did she consider that it might be interpreted as flighty by the young Englishman, and as not at all becoming for the modest betrothed daughter of the miller.

Where the highroad from Bex passes under the snow-clad rocky heights, which in the language of the country are called “Diablerets,” stood the mill, not far from a rushing mountain stream, which lashed itself into a grey foam like soapsuds. It was not this stream, however, that turned the mill-wheel, but a smaller one, which came tumbling down the rocks on the other side of the river, and which, gaining a greater impetus and power by being dammed up with stones, ran out, through a wooden trough like a wide gutter, over the large stream. The trough was always so full of water that it overflowed and offered a wet slippery path to anyone who took it into his head to get to the mill by this shorter road. The young Englishman, however, thought he would try it. Dressed in white like a miller’s boy, he was climbing up the path one evening, guided by the light that streamed from Babette’s bedroom window. But as he had never learned to climb, he nearly went head first into the stream, escaping with wet arms and bespattered trousers. All dripping and covered with slime, he arrived beneath Babette’s window, and, clambering up the old lime tree, he began to mimic the owl, that being the only bird he could imitate. Babette, hearing him, looked out through the thin curtains; but when she saw the man in white, and guessed who it was, her little heart beat with terror and also with anger. She quickly put out the light, and, after having assured herself that the window had been securely fastened, she left him to hoot and to screech as much as he liked.

What a terrible thing it would be if Rudy were now at the mill! But Rudy was not at the mill; no—what was worse still—he was standing right under the lime tree. Loud angry words were spoken; there might be blows—perhaps even murder!

Babette, in great terror, opened her window, and calling Rudy’s name, begged him to go away, adding that she could not allow him to stay there.

“You cannot allow me to stay here!” he cried. “Then this is an appointment. You are expecting some good friend whom you prefer to me. Shame on you, Babette!”

“You are unbearable,” cried Babette. “I hate you!” she added, in tears. “Go—go!”

“This I have not deserved,” said he, as he strode away, his cheeks and his heart burning like fire.

Babette threw herself on the bed weeping.

“I love you so dearly, Rudy! How can you think so ill of me?”

She worked herself into quite a passion, and that was a good thing for her; otherwise she would have been very grieved. As it was, she could fall asleep and enjoy the refreshing slumber that virtue brings.

XII

EVIL POWERS

Rudy left Bex and took his way homewards, ascending the mountain path, with its fresh cool air, where amidst the snow the Ice Maiden reigns. The trees, with their thick foliage, were far beneath him, and looked like potato-tops; the pines and the bushes became smaller up there; the Alpine roses grew next to the snow, which lay in solitary patches, like linen put out to bleach. A blue gentian that grew in his path he crushed with the butt-end of his gun.

Higher up two chamois showed themselves; Rudy’s eyes sparkled, and his thoughts took a new turn. But as he was not near enough for a sure aim, he mounted higher up, where only thick stubble grew from between the boulders; seeing the chamois calmly crossing the snow-field, he pressed on. Thick mists gathered round him, and suddenly he found himself on the brink of a steep precipice. The rain began to pour down in torrents.

He felt a burning thirst; his head was hot, while his limbs were cold. He seized his hunting-flask, but it was empty; he had not thought of filling it when he rushed up the mountains. He had never been ill before, but now he had a feeling as if he were so; he was tired, and felt an inclination to lie down, a desire to sleep, but the rain was streaming down all around him. He tried to rouse himself, but every object danced and trembled strangely before his eyes.

Suddenly he perceived what he had never seen here before—a newly built low hut that leaned against the rock, and in the doorway stood a young girl. It almost seemed to him as if it were Annette, the schoolmaster’s daughter, whom he had once kissed in the dance; but though it was not Annette, still he had seen the girl somewhere before, perhaps near Grindelwald the evening he was returning from the shooting-match at Interlaken.

“How did you come here?” he asked.

“This is my home. I am minding my flocks.”

“Your flocks? Where do they graze? Here there is only snow and rocks.”

“You know much about what is here!” said the girl, laughing. “Here behind us, a little way down, is a fine piece of pasture. That is where my goats go. I take great care of them. I never lose one; what is mine, remains mine.”

“You’re pretty sharp,” said Rudy.

“So are you,” replied the girl.

“If you have any milk in the house, give me some to drink; I am dreadfully thirsty.”

“I have something better than the milk,” said the girl, “and you shall have it. There were some travellers here yesterday with a guide and they left half a bottle of wine behind them, such as you have never tasted. They will not come back for it, and as I shall not drink it, you can have it.”

And the girl brought the wine, poured it into a wooden goblet, and handed it to Rudy.

“That’s excellent,” he said. “I never tasted wine so warming and so fiery.”

His eyes sparkled, he was filled with fresh life, and with a glow as if every care and vexation had vanished; the strongest feelings of a man’s nature welled up within him.

“But surely you are Annette,” he cried. “Give me a kiss.”

“If you give me the pretty ring you have on your finger.”

“My engagement ring?”

“Yes, that’s it,” said the girl, and re-filling the goblet with wine she held it to his lips, and he drank. The pleasure of life coursed through his veins; he felt as though the whole world belonged to him—then why torment himself? Everything was created for our enjoyment and our happiness. The stream of life is the stream of pleasure; to be carried, to be torn along by it, is happiness. He looked at the young girl. She was Annette, and yet not Annette; still less was she the phantom, the spectre, as he had called it, that he had met near Grindelwald. The girl up here on the mountain was fresh as the driven snow, blooming as an Alpine rose, and swift as a kid; but still formed from Adam’s rib, like himself. He flung his arms around the beautiful creature and looked into her eyes, so strangely clear. A moment only did he gaze, but in that moment who shall express or describe it in words? Was it the the spirit of life, or the spirit of death that took possession of him? Was he carried on high, or was he sinking into the deep deadly crevasse, deeper, ever deeper?

He saw the walls of ice looking like blue-green glass; fathomless chasms yawned around him, and the water dripped down with a sound like the chime of bells—clear as a pearl, and lit up by bluish flames.

The Ice Maiden kissed him—a kiss that sent an icy shudder through his whole frame; a cry of pain escaped him and, tearing himself away, he staggered and all became dark to his eyes; but he opened them again. The evil powers had played their game.

Gone was the Alpine maiden, gone the sheltering hut; the water trickled down the naked rocks, and the snow lay all around. Rudy was shivering with cold, soaked through to the skin, and his ring—the engagement ring that Babette had given him—had disappeared. His gun lay in the snow beside him; taking it up he tried to discharge it, but it missed fire. Damp clouds filled the chasm like masses of snow, and up above sat the Spirit of Giddiness watching her powerless prey; while from the depths came a sound as if a mass of rock were falling, crushing and carrying away everything that obstructed its course.

At the miller’s Babette sat and wept. Rudy had not been there for six days—he who was in the wrong, he who ought to ask her pardon, and whom she loved with all her heart.

XIII

IN THE MILL

“What a life these people do lead!” said the Parlour Cat to the Kitchen Cat. “Babette and Rudy have fallen out again. She sits and cries, and I suppose he thinks no more about her.”

“I don’t like that,” said the Kitchen Cat.

“Neither do I,” said the Parlour Cat, “but I shall not take it to heart. Babette can become engaged to the yellow-whiskered fellow. But he has not been here either since that night he wanted to get on the roof.”

Evil powers carry on their game around us and in us. Rudy had found that out and thought a great deal about it. What was it that had gone on about and within him on the mountain? Was it a ghost that he had seen, or only the result of a feverish dream? He had never had fever, or any other illness, before. But while judging Babette he had examined the workings of his own heart, and there he had found traces of the wild course of the fierce storm that had raged there. Could he confess all to Babette, every thought that in the hour of temptation might have led to deeds? He had lost her ring, and by that very loss she had won him back. Would she be able to confess to him? It seemed as if his heart would burst when he thought of her; how many recollections rose within him! He saw her as if she were standing before him in the flesh, a laughing, saucy child. Many a loving word that she had uttered out of the fullness of her love came like a ray of sunshine to his heart, and soon it was filled with nothing but sunshine at the thought of Babette. Yes, she would undoubtedly be able to confess to him, and she should, too.

He went to the mill. There was a confession; it began with a kiss, and ended with Rudy remaining the sinner. It was all his fault in having doubted Babette’s fidelity—it was abominable of him. Such mistrust, such violence, could only lead them both into unhappiness. That, indeed, they could! And therefore Babette read him a little sermon, which amused her greatly and which she delivered with a pretty little air. On one point she admitted that Rudy was right: her godmother’s nephew was a fop. She would burn the book that he had given her, so that she should not possess the least thing that could remind her of him.

“Now it’s all over,” said the Parlour Cat. “Rudy has come back, and they are friends again, which they say is the greatest happiness of all.”

“I heard the rats say last night,” said the Kitchen Cat, “that the greatest happiness consists in eating tallow candles and having plenty of rancid bacon. Whom is one to believe—the rats, or the lovers?”

“Neither,” said the Parlour Cat, “that is the safest.”

The greatest happiness for Rudy and Babette, the happy day, as they called it, their wedding-day, was drawing near. But the wedding was not to take place in the church at Bex, nor at the mill; Babette’s godmother wished the marriage to be solemnised in the pretty little church at Montreux, and the festivities to be held at her house. The miller was very anxious that her wish should be acceded to; he alone knew what she had determined to do for the newly married couple. They were to receive a wedding present from her which was well worth some such concession to her will.

The day was fixed. They were to travel as far as Villeneuve on the previous evening to be in time to take the boat across to Montreux early the next morning, so that the godmother’s daughters might dress the bride.

“I suppose there will be a wedding feast in this house too,” said the Parlour Cat; “if not, I wouldn’t give a mew for the whole thing.”

“Of course there’ll be a feast here,” said the Kitchen Cat. “Ducks have been killed, pigeons plucked, and a whole roebuck is hanging on the wall. My mouth waters when I think of it. They start tomorrow!”

Yes, tomorrow! That evening Rudy and Babette for the last time sat together as an engaged couple in the miller’s house. Outside the glow was on the Alps, the evening bells rang out and the Children of the Sun sang: “That which is best will be!”

XIV

NIGHT VISIONS

The sun had gone down, and the clouds lay low in the Rhone valley between the mountain-peaks. The wind blew from the south across the high Alps. It was the wind from Africa—a hurricane that scattered the clouds; and when it had passed, all was still for a moment. The rent clouds hung in fantastic forms between the wooded hills and over the hurrying Rhone river. They hung in shapes like the sea-monsters of old, like the eagle hovering in the air, like the jumping frogs in the marsh; they lay low upon the rushing stream, and sailed down upon it, though floating in the air. The stream carried an uprooted fir tree down with it, making eddying circles all around it; the Spirits of Giddiness were there, more than one, circling on the foaming waters. The moon lit up the snow-clad mountain peaks, the dark woods, and the strange white clouds—those forms of night that are the spirits of Nature’s powers. The mountain-dwellers saw them through the windowpanes, sailing past in troops before the Ice Maiden as she came out of her glacier-castle, sitting on the frail bark formed by the uprooted fir; the glacier-water carried her down the stream to the open sea.

“The wedding-guests are coming,” was whistled in the air and sung upon the waters.

There were visions without and visions within.

Babette was dreaming a strange dream.

She dreamed that she had been married to Rudy for many years. He was gone out chamois-hunting, but she was sitting at home, and the young Englishman with the golden whiskers was with her. His eyes were so eloquent, and his words possessed such power, that when he held out his hand to her, she was obliged to follow him. They strode away from the house by a path that led ever downwards. Babette felt as though a weight lay upon her heart, which continually grew heavier; she was sinning against Rudy and against God. Suddenly she found herself deserted, her clothes torn by thorns, and her hair turned grey; looking upwards in her grief, she saw Rudy standing on a cliff. She stretched her arms out towards him, but did not venture to call or beg him to come; besides, that would have been useless, for she soon discovered that it was not Rudy, but only his coat and hat which he had hung upon his alpenstock as the hunters do to deceive the chamois. In her boundless grief Babette exclaimed: “Oh! would that I had died on my wedding-day, the happiest day of my life! My God! that would have been a mercy and a blessing. That would have been the best that could have happened for Rudy and me. No one knows the future!” Then, in godless despair, she hurled herself into the deep ravine. A sound like the breaking of a harp string and one plaintive note was heard, and then Babette awoke.

The dream was past and effaced; but she knew that she had dreamed something terrible about the young Englishman whom she had not seen nor thought of for several months. She wondered whether he was at Montreux, and whether she should see him at the wedding. A slight shadow passed over her pretty face, and her eyebrows contracted. But soon a smile played around her lips and her eyes sparkled with joy, for the sun was shining gloriously, and tomorrow she and Rudy were to be married.

Rudy was already in the parlour when she entered it, and soon they were off to Villeneuve. Both were exceedingly happy, and so was the miller; he laughed and proved himself in the best of humours. He was a kind father and an honest soul.

“Now we are the masters of the house,” said the Parlour Cat.

XV

CONCLUSION

Evening had not yet fallen when the three joyous companions reached Villeneuve and sat down to dinner. This over, the miller sat in an armchair, smoked his pipe and had a little nap. The young bridal pair walked through the town arm-in-arm, and along the highroad, at the foot of the wooded rocks by the side of the deep blue lake, The gloomy castle of Chillon, with its grey walls and ponderous towers, was reflected in the clear waters; the little island with the acacias was still nearer, and looked like a bouquet lying on the lake.

“How charming it must be there!” said Babette. She again felt her former desire come over her to cross to the island; this wish could now be gratified, for on the shore lay a boat, and the rope by which it was moored could easily be loosened. Seeing no one whom they could ask for permission, they took the boat with no more ado, Rudy knowing how to row very well. The oars moved through the pliant water like the fins of a fish—that water which is so yielding and yet so strong, which has a back for carrying and jaws for swallowing, which though mild and smiling when at peace can inspire such terror in its destroying moods. A white streak of foam followed in the wake of the boat, which in a few minutes took them both over to the island, where they landed. There was only just room enough for two to dance.

Rudy swung Babette round two or three times, and then they sat down, hand in hand, on the little bench under the drooping acacias, looking into each other’s eyes, while everything was bathed in the splendour of the setting sun. The pine-woods on the mountains assumed a purplish red tint like that of the blooming heather, and where the rocks were no longer covered with trees, they glowed as if the hills were transparent. The clouds in the sky were brilliant with a crimson glow, and the whole lake was like a fresh blooming rose-leaf. Gradually the shadows crept up the snow-clad mountains of Savoy and lent them a dark-blue hue till only the topmost peak glowed like red lava, and seemed to echo the history of the mountains’ formation, when these masses rose glowing from the depths of the earth and had not yet cooled. Rudy and Babette thought they had never beheld such an Alpine glow before. The snow-clad Dent du Midi shone like the disk of the full moon when it rises above the horizon.

“What beauty! what happiness!” both exclaimed.

“Earth can bestow no more on me,” said Rudy. “An evening such as this is a whole life. How often have I felt my happiness, as I feel it now, and thought that if all were to come to a sudden end, what a happy life I should have lived, and how beautiful this world would have been for me. But the day passed, and a new one, more beautiful even than the other, dawned for me. How infinitely good God is, Babette.”

“I am truly happy,” said she.

“Earth can bestow no more on me,” exclaimed Rudy. And the evening bells rang out from the hills of Savoy and the mountains of Switzerland, while in the west the dark-blue Jura stood out in golden splendour.

“God grant you all that is brightest and best!” said Babette.

“He will,” said Rudy. “Tomorrow I shall have it. Tomorrow you will be entirely mine. My own sweet wife!”

“The boat!” cried Babette suddenly.

The boat which was to carry them back had become unfastened and was floating away from the island.

“I’ll bring it back,” said Rudy; and taking off his coat and boots, he plunged into the lake and swam with vigorous strokes after the boat.

Cold and deep was the clear blue ice-water from the mountain glacier. Rudy looked down into it; he took only a single glance, yet he thought he saw a golden ring rolling, shining, and sparkling in the depths. He remembered his engagement ring, and the ring became larger, extending itself into a shining circle within which appeared the clear glacier; deep chasms yawned around it, and the water dropped tinkling like the sound of bells, and gleaming with pale blue flames. In a second he saw what it takes us many words to describe. Young hunters and young girls, men and women who had once fallen into the crevasses of the glaciers stood, there alive with smiles upon their lips, and far beneath the church bells of buried towns were ringing. The congregation knelt under the vaulted roof; the organ-pipes were formed of icicles and the mountain torrent furnished the music. The Ice Maiden sat on the clear transparent ground, and raising herself up towards Rudy kissed his feet. There passed through his limbs an icy death-like chill, an electric shock—ice and fire: for it is impossible to distinguish one from the other in a brief touch.

“Mine, mine!” sounded around him and within him.

“I kissed you when you were a child, kissed you on your mouth. Now I kiss you on your toes and heels, and you are entirely mine.”

And he disappeared in the clear blue waters.

All was still; the church bells ceased ringing, their last notes dying away with the glow on the red clouds above.

“You are mine,” resounded in the depths; “you are mine,” re-echoed from on high—from the infinite.

How glorious to pass from love to love, from earth to heaven!

A sound like the breaking of a harp-string, and a plaintive note were heard—the icy kiss of death had conquered what is mortal. The prelude had ended so that the real drama of life might begin; discord had resolved itself into harmony.

Do you call this a sad story?

Poor Babette! For her it was unspeakable anguish.

The boat floated farther and farther away. No one on the shore knew that the bridal pair had crossed over to the little island. The clouds began to gather, and evening came on. Alone, despairing and wailing, she stood there. A storm burst over her; the vivid lightning lit up the Jura mountains and the heights of Switzerland and Savoy; from all sides followed flash upon flash, while the peals of thunder came one upon the other, each lasting several minutes. One moment the lightning would light up the sky, so that every single vine stem could be seen as though it were broad day, and the next everything would again be plunged into darkness. The flashes formed bands, circles, and zigzags of light, darting into the lake on all sides, while the roar of the thunder increased by its own echo. On land the boats were drawn up on the beach, and every living thing had sought a shelter. And now the rain poured down in torrents.

“Where can Rudy and Babette be in this terrible storm?” said the miller.

Babette sat with folded hands, her head in her lap, dumb with grief; she wept, she wailed no more.

“In the deep water,” she said to herself. “He is deep down, as under a glacier.”

Then came into her mind what Rudy had told her of his mother’s death, and of his escape when brought up almost dead out of the crevasse.

“The Ice Maiden has him again.”

There came a flash of lightning as dazzling as the sun’s rays on the white snow. Babette sprang up; the lake rose at that moment like a shining glacier, and there stood the Ice Maiden, majestic, and encircled by a pale blue light, while at her feet lay Rudy’s corpse.

“Mine,” she said, and again all was darkness and rolling water.

“How cruel!” walled Babette. “Why was he to die just as the day of our happiness dawned? Oh, God! enlighten my understanding, shed light into my heart. I do not understand Thy ways, nor the inscrutable decrees of Thy omnipotence and wisdom.”

And God enlightened her heart. A thought, a merciful ray of understanding shot through her, reminding her of her vivid dream of the past night; and she remembered the words and the wish she had uttered concerning what might be best for Rudy and herself.

“Woe is me! Was that the germ of sin in my heart? Was my dream a glimpse of our future lives, one of which had to be thus violently taken to effect my salvation? Miserable wretch that I am!”

She sat there wailing in the dark night. Through the deep stillness she still seemed to hear Rudy’s words, the last he had spoken here: “Earth can bestow no more on me!” They had been uttered in the fullness of joy, they re-echoed in the midst of deep sorrow.

•  •  •

Years have passed since then. The lake and its shores still smile, and the vines yield luscious grapes. Steamboats with waving flags shoot past; pleasure-boats with swelling sails fly swiftly over the water like white butterflies. The railway past Chillon is opened, leading far into the Rhone valley. At every station strangers get out, and, holding their red-bound guide-books in their hands, read what sights they have to see. They visit Chillon, they see out in the lake the little island with the three acacias, and they read in their guide-book of the bridal pair who one evening in the year 1856 sailed over to it. They read how the bridegroom met his death, and how it was only on the following morning that the despairing cries of the bride were heard from the shore.

But the guide-book does not speak of Babette’s quiet life with her father, not at the mill—for strangers live there now—but in the fine house near the railway-station. Many an evening she sits at her window and looks out over the chestnut trees to the snow-clad mountains which Rudy once climbed. She sees the evening Alpine glow as the Children of the Sun recline upon the lofty peaks, repeating the song of the traveller whose cloak the whirlwind tore away—taking the covering, but not the man.

There is a rosy tint on the mountain snow, and a rosy gleam in every heart in which dwells the thought: “God’s will is best!” But the truth of it is not always revealed to us, as it was revealed to Babette in her dream.

[ 1861 ]

A Story
from the Sand-hills

—

This story is from the sand-dunes or sand-hills of Jutland, but it does not begin there in the North, but far away in the South, in Spain. The wide sea is the thoroughfare from nation to nation: journey then in thought to sunny Spain.

It is warm and beautiful there; the fiery pomegranate flowers peep from among dark laurels; a cool refreshing breeze from the mountains blows over the orange gardens, over the Moorish halls with their golden cupolas and coloured walls. Children go through the streets in procession with candles and waving banners, and the sky, lofty and clear with its glittering stars, rises above them. Sounds of singing and castanets can be heard, and youths and maidens dance under the flowering acacia trees, while even the beggar sits upon a block of marble, refreshing himself with a juicy melon, and dreamily enjoying life. It all seems like a beautiful dream.

Here dwelt a newly married couple who completely gave themselves up to the charm of life; indeed they possessed every good thing they could desire—health and happiness, riches and honour.

“We are as happy as human beings can be,” said the young couple from the depths of their hearts. They had indeed only one step higher to mount on the ladder of happiness—they hoped that God would give them a child, a son like them in form and spirit. The happy little one was to be welcomed with rejoicing, to be cared for with love and tenderness, and enjoy every advantage of wealth and luxury that a rich and influential family can give. So the days went by like a joyous festival.

“Life is a gracious gift from God, almost too great a gift for us to appreciate!” said the young wife. “Yet they say that fullness of joy for ever and ever can only be found in the future life. I cannot imagine it!”

“The thought arises, perhaps, from the arrogance of men,” said the husband. “It seems a great pride to believe that we shall live forever, that we shall be as gods! Were not these the words of the serpent, the father of lies?”

“Surely you do not doubt the existence of a future life?” exclaimed the young wife. It seemed as if one of the first shadows passed over her sunny thoughts.

“Faith realises it, and the priests tell us so,” replied her husband; “but amid all my happiness I feel that it is arrogant to demand a continuation of it—another life after this. Has not so much been given us in this world that we ought to be, we must be, contented with it?”

“Yes, it has been given to us,” said the young wife, “but this life is nothing more than one long scene of trial and hardship to many thousands. How many have been cast into this world only to endure poverty, shame, illness, and misfortune? If there were no future life, everything here would be too unequally divided, and God would not be the personification of justice.”

“The beggar there,” said her husband, “has joys of his own which seem to him great, and cause him as much pleasure as a king would find in the magnificence of his palace. And then do you not think that the beast of burden, which suffers blows and hunger, and works itself to death, suffers just as much from its miserable fate? The dumb creature might demand a future life also, and declare the law unjust that excludes it from the advantages of the higher creation.”

“Christ said: ‘In my father’s house are many mansions,’” she answered. “Heaven is as boundless as the love of our Creator; the dumb animal is also His creature, and I firmly believe that no life will be lost, but each will receive as much happiness as he can enjoy, which will be sufficient for him.”

“This world is sufficient for me,” said the husband, throwing his arm round his beautiful, sweet-tempered wife. He sat by her side on the open balcony, smoking a cigarette in the cool air, which was loaded with the sweet scent of carnations and orange blossoms. Sounds of music and the clatter of castanets came from the road beneath, the stars shone above then, and the affectionate eyes of his wife looked upon him with the expression of undying love. “Such a moment,” he said, “makes it worthwhile to be born, to die, and to be annihilated!” He smiled—the young wife raised her hand in gentle reproof, and the shadow passed away from her mind, and they were happy—quite happy.

Everything seemed to work together for their good. They advanced in honour, in prosperity, and in happiness. A change came certainly, but it was only a change of place and not of circumstances.

The young man was sent by his Sovereign as ambassador to the Russian Court. This was an office of high dignity, but his birth and his acquirements entitled him to the honour. He possessed a large fortune, and his wife had brought him wealth equal to his own, for she was the daughter of a rich and respected merchant. One of this merchant’s largest and finest ships was to be sent that year to Stockholm, and it was arranged that the dear young couple should travel in it to St. Petersburg. All the arrangements on board were princely and silk and luxury on every side.

In an old war song, called “The King of England’s Son,” it says:

Farewell, he said, and sailed away.

And many recollect that day.

The ropes were of silk, the anchor of gold,

And everywhere riches and wealth untold.

These words would aptly describe the vessel from Spain, for here was the same luxury, and the same parting thought naturally arose:

God grant that we once more may meet

In sweet unclouded peace and joy.

There was a favourable wind blowing as they left the Spanish coast, and it would be but a short journey, for they hoped to reach their destination in a few weeks; but when they came out upon the wide ocean the wind dropped, the sea became smooth and shining, and the stars shone brightly. Many festive evenings were spent on board. At last the travellers began to wish for wind, for a favourable breeze; but their wish was useless—not a breath of air stirred, or if it did arise it was contrary. Weeks passed by in this way, two whole months, and then at length a fair wind blew from the south-west. The ship sailed on the high seas between Scotland and Jutland; then the wind increased, just as it did in the old song of “The King of England’s Son.”

’Mid storm and wind, and pelting hail,

Their efforts were of no avail.

The golden anchor forth they threw;

Towards Denmark the west wind blew.

This all happened a long time ago; King Christian VII., who sat on the Danish throne, was still a young man. Much has happened since then, much has altered or been changed. Sea and moorland have been turned into green meadows, stretches of heather have become arable land, and in the shelter of the peasant’s cottages, apple trees and rose-bushes grow, though they certainly require much care, as the sharp west wind blows upon them. In West Jutland one may go back in thought to old times, farther back than the days when Christian VII. ruled. The purple heather still extends for miles, with its barrows and aerial spectacles, intersected with sandy uneven roads, just as it did then; towards the west, where broad streams run into the bays, are marshes and meadows encircled by lofty, sandy hills, which, like a chain of Alps, raise their pointed summits near the sea; they are only broken by high ridges of clay, from which the sea, year by year, bites out great mouthfuls, so that the overhanging banks fall down as if by the shock of an earthquake. Thus it is there today and thus it was long ago, when the happy pair were sailing in the beautiful ship.

It was a Sunday, towards the end of September; the sun was shining, and the chiming of the church bells in the Bay of Nissum was carried along by the breeze like a chain of sounds. The churches there are almost entirely built of hewn blocks of stone, each like a piece of rock. The North Sea might foam over them and they would not be disturbed. Nearly all of them are without steeples, and the bells are hung outside between two beams. The service was over, and the congregation passed out into the churchyard, where not a tree or bush was to be seen; no flowers were planted there, and they had not placed a single wreath upon any of the graves. It is just the same now. Rough mounds show where the dead have been buried, and rank grass, tossed by the wind, grows thickly over the whole churchyard; here and there a grave has a sort of monument, a block of half-decayed wood, rudely cut in the shape of a coffin; the blocks are brought from the forest of West Jutland, but the forest is the sea itself, and the inhabitants find beams, and planks, and fragments which the waves have cast upon the beach. One of these blocks had been placed by loving hands on a child’s grave, and one of the women who had come out of the church walked up to it; she stood there, her eyes resting on the weather-beaten memorial, and a few moments afterwards her husband joined her. They were both silent, but he took her hand, and they walked together across the purple heath, over moor and meadow towards the sand-hills. For a long time they went on without speaking.

“It was a good sermon today,” the man said at last. “If we had not God to trust in, we should have nothing.”

“Yes,” replied the woman, “He sends joy and sorrow, and He has a right to send them. Tomorrow our little son would have been five years old if we had been permitted to keep him.”

“It is no good in grieving,” said the man. “The boy is well provided for. He is where we hope and pray to go to.”

They said nothing more, but went out towards their houses among the sand-hills. All at once, in front of one of the houses where the sea grass did not keep the sand down with its twining roots, what seemed to be a column of smoke rose up. A gust of wind rushed between the hills, hurling the particles of sand high into the air; another gust, and the strings of fish hung up to dry flapped and beat violently against the walls of the cottage; then everything was quiet once more, and the sun shone with renewed heat.

The man and his wife went into the cottage. They had soon taken off their Sunday clothes and come out again, hurrying over the dunes which stood there like great waves of sand suddenly arrested in their course, while the sand-weeds and dune grass with its bluish stalks spread a changing colour over them. A few neighbours also came out, and helped each other to draw the boats higher up on the beach. The wind now blew more keenly, it was chilly and cold, and when they went back over the sand-hills, sand and little sharp stones blew into their faces. The waves rose high, crested with white foam, and the wind cut off their crests, scattering the foam far and wide.

Evening came; there was a swelling roar in the air, a wailing or moaning like the voices of despairing spirits, that sounded above the thunder of the waves. The fisherman’s little cottage was on the very margin, and the sand rattled against the windowpanes; every now and then a violent gust of wind shook the house to its foundation. It was dark, but about midnight the moon would rise. Later on the air became clearer, but the storm swept over the perturbed sea with undiminished fury; the fisher folks had long since gone to bed, but in such weather there was no chance of closing an eye. Presently there was a tapping at the window; the door was opened, and a voice said:

“There’s a large ship stranded on the farthest reef.”

In a moment the fisher people sprung from their beds and hastily dressed themselves. The moon had risen, and it was light enough to make the surrounding objects visible to those who could open their eyes in the blinding clouds of sand; the violence of the wind was terrible, and it was only possible to pass among the sand-hills if one crept forward between the gusts; the salt spray flew up from the sea like down, and the ocean foamed like a roaring cataract towards the beach. Only a practised eye could discern the vessel out in the water; she was a fine brig, and the waves now lifted her over the reef, three or four cables’ length out of the usual channel. She drove towards the shore, struck on the second reef, and remained fixed.

It was impossible to render assistance; the sea rushed in upon the vessel, making a clean breach over her. Those on shore thought they heard cries for help from those on board, and could plainly distinguish the busy but useless efforts made by the stranded sailors. Now a wave came rolling onward. It fell with enormous force on the bowsprit, tearing it from the vessel, and the stern was lifted high above the water. Two people were seen to embrace and plunge together into the sea, and the next moment one of the largest waves that rolled towards the sand-hills threw a body on the beach. It was a woman; the sailors said that she was quite dead, but the women thought they saw signs of life in her, so the stranger was carried across the sand-hills to the fisherman’s cottage. How beautiful and fair she was! She must be a great lady, they said.

They laid her upon the humble bed; there was not a yard of linen on it, only a woollen coverlet to keep the occupant warm.

Life returned to her, but she was delirious, and knew nothing of what had happened or where she was; and it was better so, for everything she loved and valued lay buried in the sea. The same thing happened to her ship as to the one spoken of in the song about “The King of England’s Son.”

Alas! how terrible to see

The gallant bark sink rapidly.

Fragments of the wreck and pieces of wood were washed ashore; they were all that remained of the vessel. The wind still blew violently on the coast.

For a few moments the strange lady seemed to rest; but she awoke in pain, and uttered cries of anguish and fear. She opened her wonderfully beautiful eyes, and spoke a few words, but nobody understood her.—And lo! as a reward for the sorrow and suffering she had undergone, she held in her arms a newborn babe. The child that was to have rested upon a magnificent couch, draped with silken curtains, in a luxurious home; it was to have been welcomed with joy to a life rich in all the good things of this world; and now Heaven had ordained that it should be born in this humble retreat, that it should not even receive a kiss from its mother, for when the fisherman’s wife laid the child upon the mother’s bosom, it rested on a heart that beat no more—she was dead.

The child that was to have been reared amid wealth and luxury was cast into the world, washed by the sea among the sand-hills to share the fate and hardships of the poor.

Here we are reminded again of the song about “The King of England’s Son,” for in it mention is made of the custom prevalent at the time, when knights and squires plundered those who had been saved from shipwreck.

The King’s son wept, his heart was sore;

“O, woe for me, on this wild shore!

Had the waves but tossed me on Bugge’s strand,

No knight nor squire of all his band

Had dared against me lift a hand.”

The ship had stranded some distance south of Nissum Bay, on the very shore that Herr Bugge once called his, and the cruel, inhuman days, when, as we have just said, the inhabitants of Jutland treated the shipwrecked people so cruelly were past, long ago. Affectionate sympathy and self-sacrifice for the unfortunate existed then, just as it does in our own time in many a bright example. The dying mother and the unfortunate child would have found kindness and help wherever they had been cast by the winds, but nowhere would it have been more sincere than in the cottage of the poor fisherman’s wife, who had stood, only the day before, beside her child’s grave, who would have been five years old that day if God had spared it to her.

No one knew who the dead stranger was, they could not even form a conjecture; the fragments of wreckage gave no clue to the matter.

No tidings reached Spain of the fate of the daughter and son-in-law. They did not arrive at their destination, and violent storms had raged during the past weeks. At last the verdict was given: “Foundered at sea—all lost.” But in the fisherman’s cottage among the sand-hills near Hunsby, there lived a little scion of the rich Spanish family.

Where Heaven sends food for two, a third can manage to find a meal, and in the depth of the sea there is many a dish of fish for the hungry.

They called the boy Jürgen.

“He must certainly be a Jewish child, his skin is so dark,” the people said.

“He might be an Italian or a Spaniard,” remarked the clergyman.

But to the fisherman’s wife these nations seemed all the same, and she consoled herself with the thought that the child was baptised as a Christian.

The boy throve; the noble blood in his veins was warm, and he became strong on his homely fare. He grew apace in the humble cottage, and the Danish dialect spoken by the West Jutes became his language. The pomegranate seed from Spain became a hardy plant on the coast of West Jutland. Thus may circumstances alter the course of a man’s life! To this home he clung with deep-rooted affection; he was to experience cold and hunger, and the misfortunes and hardships that surround the poor; but he also tasted of their joys.

Childhood has bright days for everyone, and the memory of them shines through the whole after-life. The boy had many sources of pleasure and enjoyment; the coast for miles and miles was full of playthings, for it was a mosaic of pebbles, some red as coral or yellow as amber, and others again white and rounded like birds’ eggs and smoothed and prepared by the sea. Even the bleached fishes’ skeletons, the water plants dried by the wind, and seaweed, white and shining long linen-like bands waving between the stones—all these seemed made to give pleasure and occupation for the boy’s thoughts, and he had an intelligent mind; many great talents lay dormant in him. How readily he remembered stories and songs that he heard, and how dexterous he was with his fingers! With stones and mussel-shells he could put together pictures and ships with which one could decorate the room; and he could make wonderful things from a stick, his foster-mother said, although he was still so young and little. He had a sweet voice, and every melody seemed to flow naturally from his lips. And in his heart were hidden chords, which might have sounded far out into the world if he had been placed anywhere else than in the fisherman’s hut by the North Sea.

One day another ship was wrecked on the coast, and among other things a chest filled with valuable flower bulbs was washed ashore. Some were put into saucepans and cooked, for they were thought to be fit to eat, and others lay and shrivelled in the sand—they did not accomplish their purpose, or unfold their magnificent colours. Would Jürgen fare better? The flower bulbs had soon played their part, but he had years of apprenticeship before him. Neither he nor his friends noticed in what a monotonous, uniform way one day followed another, for there was always plenty to do and see. The ocean itself was a great lesson-book, and it unfolded a new page each day of calm or storm—the crested wave or the smooth surface.

The visits to the church were festive occasions, but in the fisherman’s house one was especially looked forward to: this was, in fact, the visit of the brother of Jürgen’s foster-mother, the eel-breeder from Fjaltring, near Bovbjerg. He came twice a year in a cart, painted red with blue and white tulips upon it, and full of eels; it was covered and locked like a box, two dun oxen drew it, and Jürgen was allowed to guide them.

The eel-breeder was a witty fellow, a merry guest, and brought a measure of brandy with him. They all received a small glassful or a cupful if there were not enough glasses; even Jürgen had about a thimbleful, that he might digest the fat eel, as the eel-breeder said; he always told one story over and over again, and if his hearers laughed he would immediately repeat it to them. Jürgen while still a boy, and also when he was older, used phrases from the eel-breeder’s story on various occasions, so it will be as well for us to listen to it. It runs thus:

The eels went into the bay, and the young ones begged leave to go a little farther out. “Don’t go too far,” said their mother; “the ugly eel-spearer might come and snap you all up.” But they went too far, and of eight daughters only three came back to the mother, and these wept and said, “We only went a little way out, and the ugly eel-spearer came immediately and stabbed five of our sisters to death.”  “They’ll come back again,” said the mother eel. “Oh, no,” exclaimed the daughters, “for he skinned them, cut them in two, and fried them.”  “Oh, they’ll come back again,” the mother eel persisted. “No,” replied the daughters, “for he ate them up.”  “They’ll come back again,” repeated the mother eel. “But he drank brandy after them,” said the daughters. “Ah, then they’ll never come back,” said the mother, and she burst out crying, “it’s the brandy that buries the eels.”

“And therefore,” said the eel-breeder in conclusion, “it is always the proper thing to drink brandy after eating eels.”

This story was the tinsel thread, the most humorous recollection of Jürgen’s life. He also wanted to go a little way farther out and up the bay—that is to say, out into the world in a ship—but his mother said, like the eel-breeder, “There are so many bad people—eel-spearers!” He wished to go a little way past the sand-hills, out into the dunes, and at last he did: four happy days, the brightest of his childhood, fell to his lot, and the whole beauty and splendour of Jutland, all the happiness and sunshine of his home, were concentrated in these. He went to a festival, but it was a burial feast.

A rich relation of the fisherman’s family had died; the farm was situated far eastward in the country and a little towards the north. Jürgen’s foster parents went there, and he also went with them from the dunes, over heath and moor, where the Skjaerumaa takes its course through green meadows and contains many eels; mother eels live there with their daughters, who are caught and eaten up by wicked people. But do not men sometimes act quite as cruelly towards their own fellow-men? Was not the knight Sir Bugge [103] murdered by wicked people? And though he was well spoken of, did he not also wish to kill the architect who built the castle for him, with its thick walls and tower, at the point where the Skjaerumaa falls into the bay? Jürgen and his parents now stood there; the wall and the ramparts still remained, and red crumbling fragments lay scattered around. Here it was that Sir Bugge, after the architect had left him, said to one of his men, “Go after him and say, ‘Master, the tower shakes.’ If he turns round, kill him and take away the money I paid him, but if he does not turn round let him go in peace.” The man did as he was told; the architect did not turn round, but called back “The tower does not shake in the least, but one day a man will come from the west in a blue cloak—he will cause it to shake!” And so indeed it happened a hundred years later, for the North Sea broke in and cast down the tower; but Predbjörn Gyldenstjerne, the man who then possessed the castle, built a new castle higher up at the end of the meadow, and that one is standing to this day, and is called Nörre-Vosborg.

Jürgen and his foster parents went past this castle. They had told him its story during the long winter evenings, and now he saw the stately edifice, with its double moat, and trees and bushes; the wall, covered with ferns, rose within the moat, but the lofty lime trees were the most beautiful of all; they grew up to the highest windows, and the air was full of their sweet fragrance. In a north-west corner of the garden stood a great bush full of blossom, like winter snow amid the summer’s green; it was a juniper bush, the first that Jürgen had ever seen in bloom. He never forgot it, nor the lime trees; the child’s soul treasured up these memories of beauty and fragrance to gladden the old man.

From Nörre-Vosborg, where the juniper blossomed, the journey became more pleasant, for they met some other people who were also going to the funeral and were riding in wagons. Our travellers had to sit all together on a little box at the back of the wagon, but even this, they thought, was better than walking. So they continued their journey across the rugged heath. The oxen which drew the wagon stopped every now and then, where a patch of fresh grass appeared amid the heather. The sun shone with considerable heat, and it was wonderful to behold how in the far distance something like smoke seemed to be rising; yet this smoke was clearer than the air; it was transparent, and looked like rays of light rolling and dancing afar over the heath.

“That is Lokéman driving his sheep,” said someone.

And this was enough to excite Jürgen’s imagination. He felt as if they were now about to enter fairyland, though everything was still real. How quiet it was! The heath stretched far and wide around them like a beautiful carpet. The heather was in blossom, and the juniper-bushes and fresh oak saplings rose like bouquets from the earth. An inviting place for a frolic, if it had not been for the number of poisonous adders of which the travellers spoke; they also mentioned that the place had formerly been infested with wolves, and that the district was still called Wolfsborg for this reason. The old man who was driving the oxen told them that in the lifetime of his father, the horses had many a hard battle with the wild beasts that were now exterminated. One morning, when he himself had gone out to bring in the horses, he found one of them standing with its forefeet on a wolf it had killed, but the savage animal had torn and lacerated the brave horse’s legs.

The journey over the heath and the deep sand was only too quickly at an end. They stopped before the house of mourning, where they found plenty of guests within and without. Wagon after wagon stood side by side, while the horses and oxen had been turned out to graze on the scanty pasture. Great sand-hills like those at home by the North Sea rose behind the house and extended far and wide. How had they come here, so many miles inland? They were as large and high as those on the coast, and the wind had carried them there; there was also a legend attached to them.

Psalms were sung, and a few of the old people shed tears; with this exception, the guests were cheerful enough, it seemed to Jürgen, and there was plenty to eat and drink. There were eels of the fattest, requiring brandy to bury them, as the eel-breeder recommended; and certainly they did not forget to carry out his maxim here.

Jürgen went in and out the house; and on the third day he felt as much at home as he did in the fisherman’s cottage among the sand-hills, where he had passed his early days. But the heath here was far more beautiful, with its myriads of bright blossoms, and large, sweet bilberries, clustering so thickly that one trod on them continually, staining the ground with the red juice. And the mounds, marking the graves of Jutlanders who had lived centuries ago, stood in rows almost everywhere, and mysterious pillars of mist curled upward through the calm atmosphere in the bright evenings—they called it “the heath on fire.”

The fourth day came, and the funeral festivities were at an end; they were to go back from the land-dunes to the sand-dunes.

“Ours are better,” said the old fisherman, Jürgen’s foster-father; “these have no strength.”

And they spoke of the way in which the sand-dunes had come inland, and it seemed very easy to understand. This is how they explained it:

A dead body had been found on the coast, and the peasants buried it in the churchyard. From that time the sand began to fly about and the sea broke in with violence. A wise man in the district advised them to open the grave and see if the buried man was not lying sucking his thumb, for if so he must be a sailor, and the sea would not rest until it had got him back. The grave was opened, and he really was found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart, and harnessed two oxen to it; and the oxen ran off with the sailor over heath and moor to the ocean, as if they had been stung by an adder. Then the sand ceased to fly inland, but the hills that had been piled up still remained.

All this Jürgen listened to and treasured up in his memory of the happiest days of his childhood—the days of the funeral feast.

It was delightful to go from home, and to see new places and new people; and he was to go still farther away. He went on board a ship. He went forth to see what the world produced; and he found bad weather, rough seas, unkindness, and harsh masters. He went as a cabin-boy! Cold nights, scanty fare, and blows had to be endured; then he felt his noble Spanish blood boil within him, and bitter, angry words rose to his lips, but he gulped them down; it was better, although he felt as the eel must feel when it is skinned, cut up, and put into the frying-pan.

“I shall get over it,” said a voice within him.

He saw the Spanish coast, the native land of his parents. He even saw the town where they had lived in joy and prosperity, but he knew nothing of his home or his relations, and his relations knew just as little about him.

The grimy little cabin-boy was not permitted to land, but on the last day of their stay he managed to get ashore. There were several purchases to be made, and he was sent to bring them on board.

Jürgen stood there in his shabby clothes which looked as if they had been washed in the ditch and dried in the chimney; he, who had always dwelt among the sand-hills, now saw a great city for the first time. How lofty the houses seemed, and what a number of people there were in the streets! some pushing this way, some that—a perfect maelstrom of citizens and peasants, monks and soldiers—the jingling of bells on the trappings of asses and mules, the chiming of church bells, song and musical instruments, calling and shouting, hammering and knocking—for every mechanic seemed to make his workshop either on the threshold or in the walkway—and all the while the hot sun burned and the air was so heavy! Jürgen felt as though he had got into an oven full of beetles, cockchafers, bees, and flies, all humming and buzzing with all their might; he hardly knew where he was or which way he went. Then he saw just in front of him the great doorway of a cathedral; the lights were gleaming in the dark aisles, and the fragrance of incense was wafted towards him. Even the poorest beggar ventured up the steps into the sanctuary. Jürgen followed the sailor he was with into the church, and stood in the sacred edifice. Coloured pictures gleamed from their golden background, and on the altar stood the figure of the Virgin with the child Jesus, surrounded by lights and flowers; priests in festive robes were chanting, and choir boys in dazzling attire swung silver censers. What splendour and magnificence he saw there! It streamed in upon his soul and overpowered him: the church and the faith of his parents surrounded him, and touched a chord in his heart that caused his eyes to overflow with tears.

They went from the church to the market-place. Here a quantity of provisions were given him to carry. The way to the harbour was long; and weary and overcome with various emotions, he rested for a few moments before a splendid house, with marble pillars, statues, and broad steps. Here he rested his burden against the wall. Then a porter in livery came out, lifted up a silver-headed cane, and drove him away—him, the grandson of that house. But no one knew that, and he just as little as anyone.

Then he went on board again, and once more encountered rough words and blows, much work and little sleep—such was his experience of life. They say it is good to suffer in one’s young days, if age brings something to make up for it.

His term of service on board the ship came to an end, and the vessel lay once more at Ringkjöbing in Jutland. He came ashore, and went home to the sand-dunes near Hunsby; but his foster-mother had died during his absence.

A hard winter followed this summer. Snow-storms swept over land and sea, and there was difficulty in getting from one place to another. How unequally things are distributed in this world! Here there was bitter cold and snow-storms, while in Spain there was burning sunshine and oppressive heat. Yet, when a clear frosty day came, and Jürgen saw the swans flying in numbers from the sea towards the land, across to Nörre-Vosborg, it seemed to him that people could breathe more freely here; the summer also in this part of the world was splendid. In imagination he saw the heath blossom and become purple with rich juicy berries, and the elder-bushes and lime trees at Nörre-Vosborg in flower. He made up his mind to go there again.

Spring came, and the fishing began. Jürgen was now an active helper in this, for he had grown during the last year, and was quick at work. He was full of life, and knew how to swim, to tread water, and to turn over and tumble in the strong tide. They often warned him to beware of the sharks, which seize the best swimmer, draw him down, and devour him; but such was not to be Jürgen’s fate.

At a neighbour’s house in the dunes there was a boy named Morten, with whom Jürgen was on very friendly terms, and they both took service in the same ship to Norway, and also went together to Holland. They never had a quarrel, but a person can be easily excited to quarrel when he is naturally hot tempered, for he often shows it in many ways; and this is just what Jürgen did one day when they fell out about the merest trifle. They were sitting behind the cabin door, eating from a delft plate, which they had placed between them. Jürgen held his pocket-knife in his hand and raised it towards Morten, and at the same time became ashy pale, and his eyes had an ugly look. Morten only said, “Ah! ah! you are one of that sort, are you? Fond of using the knife!”

The words were scarcely spoken, when Jürgen’s hand sank down. He did not answer a syllable, but went on eating, and afterwards returned to his work. When they were resting again he walked up to Morten and said:

“Hit me in the face! I deserve it. But sometimes I feel as if I had a pot in me that boils over.”

“There, let the thing rest,” replied Morten.

And after that they were almost better friends than ever; when afterwards they returned to the dunes and began telling their adventures, this was told among the rest. It was remarked, “Jürgen might be like a pot, soon boiling over, but he was an honest pot at any rate.”  “But not of Jutland manufacture—he cannot be called a Jutlander,” was Morten’s witty reply.

They were both young and healthy, well-grown and strong; but Jürgen was the cleverer of the two.

In Norway the peasants go into the mountains and take the cattle there to find pasture. On the west coast of Jutland huts have been erected among the sand-hills; they are built of pieces of wreck, and thatched with turf and heather; there are sleeping places round the walls, and here the fishermen live and sleep during the early spring. Every fisherman has a female helper, or manager as she is called, who baits his hooks, prepares warm beer for him when he comes ashore, and gets the dinner cooked and ready for him by the time he comes back to the hut tired and hungry. Besides this the managers bring up the fish from the boats, cut them open, prepare them, and have generally a great deal to do.

Jürgen, his father, and several other fishermen and their managers inhabited the same hut; Morten lived in the next one.

One of the girls, whose name was Else, had known Jürgen from childhood; they were glad to see each other, and were of the same opinion on many points, but in appearance they were entirely opposite; for he was dark, and she was pale, and fair, and had flaxen hair, and eyes as blue as the sea in sunshine.

As they were walking together one day, Jürgen held her hand very firmly in his, and she suddenly said to him:

“Jürgen, I have something I want to say to you; let me be your manager, for you are like a brother to me; but Morten, whose housekeeper I am—he is my sweetheart—but you need not tell this to the others.”

It seemed to Jürgen as if the loose sand was giving way under his feet. He did not speak a word, but nodded his head, and that meant “yes.” It was all that was necessary; but he suddenly felt in his heart that he hated Morten, and the more he thought the more he felt convinced that Morten had stolen away from him the only being he ever loved, and that this was Else: he had never thought of Else in this way before, but now it all became plain to him.

When the sea is rather rough, and the fishermen are coming home in their great boats, it is wonderful to see how they cross the reefs. One of them stands upright in the bow of the boat, and the others watch him sitting with the oars in their hands. Outside the reef it looks as if the boat was not approaching land but going back to sea; then the man who is standing up gives them the signal that the great wave is coming which is to float them across the reef. The boat is lifted high into the air, so that the keel is seen from the shore; the next moment nothing can be seen, mast, keel, and people are all hidden—it seems as though the sea had devoured them; but in a few moments they emerge like a great sea animal climbing up the waves, and the oars move as if the creature had legs. The second and third reef are passed in the same manner; then the fishermen jump into the water and push the boat towards the shore—every wave helps them—and at length they have it drawn up, beyond the reach of the breakers.

A wrong order given in front of the reef—the slightest hesitation—and the boat would be lost.

“Then it would be all over with me and Morten too!”

This thought passed through Jürgen’s mind one day while they were out at sea, where his foster-father had been taken suddenly ill. The fever had seized him. They were only a few oars’ strokes from the reef, and Jürgen sprang from his seat and stood up in the bow.

“Father-let me come!” he said, and he glanced at Morten and across the waves; every oar bent with the exertions of the rowers as the great wave came towards them, and he saw his father’s pale face, and dared not obey the evil impulse that had shot through his brain. The boat came safely across the reef to land; but the evil thought remained in his heart, and roused up every little fibre of bitterness which he remembered between himself and Morten since they had known each other. But he could not weave the fibres together, nor did he endeavour to do so. He felt that Morten had robbed him, and this was enough to make him hate his former friend. Several of the fishermen saw this, but Morten did not—he remained as obliging and talkative as ever, in fact he talked rather too much.

Jürgen’s foster-father took to his bed, and it became his death-bed, for he died a week afterwards; and now Jürgen was heir to the little house behind the sand-hills. It was small, certainly, but still it was something, and Morten had nothing of the kind.

“You will not go to sea again, Jürgen, I suppose,” observed one of the old fishermen. “You will always stay with us now.”

But this was not Jürgen’s intention; he wanted to see something of the world. The eel-breeder of Fjaltring had an uncle at Old Skjagen, who was a fisherman, but also a prosperous merchant with ships upon the sea; he was said to be a good old man, and it would not be a bad thing to enter his service. Old Skjagen lies in the extreme north of Jutland, as far away from the Hunsby dunes as one can travel in that country; and this is just what pleased Jürgen, for he did not want to remain till the wedding of Morten and Else, which would take place in a week or two.

The old fisherman said it was foolish to go away, for now that Jürgen had a home Else would very likely be inclined to take him instead of Morten.

Jürgen gave such a vague answer that it was not easy to make out what he meant—the old man brought Else to him, and she said:

“You have a home now; you ought to think of that.”

And Jürgen thought of many things.

The sea has heavy waves, but there are heavier waves in the human heart. Many thoughts, strong and weak, rushed through Jürgen’s brain, and he said to Else:

“If Morten had a house like mine, which of us would you rather have?”

“But Morten has no house and cannot get one.”

“Suppose he had one?”

“Well, then I would certainly take Morten, for that is what my heart tells me; but one cannot live upon love.”

Jürgen turned these things over in his mind all night. Something was working within him, he hardly knew what it was, but it was even stronger than his love for Else; and so he went to Morten’s, and what he said and did there was well considered. He let the house to Morten on most liberal terms, saying that he wished to go to sea again, because he loved it. And Else kissed him when she heard of it, for she loved Morten best.

Jürgen proposed to start early in the morning, and on the evening before his departure, when it was already getting rather late, he felt a wish to visit Morten once more. He started, and among the dunes met the old fisherman, who was angry at his leaving the place. The old man made jokes about Morten, and declared there must be some magic about that fellow, of whom the girls were so fond.

Jürgen did not pay any attention to his remarks, but said good-bye to the old man and went on towards the house where Morten dwelt. He heard loud talking inside; Morten was not alone, and this made Jürgen waver in his determination, for he did not wish to see Else again. On second thoughts, he decided that it was better not to hear any more thanks from Morten, and so he turned back.

On the following morning, before the sun rose, he fastened his knapsack on his back, took his wooden provision box in his hand, and went away among the sand-hills towards the coast path. This way was more pleasant than the heavy sand road, and besides it was shorter; and he intended to go first to Fjaltring, near Bovbjerg, where the eel-breeder lived, to whom he had promised a visit.

The sea lay before him, clear and blue, and the mussel shells and pebbles, the playthings of his childhood, crunched over his feet. While he thus walked on his nose suddenly began to bleed; it was a trifling occurrence, but trifles sometimes are of great importance. A few large drops of blood fell upon one of his sleeves. He wiped them off and stopped the bleeding, and it seemed to him as if this had cleared and lightened his brain. The sea-kale bloomed here and there in the sand as he passed. He broke off a spray and stuck it in his hat; he determined to be merry and light-hearted, for he was going out into the wide world—“a little way out, beyond the bay,” as the young eels had said. “Beware of bad people who will catch you, and skin you, and put you in the frying-pan!” he repeated laughingly to himself. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he thought; “I shall slip whole-skinned through the world.”

The sun was high in the heavens when he approached the narrow entrance to Nissum Bay. He looked back and saw a couple of horsemen galloping a long distance behind him, and there were other people with them. But this did not concern him.

The ferry-boat was on the opposite side of the bay. Jürgen called to the ferry-man, and the latter came over with his boat. Jürgen stepped in; but before he had got half-way across, the men whom he had seen riding so hastily, came up, hailed the ferry-man, and commanded him to return in the name of the law. Jürgen did not understand the reason of this, but he thought it would be best to turn back, and therefore he himself took an oar and returned. As soon as the boat touched the shore, the men sprang on board, and before he was aware of it, they had bound his hands with a rope.

“This wicked deed will cost you your life,” they said. “It is a good thing we have caught you.”

He was accused of nothing less than murder. Morten had been found dead, with his throat cut. One of the fishermen, late on the previous evening, had met Jürgen going towards Morten’s house; this was not the first time Jürgen had raised his knife against Morten, so they felt sure that he was the murderer. The prison was in a town at a great distance, and the wind was contrary for going there by sea; but it would not take half an hour to get across the bay, and another quarter of an hour would bring them to Nörre-Vosborg, the great castle with ramparts and moat. One of Jürgen’s captors was a fisherman, a brother of the keeper of the castle, and he said it might be managed that Jürgen should be placed for the present in the dungeon at Vosborg, where Long Martha the gipsy had been shut up till her execution. They paid no attention to Jürgen’s defence; the few drops of blood on his shirt-sleeve bore heavy witness against him. But he was conscious of his innocence, and as there was no chance of clearing himself at present he submitted to his fate.

The party landed just at the place where Sir Bugge’s castle had stood, and where Jürgen had walked with his foster-parents after the burial feast, during the four happiest days of his childhood. He was led by the well-known path, over the meadow to Vosborg; once more the elders were in bloom and the lofty lime trees gave forth sweet fragrance, and it seemed as if it were but yesterday that he had last seen the spot. In each of the two wings of the castle there was a staircase which led to a place below the entrance, from whence there is access to a low, vaulted cellar. In this dungeon Long Martha had been imprisoned, and from here she was led away to the scaffold. She had eaten the hearts of five children, and believed that, could she have eaten two more, she would have flown away as a Night Raven. [104] In the middle of the roof of the cellar there was a little narrow air-hole, but no window. The flowering lime trees could not breathe refreshing fragrance into that dark and mouldy dungeon. There was only a rough bench in the cell; but a good conscience makes a soft pillow, and therefore Jürgen could sleep well.

The thick oaken door was locked, and secured on the outside by an iron bar; but the goblin of superstition can creep through a keyhole into a baron’s castle just as easily as it can into a fisherman’s cottage, and why should he not creep in here, where Jürgen sat thinking of Long Martha and her wicked deeds? Her last thoughts on the night before her execution had filled this place, and he recalled too, the sorcery that had been practised in this house when General Swanwedel [105] dwelt there, and how the watch-dog that guarded the bridge had every morning been found hung in his chain across the railing. All these recollections thrilled through Jürgen’s imagination, turning his blood cold with horror; but a sunbeam, a refreshing thought from without, penetrated his heart even here—it was the remembrance of the flowering elder and the sweet-smelling lime trees.

He was not left there long. They took him away to the town of Ringkjöbing, where he was imprisoned with equal severity.

Those times were not like ours. Things went hard then with poor men; a nobleman’s coachman or valet was often appointed village judge, with power to condemn the peasant to a severe flogging or loss of all his goods, for some trifling offence. And thus, in Jutland, far from the capital, far from the King and the wise rulers of the state, the law took its course with little consideration for justice, or mercy either.

His dwelling was cold and comfortless; and how long would he be obliged to bear all this? It seemed his fate to suffer misfortune and sorrow innocently. He now had plenty of time to reflect on the difference of fortune on earth, and to wonder why this fate had been allotted to him; yet he felt sure that all would be made clear in the next life, the existence that awaits us when this life is over. His faith had grown strong in the poor fisherman’s cottage; the light which had never shone into his father’s mind, in all the richness and sunshine of Spain, was sent to him to be his comfort in poverty and distress, a sign of that mercy of God which never fails.

The spring storms began to blow. The rolling and moaning of the North Sea could be heard for miles inland when the wind was blowing, and then it sounded like the rushing of a thousand wagons over a hard road with a mine underneath. Jürgen heard these sounds in his prison, and it was a relief to him. No music could have touched his heart as did these sounds of the sea—the rolling sea, the boundless sea, on which a man can be borne across the world before the wind, carrying his own house with him wherever he goes, just as the snail carries its home even into a strange country.

He listened eagerly to its deep murmur and then the thought arose—“Free! free! How happy to be free, even barefooted and in ragged clothes!” Sometimes, when such thoughts crossed his mind, the fiery nature rose within him, and he beat the wall with his clenched fists.

Weeks, months, a whole year had gone by, when the gypsy Niels Tyv, called also a horse-dealer, was arrested; and now better times came—it was seen that Jürgen had been wrongly accused.

On the afternoon before Jürgen’s departure from home, and before the murder, Niels the thief, had met Morten at a beer-house in the neighbourhood of Ringkjöbing. A few glasses were drank, not enough to cloud the brain, but enough to loosen Morten’s tongue. He began to boast and to say that he had obtained a house and intended to marry, and when Niels asked him where he was going to get the money, he slapped his pocket proudly and said:

“The money is here, where it ought to be.”

This boast cost him his life; for when he went home Niels followed him, and cut his throat, intending to rob the murdered man of the gold, which did not exist.

All this was circumstantially explained; but it is enough for us to know that Jürgen was set free. But what compensation did he get for having been imprisoned a whole year, and shut out from all communication with his fellow creatures? They told him he was fortunate in being proved innocent, and that he might go. The burgomaster gave him two dollars for travelling expenses, and many citizens offered him provisions and beer—there were still good people; they were not all hard and pitiless; not all would “skin you, and lay you on the frying-pan!” But the best thing of all was that the merchant Brönne, of Skjagen, into whose service Jürgen had proposed entering the year before, was just at that time on business in the town of Ringkjöbing. Brönne heard the whole story; he was kind-hearted, and understood what Jürgen must have felt and suffered. Therefore he made up his mind to make it up to the poor lad, and convince him that there were still kind folks in the world.

So Jürgen went forth from prison as if to paradise, to find freedom, affection, and trust. He was to travel this path now, for no goblet of life is all bitterness; no good man would pour out such a draught for his fellow-man, and how could God the All-loving?

“Let everything be buried and forgotten,” said Brönne, the merchant. “Let us draw a thick line through last year: we will even burn the almanac. In two days we will start for dear, friendly, peaceful Skjagen. People call it an out-of-the-way corner; but it is a good warm chimney-corner, and its windows open toward every part of the world.”

What a journey that was: It was like taking fresh breath out of the cold dungeon air into the warm sunshine. The heather bloomed in pride and beauty, and the shepherd-boy sat on a barrow and blew his pipe, which he had carved for himself out of a sheep bone. Fata Morgana, [106] the beautiful aerial phenomenon of the wilderness, appeared with hanging gardens and waving forests, and the wonderful cloud called “Lokéman driving his sheep” also was seen.

Up towards Skjagen they went, through the land of the Vandals, where the men with long beards (the Langbarderne or Lombards) [107] came from. In that locality, during the famine under King Snio, all old people and young children were ordered to be put to death; but the noble lady, Gambaruk, who was the heiress of that part of the country, insisted that the children should rather be sent out of the country. Jürgen knew all this, he had some little knowledge; and although he did not know the land of the Lombards beyond the lofty Alps, he had an idea that it must be there, for in his boyhood he had been in the south, in Spain. He thought of the plenteousness of the southern fruit, of the red pomegranate flowers, of the humming, buzzing, and toiling in the great beehive of a city he had seen; but home is the best place after all, and Jürgen’s home was Denmark.

At last they arrived at “Vendilskaga,” as Skjagen is called in old Norwegian and Icelandic writings. At that time Old Skjagen, with the eastern and western town, extended for miles, with sand hills and arable land as far as the lighthouse near Grenen. Then, as now, the houses were strewn among the wind-raised sand-hills—a wilderness in which the wind sports with the sand, and where the voice of the seagull and wild swan strikes harshly on the ear.

In the south-west, a mile from Grenen, lies Old Skjagen; merchant Brönne dwelt here, and this was also to be Jürgen’s home for the future. The dwelling-house was tarred, and all the small out-buildings had been put together from pieces of wrecked boats. There was no fence, for indeed there was nothing to fence in except the long rows of fishes which were hung upon ropes, one above the other, to dry in the wind. The entire coast was strewn with spoiled herrings, for there were so many of these fish that a net was scarcely thrown into the sea before it was filled. They were caught by carloads, and many of them were either thrown back into the sea or left to lie on the beach.

The old man’s wife and daughter and his servants also came to meet him with great rejoicing. There was a great squeezing of hands, and talking and questioning. And the daughter, what a sweet face and bright eyes she had!

The inside of the house was comfortable and roomy. Dishes of fish were set on the table, among them plaice fit for a king; and there was wine from the Skjagen vineyard—that is, the sea, for there the grapes come ashore ready pressed and prepared in barrels and in bottles.

When the mother and daughter heard who Jürgen was, and how innocently he had suffered, they looked at him in a still more kindly way; and pretty Clara’s eyes had a look of especial interest as she listened to his story. Jürgen found a happy home in Old Skjagen. It did his heart good, for it had been sorely tried. He had drunk the bitter goblet of unrequited love, which softens or hardens the heart, according to circumstances. Jürgen’s heart was still soft—it was young, and perhaps it was a good thing that Miss Clara was going in three weeks’ time to Christiansand in Norway, in her father’s ship, to visit an aunt and to stay there the whole winter.

On the Sunday before she went away, they all went to church, to the Holy Communion. The church was large and handsome, and had been built centuries before by Scotchmen and Dutchmen; it stood some little way out of the town. It was rather ruinous certainly, and the road to it was heavy going, through deep sand, but the people gladly surmounted these difficulties to get to the house of God, to sing psalms and to hear the sermon. The sand had heaped itself up round the walls of the church, but the graves were kept free from it.

It was the largest church north of the Limfjorden. The Virgin Mary, with a golden crown on her head and the child Jesus in her arms, stood lifelike on the altar; the holy Apostles had been carved in the choir, and on the walls there were portraits of the old burgomasters and councillors of Skjagen; the pulpit was of carved work. The sun shone brightly into the church, and its radiance fell on the polished brass chandelier and on the little ship that hung from the vaulted roof.

Jürgen felt overcome by a holy, childlike feeling, like that which possessed him, when, as a boy, he stood in the splendid Spanish cathedral. But here the feeling was different, for he felt conscious of being one of the congregation.

After the sermon followed Holy Communion. He partook of the bread and wine, and it so happened that he knelt by the side of Miss Clara; but his thoughts were so fixed upon heaven and the Holy Sacrament that he did not notice his neighbour until he rose from his knees, and then he saw tears rolling down her cheeks.

She left Skjagen and went to Norway two days later. He remained behind, and made himself useful on the farm and at the fishery. He went out fishing, and in those days fish were more plentiful and larger than they are now. The shoals of the mackerel glittered in the dark nights, and indicated where they were swimming; the gurnard fish snarled, and the crabs gave piteous yells when they were caught, for fish are not so mute as people say.

Every Sunday Jürgen went to church; and when his eyes rested on the picture of the Virgin Mary over the altar as he sat there, they often glided away to the spot where he and Clara had knelt side by side.

Autumn came, and brought rain and snow with it; the water rose up right into the town of Skjagen, the sand could not suck it all in, one had to wade through it or go by boat. The storms threw vessel after vessel on the fatal reefs; there were snow-storm and sand-storms; the sand flew up to the houses, blocking the entrances, so that people had to creep up through the chimneys; that was nothing at all remarkable here. It was pleasant and cheerful indoors, where peat fuel and fragments of wood from the wrecks blazed and crackled upon the hearth. Merchant Brönne read aloud, from an old chronicle, about Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who had come over from England, landed near Bovbjerg, and fought a battle; close by Ramme was his grave, only a few miles from the place where the eel-breeder lived; hundreds of barrow rose there from the heath, forming as it were an enormous churchyard. Merchant Brönne had himself been at Hamlet’s grave; they spoke about old times, and about their neighbours, the English and the Scotch, and Jürgen sang the air of “The King of England’s Son,” and of his splendid ship and its outfit.

“In the hour of peril when most men fear,

He clasped the bride that he held so dear,

And proved himself the son of a King;

Of his courage and valour let us sing.”

This verse Jürgen sang with so much feeling that his eyes, black and lustrous from his birth, sparkled with more fire than ever.

There was wealth, comfort, and happiness even among the domestic animals, for they were all well cared for, and well kept. The kitchen looked bright with its copper and tin utensils, and white plates, and from the rafters hung hams, beef, and winter stores in plenty. This can still be seen in many rich farms on the west coast of Jutland: plenty to eat and drink, clean, prettily decorated rooms, active minds, cheerful tempers, and hospitality can be found there, as in an Arab’s tent.

Jürgen had never spent such a happy time since the famous burial feast, and yet Miss Clara was absent, except in the thoughts and memory of all.

In April a ship was to start for Norway, and Jürgen was to sail in it. He was full of life and spirits, and looked so sturdy and well that Dame Brönne said it did her good to see him.

“And it does one good to look at you also, old wife,” said the merchant. “Jürgen has brought fresh life into our winter evenings, and into you too, mother. You look younger than ever this year, and seem well and cheerful. But then you were once the prettiest girl in Viborg, and that is saying a great deal, for I have always found the Viborg girls the prettiest of any.”

Jürgen said nothing, but he thought of a certain maiden of Skjagen, whom he was soon to visit. The ship set sail for Christiansand in Norway, and as the wind was favourable it soon arrived there.

One morning merchant Brönne went out from Old Skjagen to the lighthouse at Grenen. The light was out, and the sun was already high in the heavens, when he mounted the tower. The sand-banks extend a whole mile from the shore, beneath the water, outside these banks; many ships could be seen that day, and with the aid of his telescope the old man thought he recognised his own ship, the Karen Brönne. Yes! certainly, there she was, sailing homewards with Clara and Jürgen on board.

Clara sat on deck, and saw the sand-hills gradually appearing in the distance; the church and lighthouse looked like a heron and a swan rising from the blue waters. If the wind held good they might reach home in about an hour. So near they were to home and all its joys—so near to death and all its terrors! A plank in the ship gave way, and the water rushed in; the crew flew to the pumps, and did their best to stop the leak. A signal of distress was hoisted, but they were still fully a mile from the shore. Some fishing boats were in sight, but they were too far off to be of any use. The wind blew towards the land, the tide was in their favour, but it was all useless; the ship could not be saved.

Jürgen threw his right arm round Clara, and pressed her to him. With what a look she gazed up into his face, as with a prayer to God for help he breasted the waves, which rushed over the sinking ship! She uttered a cry, but she felt safe and certain that he would not leave her to sink. And in this hour of terror and danger Jürgen felt as the king’s son did, as told in the old song:

In the hour of peril when most men fear,

He clasped the bride that he held so dear.

How glad he felt that he was a good swimmer! He worked his way onward with his feet and one arm, while he held the young girl up firmly with the other. He rested on the waves, he trod the water—in fact, did everything he could think of, in order not to fatigue himself, and to reserve strength enough to reach land. He heard Clara sigh, and felt her shudder convulsively, and he pressed her more closely to him. Now and then a wave rolled over them, the current lifted them; the water, although deep, was so clear that for a moment he imagined he saw the shoals of mackerel glittering, or Leviathan himself ready to swallow them. Now the clouds cast a shadow over the water, then again came the playing sunbeams; flocks of loudly screaming birds passed over him, and the plump and lazy wild ducks which allow themselves to be drifted by the waves rose up terrified at the sight of the swimmer. He began to feel his strength decreasing, but he was only a few cable lengths’ distance from the shore, and help was coming, for a boat was approaching him. At this moment he distinctly saw a white staring figure under the water—a wave lifted him up, and he came nearer to the figure—he felt a violent shock—and all was darkness.

On the sand reef lay the wreck of a ship, which was covered with water at high tide; the white figurehead rested against the anchor, the sharp iron edge of which rose just above the surface. Jürgen had come in contact with this; the tide had driven him against it with great force. He sank down stunned with the blow, but the next wave lifted him and the young girl up again. Some fishermen, coming with a boat, seized them and dragged them into it. The blood streamed down over Jürgen’s face; he seemed dead, but still held the young girl so tightly that they had to wrench her from his encircling arm. Pale and lifeless, she lay outstretched in the boat; all measures for restoring her were tried, but in vain—she was dead. For several minutes Jürgen must have swum clasping only a corpse, laboring and wrestling for the life of one whose soul had already fled.

But Jürgen himself still breathed; they bore him to the nearest cottage among the sand-hills. A man of many talents, smith, small trader, and surgeon in one, who happened to be on the spot, bound up his wound; the next day a physician was sent for from the nearest town.

The injured man’s brain was affected, and in his delirium he uttered wild cries; but on the third day he lay quiet and weak upon his bed; his life seemed to hang by a thread, and the physician said it would be better for him if this thread broke. “Let us pray that God may take him,” he said, “for he will never be the same man again.”

But life did not depart from him—the thread would not break, but the thread of memory was severed; the thread of his mind had been cut through, and what was still more grievous, a body remained—a living healthy body that wandered about like a troubled spirit.

Jürgen remained in merchant Brönne’s house. “He was hurt while endeavouring to save our child,” said the old man, “and now he is our son.” People called Jürgen “an idiot,” but that was not exactly the correct term. He was like an instrument in which the strings are loose and will give no sound; only occasionally they regained their power for a few minutes, and then they sounded as they used to do. He would sing snatches of songs or old melodies, pictures of the past would rise before him, and then disappear in the mist, as it were, but as a general rule he sat staring into vacancy, without a thought. We may conjecture that he did not suffer, but his dark eyes lost their brightness, and looked like clouded glass.

“Poor mad Jürgen,” said the people. And this was the end of a life whose infancy was to have been surrounded with wealth and splendour had his parents lived! All his great mental abilities had been lost, nothing but hardship, sorrow, and disappointment had been his fate. He was like a rare plant, torn from its native soil, and tossed upon the beach to wither there. And was this one of God’s creatures, fashioned in His own likeness, to have no better fate? Was he to be only the plaything of fortune? No! the all-loving Creator would certainly repay him in the life to come for what he had suffered and lost here. “The Lord is good to all; and His mercy is over all His works.” The pious old wife of the merchant repeated these words from the Psalms of David in patience and hope, and the prayer of her heart was that Jürgen might soon be called away to enter into eternal life.

In the churchyard where the walls were surrounded with sand, Clara lay buried. Jürgen did not seem to know this; it did not enter his mind, which could only retain fragments of the past. Every Sunday he went to church with the old people, and sat there silently, staring vacantly before him. One day, when the Psalms were being sung, he sighed deeply, and his eyes became bright; they were fixed upon a place near the altar where he had knelt with his friend who was dead. He murmured her name, and became deadly pale, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

He was helped out of the church, and then he said that he felt quite well, and did not think anything had been the matter with him; the short flash of memory had already faded away from him—the much-tried, the sorely-smitten of God. Yet that God, our Creator, is all wisdom and all love. Our hearts and our reason acknowledge it, and the Bible proclaims it. “His tender mercies are over all His works.” Who can doubt it?

In Spain, where balmy breezes blow over the Moorish cupolas and gently stir the orange and myrtle groves, where singing and the sound of the castanets are always heard, the richest merchant in the place, a childless old man, sat in a luxurious house, while children marched in procession through the streets with waving flags and lighted tapers. If he had been able to press his children to his heart, his daughter, or her child, that had, perhaps never seen the light of day, far less the kingdom of heaven, how much of his wealth would he not have given! “Poor child!” Yes, poor child—a child still, yet more than thirty years old, for Jürgen had arrived at this age in Old Skjagen.

The shifting sands had covered the graves in the courtyard, quite up to the church walls, but still, the dead must be buried among their relatives and the dear ones who had gone before them. Merchant Brönne and his wife now rested with their children under the white sand.

It was in the spring—the season of storms. The sand from the dunes was whirled up in clouds; the sea was rough, and flocks of birds flew like clouds in the storm, screaming across the sand-hills. Ship after ship went aground on the terrible reefs between Skagen’s Green and the Hunsby dunes.

One evening Jürgen sat in his room alone: all at once his mind seemed to become clearer, and a restless feeling came over him, such as had often, in his younger days, driven him out to wander over the sand-hills or on the heath. “Home, home!” he cried. No one heard him. He went out and walked towards the dunes. Sand and small stones dashed into his face, and whirled round him; he went in the direction of the church. The sand was banked up the walls, half covering the windows, but it had been cleared away in front of the door, and the entrance was free and easy to open, so Jürgen went into the church.

The storm raged over the town of Skjagen; there had not been such a terrible tempest within the memory the oldest man living, nor such a rough sea. But Jürgen was in the temple of God, and while the darkness of night reigned outside, a light arose in his soul that was never to depart from it; the heavy weight that pressed on his brain burst asunder. He fancied he heard the organ, but it was only the storm and the moaning of the sea. He sat down on one of the seats, and lo! the candles were lighted one by one, and there was brightness and grandeur such as he had only seen once, in the Spanish cathedral. The portraits of the old citizens became alive, stepped down from the walls against which they had hung for centuries, and took seats near the church door. The gates flew open, and all the dead people from the churchyard came in, and filled the church, while beautiful music sounded. Then a solemn hymn arose, and swelled like the rolling of the sea.

Jürgen saw that his foster parents from the Hunsby dunes were there, also old merchant Brönne with his wife and their daughter Clara, who gave him her hand. They both went up to the altar where they had knelt before, and the priest joined their hands and united them for life. Then music was heard again; it was wonderfully sweet, like a child’s voice, full of joy and expectation, swelling to the powerful tones of a full organ, sometimes soft and sweet, then like the sounds of a tempest, delightful and elevating to hear, yet strong enough to burst the stone tombs of the dead. Then the ship that hung in the choir sank downward, and grew so vast, so splendid!

“The ropes were of silk, the anchor of gold,

And everywhere riches and pomp untold,”

as the old song says.

The young couple went on board, accompanied by the whole congregation, for there was room and enjoyment for them all. Then the walls and arches of the church were covered with flowering junipers and lime trees breathing forth fragrance; the branches waved, creating a pleasant coolness; they bent and parted, and the ship sailed between them through the air and over the sea. Every candle in the church became a star, and the wind sang a hymn in which they all joined.

“O brother, from thine earthly love

Called to a higher bliss above,

Deem not in vain these years of strife,

For thou art heir to endless life!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Jürgen sang “Hallelujah!” too; and this word was his last in this world, for the thread that bound his immortal soul was severed, and nothing but the dead body lay in the dark church, while the storm, wailing in wild, high notes, whirled above and around it a cloud of flying sand.

•  •  •

The next day was Sunday, and the congregation and their pastor went to the church. The road had always been heavy, but now it was almost unfit for use, and when they at last arrived at the church, a great heap of sand lay piled up in front of them. The whole church was completely buried in sand. The clergyman offered a short prayer, and said that God had closed the door of His house here, and that the congregation must go and build a new one for Him somewhere else. So they sang a hymn under the open sky, and went home again.

Jürgen could not be found anywhere in the town of Skjagen, nor on the dunes, though they searched for him everywhere. It was supposed that the rolling waves of sand had buried him beneath them.

Nor was this altogether an error. But they could not guess that his body lay entombed in a vast sarcophagus—in the church itself. The Almighty’s own hand had flung earth over his coffin: the drifting sand had covered the vaulted roof of the church, the arched cloisters, and the stone aisles. The white-thorn and the dog-rose now blossom above the place where the church lies buried, but the spire, like an enormous monument over a grave, can be seen for miles round. No king had ever a more splendid mausoleum. None disturb the repose of the dead—none knew where Jürgen lay, until now. The storm sang the secret for me among the sand-hills!

[ 1860 ]

Endnotes

—

Ole Lukoie

[01]  Ole Lukoie (literally Olaf the Eye-shutter or Ole Shut-Eye) is the Danish equivalent of the legendary character known as the “Sandman” or the “Dustman.”

The Elfin Hill

[02]  According to a superstition, these elf-maidens are only intended to be looked at from the front, so they are made hollow, like the inside of a mask.

[03]  When in former days a ghost appeared, the priest banished it into the earth; on the spot where this had happened they drove a stake into the ground. At midnight suddenly a cry was heard: “Let me go.” The stake was then removed, and the banished ghost escaped in the shape of a raven with a hole in his left wing. This ghostly bird was called the night-raven.

[04]  According to a Danish superstition, a living horse or pig has been buried under every church; their ghosts are said to walk at night. It is supposed that the ghost of the horse limps on three legs every night to some house where somebody is going to die.

The Galoshes of Fortune

[05]  King Hans was born in 1455 and ruled Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513.

[06]  “Everyday Stories,” popular stories of the early nineteenth century, written by Fru Gyllembourg, edited by Heiberg.

[07]  Holberg relates in his Stories of Denmark’s Kings that King Hans one day, when he had been reading in the Romance of King Arthur, said in jest to his boon companion, Otto Rud, whom he loved much: “These Knights, Iffven and Gaudian, whom I find in this book, must have been wonderful knights, such as one does not find nowadays;” whereupon Otto Rud replied: “If there were such a champion as King Arthur, then you would find many such knights as Iffven and Gaudian.”

[08]  Writer and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860).

[09]  Gotfred von Ghemen, Dutch book printer who mainly worked in Copenhagen. The first printer and publisher in Denmark, under the reign of King Hans.

[10]  Copenhagen was visited by a terrible outbreak of cholera in 1831.

[11]  When the English fleet under Sir Hyde Parker, Lord Nelson, and others, defeated the Danish fleet in the roadstead of Copenhagen, on 2 April, 1801.

[12]  Johann Heinrich von Mädler, a German astronomer who (with Wilhelm Beer) issued Mappa Selenographica (1834–1836), presenting the most complete map of the moon at that time.

[13]  This relates to a book published some years previously in Germany, and said to be by the astronomer William Herschel, which contained a description of the moon and its inhabitants, written with such a semblance of truth that many were deceived by the imposture.

[14]  The popular name for the staff which the watchman used to carry, a ponderous club with spikes in the bulging head.

[15]  On the Continent in all law and police practices, nothing is verbal—any circumstance, however trifling, is reduced to writing. The labour, as well as the number of papers that thus accumulate, is enormous. In a police office, consequently, we find copying clerks among many other scribes of various denominations, of which, it seems, our hero was one.

[16]  Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837), a historical novel by Captain Frederick Marryat.

[17]  Solon (ca. 630-560 B.C.), statesman and poet known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.

The Court Cards

[18]  “Black Peter” is the name of a card game in Denmark, where it is called “Sorte Peer,” the word sorte denoting black. When the cards are dealt, he who happens to get the Knave of Spades is all the evening nicknamed Black Peter by his fellow players, who paint his face black.

[19]  “Dirty Mads” is another Danish card game. Mads (or Matz) is a name used almost exclusively by the peasantry.

The Jumpers

[20]  Spring-goose: An old-fashioned toy formerly much used in Denmark. It is made from the breast-bone of a goose and, with the aid of a peg, some string, and cobblers’ wax, can be made to jump.

The Old Street Lamp

[21]  It is the custom in Denmark, and one deserving the severest censure, that, on those nights in which the moon shines, or, according to almanac authority, ought to shine, the street lamps are not lighted; so that, it all too frequently happens, when the moon is over-clouded, or on rainy evenings when she is totally obscured, the streets are for the most part in perfect darkness. This petty economy is called “the magistrates’ light,” those persons having the direction of the lighting, paving, and cleansing of towns. The same management may be met with in some other countries besides Denmark. (—Note of translator Charles Boner, ca. 1868.)

Twelve by the Mail-Coach

[22]  It is an old Danish custom to bang an earthenware pot against the doors on New Year’s Eve.

[23]  It is the custom in Denmark to change houses in April, generally on one particular day of the month, which is therefore called “moving day” or “flitting day.” Therefore, April is here called a “house agent,” as well as the manager of funerals, as the changeable weather in this month is considered very unhealthy.

The Days of the Week

[24]  Intercalary: Having a day or month inserted to make the calendar year correspond to the solar year. A leap year is an intercalary year.

Sunshine Stories

[25]  Jason: In Greek mythology, the son of a Greek king and husband of Medea. Leading the Argonauts, he sailed in quest of the Golden Fleece, which he must obtain in order to reclaim his throne.

The Metal Pig

[26]  The bronze pig is a cast. The original is antique and of marble, and is found by the entrance to Galleria degli Uffizi.

[27]  Italian artist Agnolo di Cosimo, called Il Bronzino (1503–1572); he painted Descent of Christ into Hell.

[28]  Galileo (1564–1642) is called the Father of Modern Science. He made a number of most important scientific discoveries. To him is attributed the saying in regard to the earth, when under trial for the supposed heresy of believing in its motion, “It moves, nevertheless.”

[29]  Michaelangelo Buonarroti: Florentine sculptor and painter and architect; one of the outstanding figures of the Renaissance (1475–1564).

[30]  Dante Aligheri was the greatest of Italian poets. Famous for writing the Divine Comedy that describes a journey through Hell and purgatory and paradise guided by Virgil and his idealized Beatrice (1265–1321).

[31]  Italian dramatist and poet Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) was a leading figure in the development of modern Italy.

[32]  Niccolo Machiavelli, a statesman of Florence who advocated a strong central government (1469–1527).

[33]  Opposite the grave of Galileo is that of Michaelangelo. On the monument is his bust and three figures representing Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture. Close by is Dante’s monument (whose body was buried at Ravenna), on which Italy is represented pointing to a colossal statue of the poet, while Poetry weeps over his loss. A few steps farther is Alfieri’s monument, adorned with laurels, lyre, and dramatic masks, while a figure of Italy weeps over his grave. Machiavelli closes the series of celebrated men.

The Dryad

[34]  Fata Morgana: a mirage, an optical illusion, presenting an image of objects on the earth or sea, as if elevated into the air. Attributed to the sorceress Morgan le Fay, sister to King Arthur, who was said to be able to change her shape.

Elder-tree Mother

[35]  The golden wedding is celebrated in several countries of the Continent, by married couples who survive to see the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding-day.

The Snowdrop

[36]  Sommergjoek (meaning summer-dupe) is a Danish name for the snowdrop. The archaic verb gjekke means to hoax or tease. The sommergjoek, therefore, teases about the hope of summer because it blooms in the winter.

In England, gowk and gawky (like Gauch in German) are common provincial terms for a cuckoo, or for a fool. “In the north of England,” says Brand (in his Popular Antiquities), “April fools are called ‘April Gouks.’” The form geck (also used in Germany) was to be found in England in the time of Shakespeare. Malvolio, for instance, complains that he has been “made the most notorious geck and gull, that e’er invention played on.” Twelfth Night, Act v. Sc. 1.

The Storks

[37]  On account of the ravages it makes among noxious animals, the stork is a privileged bird wherever it makes its home. In cities it is sometimes trained to act as scavenger. In Denmark, Holland, and Germany it is always a welcome guest. Boxes are placed upon roofs in the hope that storks might nest in them, for it is considered a sign of good fortune to have a stork’s nest on one’s roof.

The stork is noted for its great affection for its young and especially for the care it is said to give to its parents in their old age. It has no song, and is in no sense a bird to love, though it may become quite tame.

The Nis and the Dame

[38]  The Nis of Denmark and Norway is the same being that is called Brownie in Scotland, and Kobold in Germany. He is represented as a dwarf, dressed in grey, with a pointed red cap.

In the Duck-Yard

[108]  Portalak: an edible leafy plant; purslane.

The Neighbours

[39]  In Danish, the sun is of the feminine gender, and not, as with us, when personified, spoken of as “he.” We beg to make this observation, lest the roses’ wish “to kiss the sun,” be thought unmaidenly. We are anxious, also, to remove a stumbling block, which might perchance trip up exquisitely-refined modern notions, sadly shocked, no doubt, as they would be, at such an apparent breach of modesty and decorum. (—Tongue-in-cheek note of translator Charles Boner, ca. 1868.)

The Shadow

[40]  The word mahogany can be understood, in Danish, as having two meanings. In general, it means the reddish-brown wood itself; but in jest, it signifies “excessively fine,” which arose from an anecdote of Nyboder in Copenhagen (the seamen’s quarter). A sailor’s wife, who was always proud and fine, in her way, came to her neighbour and complained that she had got a splinter in her finger. “What of?” asked the neighbour’s wife. “It is a mahogany splinter,” said the other. “Mahogany! it cannot be less with you!” exclaimed the woman; and thence the Proverb, “It is so mahogany!” (that is: “so excessively fine”) is derived.

[41]  The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl (1814) by Adelbert Chamisso.

[42]  In Denmark, as in many other Continental countries, only relations and intimate friends call each other “thou.” Also, and most relevant to this story, persons speaking to their inferiors or subordinates say “thou,” while those speaking to their superiors say “you.”

It is the custom in Denmark for intimate friends to use the second person singular “Du” (thou) when speaking to each other. When a friendship is formed between men, they generally affirm it, when occasion offers, either in public or private, by drinking to each other and exclaiming “Thy health,” at the same time striking their glasses together. This is called “drinking Duus:” they are then, “Duus Brodre” (thou brothers), and ever afterwards use the pronoun “thou” to each other, it being regarded as more familiar than “De” (you).

The Wind’s Tale

[43]  In Danish, Daa or Daae pronounced as “Daw”

[44]  The black stork, unlike his sociable relatives, shuns the abodes of men, and dwells in woods.

[45]  In the southwest of Zealand lie two old castles, Basnaes and Borreby Hall. There was, in olden time, incessant rivalry between the respective owners. On the portal of Basnaes may still be read the old rhyme,

The eagle in lofty hold doth rest,

Envy beneath in the vale makes his nest.

“Concerning Borreby Hall, it is related that a part of it was built from the ruins of Marsk Stig’s castle, which stood on Stig’s Naes, or promontory, not far off. … On the left side of the main building of Borreby Hall there were formerly two arches, and in the arch in the place whereof now stands the staircase, there was what was called the Record Room. This last contained three large iron chests filled with letters and manuscripts, among them many referring to state affairs; but as the key was always left in the door, these papers in time got dispersed, and at last Peter Rosenmeier, the steward, had the chests broken in pieces and the iron made into horseshoes. From the ceiling in this chamber hung a bell, the original purpose whereof none could divine, but concerning it was known that when Herre Christian Frus lay dying, he told his wife, Mette Hardenberg, that when she should hear the bell in the Record Room give out a peal, she must prepare to follow him into the grave. And even so it came to pass, for some years later, when Fru Mette sat one evening playing at cards with other ladies, the bell from the Record Room was heard to ring, and she laid the cards aside, saying, ‘Now is my death very nigh,’ and shortly afterward she died. Borreby Hall was then sold to Admiral Glaus Daae, who bequeathed it to his two sons, Christian and Waldemar. And after these two had disputed for some time concerning their inheritance, they agreed to share the hall and the lands thereto belonging after this fashion; Waldemar was to have the main building, erecting for himself what outhouses he required, whilst his brother was to retain the keep and the outhouses. So Waldemar had the great hall, and built his own outhouses on the further side of the moat; but he soon grew discontented to see the strong tower and its spire belonging to his brother, and taking advantage of the absence of Christian Daae, he pulled down the spire, and razed the tower to the ground. But he never prospered afterward.”

Here follows Waldemar’s history, as also related:

“Herre Ove Ramel of Basnaes, having bought up the mortgages upon Borreby Hall, which had been given by its owner to a Holstein nobleman, succeeded to the estate, Waldemar Daae retiring to Smidstrup, where he rented a house for ten marks yearly. But here he stayed only through the summer; he then removed to Viborg and died there. And Herre Ove Ramel, who now possessed both Basnaes and Borreby, had much to do to repair the latter, which was in a very ruinous state. He often travelled over to Borreby to look after the repairs; and so it happened that once when he had bidden his servant, Peter Rosenmeier, to cover the table, and he sat and dined, there came in through the door a great black dog; and the creature came up to the table and stared at him with large, glistening eyes. Herre Ove Ramel, who was alone, felt startled, but presently the dog left the chamber, passing straight to the Record Room already mentioned. So when Peter Rosenmeier returned, his master bade him go to the Record Room and drive out the dog, and he went, but could not find the creature—and shortly after this, Herre Ove Ramel died.”—Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagn, vol. i.

The Bishop of Börglum

[46]  Fata Morgana: a mirage, an optical illusion, presenting an image of objects on the earth or sea, as if elevated into the air. Attributed to the sorceress Morgan le Fay, sister to King Arthur, who was said to be able to change her shape.
A recurring mirage in the Strait of Messina.

Godfather’s Picture-Book

[47]  Hel was the queen of the underworld, and claimed those who died of sickness or old age; while those who died in battle went to Odin’s Valhalla. In times of plague, Hel rode abroad on her pale horse, a wretched animal, limping upon three legs. The Danish people still tell of the grey Hel-horse, that comes at midnight, neighing before the house where someone is to die.

This is the Hela of the Icelandic ode translated by Gray from “Saemund Frode’s” Edda:

“Uprose the king of men with speed

And saddled straight his coal-black steed:

Down the yawning steep he rode,

That leads to Hela’s drear abode.”

[48]  Holmgang (island-going) was the name given to a mortal combat; as the place appointed for the duel was frequently a small island.

[49]  Hafn (Haven) was a mere fishing-village when first mentioned, about 1050 A.D. Bishop Axel (or Absalon, Bishop of Roeskilde, who died as Archbishop of Lund in 1201) built a castle there, and merchants soon gathered under the shelter of Axel’s House, as the castle was called, and Hafn received the name of Kjópinghafn: merchants’ haven.

Bishop Axel was great as a warrior and statesman, and he was the patron of Denmark’s first chronicler, Saxo Gramaticus. On the site of his house stands the royal palace, Christiansborg Castle, a part of which has been turned into the Thorwaldsen Museum.

[50]  Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851), the discoverer (in 1826) of the close connection between magnetism and electricity, on which principle is founded the electric telegraph system.

[51]  Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770–1844), the great Danish neo-classical sculptor.

From a Window in Vartou

[52]  “When, long ago, a rampart was raised around Copenhagen, it kept sinking and sinking, and it seemed impossible to make it firm. At last they took an innocent little girl, set her upon a chair, with a table before her, and gave her toys and sweetmeats, and then, whilst the little one sat amusing herself, twelve masons built up an arch over her, and, that completed, flung over it, amid music and shouting, the earth for the rampart, which from that time has been immovable.” Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagen, vol. i. p. 147.

Nor was this cruel superstition confined to Denmark. Heinrich Heine says, “In the Middle Ages prevailed, popularly, a notion that whenever any building had to be erected, some living creature must be slain, and the foundation stone raised upon its blood; this would make the building firm and durable. And in numerous legends and songs we find how children or animals were slaughtered for this purpose.”

The Serbians have a ballad on the founding of Scutari, telling how workmen had laboured for six years at building the castle, and still the Vila—a Serbian fairy—destroyed every night the work of the day; at last she tells King Mokaschin that if he wants the walls to stand, he must build up within them either his own wife or the wife of one of his two brothers. The bride of the youngest, coming with her basket on the morrow with provisions for the workmen, is thus sacrificed.

And beams they drew, and stones they drew, and higher, higher still

The wall above her girdle grew, ere once she dreamt of ill.

The poor lady entreats that a little window might be left in the wall, so that her baby might be brought to her every day, for her to nurse him, and her request is granted.

And yet once more she called on him (the king) and whispered in his ear,

“The wall is at my face. O leave a little window here—

A little window, for the love of God that sits on high,

That I might see mine own white house until the hour I die;

A little window, brother dear, that I the child may see,

Both when he hither comes, and when they bear him home from me.”

And like a brother once again he her petition took,

And left a window, that she still upon her home might look—

That she might have the light of God to see her infant still.

Both coming and returning home when he had sucked his fill.

The child was thus nursed by his mother, the ballad tells us, for a whole year, though only during the first week could the poor lady’s voice be heard through the opening in the wall.—Translator.

The Dream of Little Tuk

[53]  Kjöge, a little town on Kjöge Bay. Lifting up a child by putting the two hands to the sides of his head is called “showing him Kjöge hens,” an action similar to “showing a child London.”

[54]  Prästöe is a little town, only known because the Castle of Nysöe, where the famed sculptor Thorwaldsen lived, is in its immediate neighbourhood.

[55]  Wordingborg, in King Waldemar’s time a considerable town, now a place of no importance. Only a lonely tower and a few remains of a wall show where the castle once stood.

[56]  Corsör, on the Great Belt, used to be called the most tiresome of Danish towns before the establishment of steamers; for in those days travellers had often to wait there for a favourable wind. The poet Jens Baggesen was born there.

[57]  Roeskilde (Roesquellp, Rose-spring, falsely called Rothschild), once the capital of Denmark. The town took its name from King Hroar and from the many springs in the vicinity. Most of the kings and queens of Denmark are buried in the beautiful cathedral. The Danish States used to assemble here.

[58]  Sorö, a small beautifully-situated town; the Danish poet Ludwig Holberg founded an academy here.

A String Of Pearls

[59]  Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), a Danish poet whose fame became European. He is best known as a tragic dramatist. He received the honour of knighthood before his death, and held some official posts of importance.—Translator.

[60]  Kund Lyne Rahbek, Etatsraad and Professor, born 1760; died 1830.

[61]  Leiré, the original residence of the Danish kings, said to have been founded by Skjold, a son of Odin, was, during the heathen ages, a place of note. It contained a large and celebrated temple for offerings, to which people thronged every ninth year, at the period of the great Yule feast, which was held annually in mid-winter, commencing on the 4th of January. In Norway this ancient festival was held in honour of Thor; in Denmark, in honour of Odin. Every ninth year the sacrifices were on a larger scale than usual, consisting then of ninety-nine horses, dogs, and cocks—human beings were also sometimes offered. When Christianity was established in Denmark, the seat of royalty was transferred to Roeskilde, and Leiré fell into total insignificance. It is now merely a village in Zealand.—Translator.

[62]  Note concerning Hagbarth and Signelil, from Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagn vol II.—
“Near Ringsted lies Sigersted, so called after King Sigur who dwelt there. His daughter Signelil loved a warrior named Habor, or Hagbarth. Once, when she was hunting a stag and followed it over Vrangstrup River, her horse fell under her; then leaped Habor into the water and saved her life, bringing her safe to an island that may be seen in the river to this day. Afterward Habor came to Signelil disguised as a damsel, but was soon betrayed to King Sigur by Gunvar, his daughter’s nurse. And when all was discovered, and Habor was seized by the King’s men, the lovers resolved to die together. Habor was led away to be hanged on a hill; but, wishing to convince himself of Signelil’s truth, he begged that his cloak might be suspended on the gallows, before he himself was hanged, saying he wished to see how he should look. In the meantime, his lady-love had flung all her precious things into a deep hole, still called Signelil’s Well—whence comes the saying that Sigersted holds more silver and gold than it wots of. She then shut herself up in her bower, and watched the gallows where Habor was to be hanged. And when she saw his cloak suspended, imagining him to be already dead, she set fire to her bower, and Habor, seeing it in flames, was assured of her love, and cheerfully offered himself for death. He was buried in Hage Hill. But the false nurse had no joy of her treachery, for she was afterward flung into a well, still known as Maiden Well.”

See also Danske Viser fra Middelalderen, and Grimm’s Alt-Dänische Heldenlieder, for divers ballads founded on this, the favourite love-tale for more than a thousand years in Denmark. Saxo Grammaticus relates the his history, and in later times Oehlenschläger has written a tragedy on the subject.—Translator.

[63]  Louis, Baron of Holberg, a popular Danish author (of both prose and poetry), born at Bergen in Norway, 1684, died 1754. He struggled with many difficulties in the acquisition of learning, but overcame them. “He travelled in England, Holland, France, and Italy,” says his biographer; “and on his return to his native land, raised himself to fame, fortune, and rank, by his literary talents.”—Translator.

[64]  Bernhard Severin Ingemann, born in May, 1789, lector at the Academy of Sorö.

[65]  St. Anders made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the beginning of the thirteenth century. When his eleven companions were ready to set sail homeward from Joppa, the wind being fair, he refused to depart before he had heard mass. So at the end of the service he stood forlorn on the shore, gazing sorrowfully on the ship that was bearing his comrades hence. Then came up one mounted on horseback, and invited him to ride with him. He did so, but presently fell asleep in the stranger’s arms, and when he awoke, he looked round and marvelled greatly, for he was lying on a hill close outside Slagelse; his companions, meantime, were slowly performing their voyage, and did not reach Denmark till long afterward. Another legend tells us that when St Anders prayed in the open air he was wont to hang up his hat and gloves on the sunbeams the while; once only did they refuse to perform this office, and let the gloves fall to the ground, and this was when one of the people in his convent had scandalized the neighbourhood by some petty theft.—Translator.

[66]  Danish poet Jens Baggesen, born at Corsör, 1764; died in 1826.

[67]  Michael Gottlieb Birckner (1756–1798), a Danish priest and philosopher; advocate of Free Speech and Freedom of the Press.

Holger the Dane

[68]  The Danish Arms consist of three lions between nine hearts.

[69]  The Danish prince Canute I (994–1035) became undisputed king of Denmark and England in 1016, and of Norway in 1028.

[70]  Waldemar I (1131–1182) King of Denmark from 1146 to 1182.

[71]  Margarethe I, (1353–1412) queen of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

[72]  Eleanor (1621–1698), daughter of King Christian IV, was the wife of Corfitz Ulfeldt, who was accused of high treason. The only crime of this high-minded woman was her faithful love for her unhappy husband. She passed twenty-two years in a dreadful prison, and was only delivered after the death of her persecutor, Queen Sophia Amelia.

[73]  Native Norwegian Ivar Hvitfeldt (1665–1710) was a Danish naval hero. In the battle on the Kjöge Bay, October 4, 1710, when his ship, the Dannebrog, caught fire, this gallant man blew up himself and his ship in order to save the town and the Danish fleet, against which the ship was drifting.

[74]  Hans Egede (1686–1758) went in 1721 to Greenland, and worked there as a missionary for fifteen years under very hard conditions.

[75]  Frederick VI (1768–1839), King of Denmark (1808–1839) and of Norway (1808–1814). On a journey on the west coast of Jutland, the King visited an old woman. When he had already left her house, the woman ran after him and begged him, as a remembrance, to write his name upon a beam, the King turned back and complied. During his whole lifetime he felt and worked for the peasant class; therefore the Danish peasants begged to be allowed to carry his coffin to the royal vault at Roeskilde, four Danish miles from Copenhagen.

[76]  Steen Bille (1751–1833), Danish naval officer.

[77]  Astronomical observatory in Copenhagen. King Christian IV laid the first stone in 1637; the observatory was completed in 1642.

[78]  Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Danish astronomer whose observations of the planets provided the basis for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

[79]  Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770–1844), the famed Danish neoclassical sculptor.

The Thorny Path of Honour

[80]  Athenian statesman Alcibiades (ca. 450-404 B.C.) and Greek historian Xenophon (ca. 430-350 B.C.); both were influenced by Socrates.

[81]  Pseudonym of Persian poet Abu Ol-qasem Mansur (c.935-c.1020), author of the Persian national epic.

[82]  Luis de Camöens (1524–1580), Portuguese poet and author of the epic poem The Lusiads (1572), which describes the opening of the sea route to India by Vasco da Gama.

[83]  Danish statesman Peder Schumacher, Count Griffenfeldt (1635–1699), was imprisoned in Copenhagen and at Munkholm in the Trondheim fjord.

The Old Church-Bell

[84]  The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen.

The Phoenix Bird

[110]  In Nordic mythology, Odin has two ravens, Hugin and Munin, who fly around the world every day and then whisper everything they see and hear in Odin’s ear.

The Muse of the Coming Age

[85]  Referring to the emigration of the first French Revolution.

The Bond of Friendship

[86]  According to a Greek superstition, this monster originates from the uncut entrails of slaughtered sheep, which are thrown on the fields.

[87]  A peasant who can read often becomes a priest, and then he is addressed as “Most holy sir.” The inferior class kiss the ground on which he walks.

Chicken Greta’s Family

[109]  Ludwig Holberg (1684–1754) was the most important intellectual and writer in eighteenth-century Denmark and Norway. Often called the father of Danish and Norwegian literature.

[88]  The Searcher: the excise-man; a toll-gate attendant who collected tax on products at the town gates.

[89]  January 6, the twelfth day after Christmas, called Epiphany, celebrates the visit of the three wise men to the infant Jesus. The evening of January 5 is called Twelfth Night.

[90]  In Danish, bra means “good” or “fine.”

Ole the Watchman

[91]  A children’s game, in which all change places, something like Puss in the Corner.

The Will-o’-the Wisp Is in the Town

[92]  According to Danish legend, fourteenth-century King Waldemar I mocked God by preferring hunting to heaven, and was condemned to ride and hunt the countryside every night.

The Most Extraordinary Thing

[93]  The popular name for the staff which the watchman used to carry, a ponderous club with spikes in the bulging head

The Door-Key

[94]  This alludes to the golden key on the uniform of a court Chamberlain. The Councillor of the Chamber is also a court title, by one degree inferior to the Chamberlain.

The Candles

[95]  A Danish idiomatic expression: to sneeze at a thing, is the same as to nod assent.

Opposite to English (American) usage, where “to sneeze at something” refers to something contemptible or something unimportant (a sneeze as a snort of derision?).

Anne Lisbeth

[96]  In Denmark the church-bells still ring the sun up and ring him down, and before the chime is ended, the sexton gives nine distinct strokes: the first for the Lord’s Prayer, the following seven for the seven petitions contained therein, and the ninth for the “Amen.”—Translator

[97]  All women who treat their children unkindly are called “raven mothers,” as the raven is believed to peck out its little ones’ eyes.

The Snow Queen

[98]  Children have a kind of gibberish language, formed by adding letters or syllables to every word, which is called “crow’s language.” (“Pig Latin,” in the U.S.)

The Marsh King’s Daughter

[99]  Balder, or Baldur: In Nordic mythology, the god of light and peace, noted for his beauty and sweet nature; son of Odin and Frigg.

[100]  Loki: The trickster of Nordic mythology, the god of discord and mischief; He contrived the death of Baldur and was overcome by Thor.

[101]  The Midgard serpent, which encircles the world and is destined to fight Thor at Ragnarök (the end of the world of gods and men).

[102]  In Nordic mythology, the rainbow bridge: the Bridge of Heaven leading to Valhalla, the hall in which the souls of heroes slain in battle were received by Odin.

A Story from the Sand-hills

[103]  Sir Neils Bugge of Hald revolted against King Waldemar, and in 1358 was cited to appear before him at Nyborg. But when he reached the Little Belt, and crossed over to Middelfart, he and two companion knights were attacked by fishermen on the shore and slain with hooks, such as were used for digging up worms. It was rumoured that this crime was committed at the king’s instigation, because he would fain be quit of Sir Niels; and the king had to free himself from the charge through the oath of twelve men, and the descendants of the murderers were condemned to pay yearly three marks and one skilling to the heirs of Sir Neils. The spot where the knights were murdered is said to be marked by a quantity of red cabbage, which cannot be uprooted from the soil. Sir Niels Bugge’s castle at Vosborg afterward fell into the hands of Sir Hendrick Leth, a hard, cruel nobleman, who, when he died, could find no rest in his grave but every night came driving over the drawbridge in a chariot drawn by six black horses, visited every chamber in the house, and then drove away; and this went on till the priest, Herre Skov, came and laid the ghost and restored quiet.—Translator.

[104]  Every exorcised spirit becomes, it is believed, a Night Raven, which files ever eastward, toward the Holy Sepulchre, for, once arrived there, it will be at rest. Long Margaret’s superstition seems to have been peculiar to herself. She was taken up and tried in 1770.—Translator.

[105]  This Major-General Swanwedel served in the war with Sweden toward the close of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Christian V. Tradition describes him as skilled in the Black Art. Once he found himself, with a very small party of followers, entirely surrounded by the Swedes. But he knew how to get out of a difficulty, for in the darkness of the night he transformed a host of bulrushes growing on the spot into soldiers, and, supported by these, he attacked and routed his foes. Next morning these soldiers were again tall bulrushes growing in the field.—Translator.

[106]  Fata Morgana: a mirage, an optical illusion, presenting an image of objects on the earth or sea, as if elevated into the air. Attributed to the sorceress Morgan le Fay, sister to King Arthur, who was said to be able to change her shape.

[107]  Langobarder, a northern tribe, which, in very ancient times, dwelt in the north of Jutland. From there they migrated to the north of Germany, where, according to Tacitus, they lived about the period of the birth of Christ, and were a poor but brave people. Their original name was Vinuler, or Viniler.

The traditions, or rather fables, of Scandinavia say that when these Viniler were at war with the Vandals, and the latter went to Odin to beseech him to grant them the victory, they received for answer that Odin would award the victory to those whom he beheld first at sunrise. The warlike female, Gambaruk, or Gunborg, who was mother to the leaders of the Viniler—Ebbe and Aage—applied to Frigga, Odin’s wife, to entreat victory for her people. The goddess advised that the women of the tribe should let down their long hair so as to imitate beards, and, early in the morning, should stand with their husbands in the east, where Odin would look out. When, at sunrise, Odin saw them, he exclaimed, “Who are these long-bearded people?” whereupon Frigga replied, that since he had bestowed a name upon them, he must also give them the victory. This was the origin of the Longobardi, who, after many wanderings, found their way into Italy, and, under Alboin, founded the kingdom of Lombardy.—Translator.

Index of Titles

—

Story titles used in this book are marked in bold.
Italics are used for alternate titles.

A •  B •  C •  D •  E •  F •  G •  H •  I •  J •  K • L •  M •  N •  O •  P •  Q •  R •  S •  T •  U •  V •  W •  Y

A
<>  A-B-C Book, The
<>  Adventures of a Thistle, The
<>  Angel, The
<>  Anne Lisbeth
<>  Aunty
<>  Aunty Toothache
TOP
B
<>  “Beautiful!”
<>  Beauty of Form and Beauty of Mind
<>  Beetle, The
<>  Beetle (The) Who Went on His Travels
<>  Bell, The
<>  Bell Deep, The
<>  Bell’s Hollow, The
<>  Bird of Folklore, The
<>  Bird of Popular Song, The
<>  Bird Phoenix, The
<>  Bishop of Börglum, The
<>  Bishop of Börglum (The) and His Kinsmen
<>  Bishop of Börglum (The) and His Warriors
<>  Bog King’s Daughter, The
<>  Bond of Friendship, The
<>  Book of Fairy Tales, The
<>  Bottle-Neck, The
<>  Brave Tin Soldier, The
<>  Bronze Pig, The
<>  Brownie (The) and the Butterman
<>  Buckwheat, The
<>  Butterfly, The
<>  By the Almshouse Window
TOP
C
<>  Candles, The
<>  “Charming!”
<>  Cheerful Temper, A
<>  Chicken Greta’s Family
<>  Child in the Grave, The
<>  Children’s Prattle
<>  Clod Hans
<>  Clumsy Hans
<>  Comet, The
<>  Conceited Apple-Branch, The
<>  Constant Tin Soldier, The
<>  Court Cards, The
<>  Cripple, The
TOP
D
<>  Daddy Dustman
<>  Daisy, The
<>  Danish Popular Legends
<>  Darning Needle, The
<>  Days of the Week, The
<>  Dead Child, The
<>  Delaying Is Not Forgetting
<>  Door-Key, The
<>  Dream of Little Tuk, The
<>  Drop of Water, The
<>  Dryad, The
<>  Dumb Book, The
<>  Dung Beetle, The
TOP
E
<>  Elder-tree Mother
<>  Eleven Wild Swans, The
<>  Elf of the Rose, The
<>  Elfin Hill, The
<>  Elfin Mound, The
<>  Emperor’s New Clothes, The
<>  Emperor’s New Suit, The
<>  Everything in Its Proper Place
<>  Everything in the Right Place
<>  Evil King, The
TOP
F
<>  False Collar, The
<>  Family of Hen-Grethe, The
<>  Farmyard Cock (The) and the Weathercock
<>  Fellow-Travellers, The
<>  Fir Tree, The
<>  Five Out of One Shell
<>  Five Peas from One Pod
<>  Flax, The
<>  Flea (The) and the Professor
<>  Flying Trunk, The
<>  From a Window in Vartou
TOP
G
<>  Galoshes of Fortune, The
<>  Garden of Eden, The
<>  Garden of Paradise, The
<>  Gardener (The) and the Gentry
<>  Gardener (The) and the Manor
<>  Gardener (The) and the Noble Family
<>  Gate Key, The
<>  Girl (The) Who Stepped on Bread
<>  Girl (The) Who Trod on the Loaf
<>  Goblin (The) and the Gardener’s Wife
<>  Goblin (The) and the Woman
<>  Goblin and the Grocer, The
<>  Goblin and the Huckster
<>  Goblin and the Provisions Dealer
<>  Godfather’s Picture-Book
<>  Golden Treasure
<>  Good Humour
<>  Good Luck May Lie in a Pin
<>  Good Temper
<>  Grandmother
<>  Great Claus and Little Claus
<>  Great Grief, A
<>  Great Sea-Serpent, The
<>  Great-Grandfather
<>  Greenies, The
TOP
H
<>  Hans Clodhopper
<>  Happy Family, The
<>  Hardy Tin Soldier, The
<>  Heartbreak
<>  Hidden but not Forgotten
<>  Hill of the Elves, The
<>  Holger Danske
<>  Holger the Dane
<>  Horn-Book, The
TOP
I
<>  Ib and Christine
<>  Ice Maiden, The
<>  In a Thousand Years
<>  In the Duck-Yard
<>  In the Children’s Room
<>  In the Nursery
<>  In the Uttermost Parts of the Sea
<>  Inchelina
<>  It’s Absolutely True!
<>  It’s Perfectly Certain
<>  It’s Quite True!
TOP
J
<>  Jack the Dullard
<>  Janitor’s Son, The
<>  Jewish Girl, The
<>  Jewish Maiden, The
<>  Jumpers, The
TOP
K
<>  Kept Close Is Not Forgotten
<>  Kept Secret Is Not Forgotten
<>  King’s Quest, The
TOP
L
<>  Last Dream (The) of the Old Oak Tree
<>  Last Pearl, The
<>  Leaf from Heaven, A
<>  Leaf from the Sky, A
<>  Leap-Frog, The
<>  Leaping Contest, The
<>  Little Claus and Big Claus
<>  Little Elder-Tree Mother
<>  Little Green Ones, The
<>  Little Ida’s Flowers
<>  Little Match Girl, The
<>  Little Match-Seller, The
<>  Little Mermaid, The
<>  Little Sea-Maid, The
<>  Little Tiny
<>  Little Tuk
<>  Loveliest Rose in the World, The
<>  “Lovely”
<>  Lovers, The
<>  Loving Pair, The
<>  Luck May Lie in a Pin
TOP
M
<>  Magic Galoshes, The
<>  Mail-Coach Passengers, The
<>  Marsh King’s Daughter, The
<>  Metal Pig, The
<>  Millenium, The
<>  Money-Box, The
<>  Money-Pig, The
<>  Most Extraordinary Thing, The
<>  Most Incredible Thing, The
<>  Mother Elderberry
<>  Mud King’s Daughter, The
<>  Muse of the Coming Age, The
<>  My Boots
TOP
N
<>  Naughty Boy, The
<>  Neck of a Bottle, The
<>  Neighbouring Families, The
<>  Neighbours, The
<>  New Century’s Goddess, The
<>  Nightingale, The
<>  Nis (The) and the Dame
TOP
O
<>  Old Bachelor’s Nightcap, The
<>  Old Church-Bell, The
<>  Old Grave-Stone, The
<>  Old House, The
<>  Old Johanna’s Tale
<>  Old Oak Tree’s Last Dream, The
<>  Old Street Lamp, The
<>  Old Tombstone, The
<>  Ole Lukoie
<>  Ole Luk-Oie, the Dream-God
<>  Ole Shut-Eye
<>  Ole the Tower-Keeper
<>  Ole the Watchman
<>  On Judgment Day
<>  On the Last Day
<>  Our Auntie
TOP
P
<>  Pact of Friendship, The
<>  Pea Blossom, The
<>  Peiter, Peter, and Peer
<>  Pen (The) and the Inkstand
<>  Pepperman’s Nightcap, The
<>  Philospher’s Stone, The
<>  Phoenix Bird, The
<>  Picture Book (A) Without Pictures
<>  Picture from the Rampart, A
<>  Pig-Boy, The
<>  Pigs, The
<>  Pine Tree, The
<>  Porter’s Son, The
<>  Portuguese Duck, The
<>  Princess on the Pea, The
<>  Psyche
<>  Puppet-Show Man, The
<>  Puppeteer, The
TOP
Q
<>  Question of Imagination, A
<>  Quickest Runners, The
TOP
R
<>  Racers, The
<>  Rags, The
<>  Real Princess, The
<>  Red Shoes, The
<>  Rose Elf, The
<>  Rose from Homer’s Grave, A
<>  Roses (The) and the Sparrows
<>  Row of Pearls, A
TOP
S
<>  Sand-Hills of Jutland, The
<>  Saucy Boy, The
<>  Shadow, The
<>  She Was Good for Nothing
<>  She Was No Good

<>  Shepherd’s Story (The) of the Bond of Friendship

<>  Shepherdess (The) and the Chimney-Sweep
<>  Shepherdess (The) and the Sweep
<>  Shirt Collar, The
<>  Silent Book, The
<>  Silly Hans
<>  Silver Shilling, The
<>  Snail (The) and the Rose-Tree
<>  Snow Queen, The
<>  Snowdrop, The
<>  Snowman, The
<>  Something
<>  Songbird of the People, The
<>  Soup from a Sausage Skewer
<>  Soup Made of a Sausage-Stick
<>  Soup on a Sausage Peg
<>  Spruce Tree, The
<>  Steadfast Tin Soldier, The
<>  Stone of the Wise Men, The
<>  Storks, The
<>  Storm (The) Moves the Sign-Boards
<>  Storm (The) Shakes the Sign-Boards
<>  Storm (The) Shifts the Shields
<>  Story, A
<>  Story (A) from the Sand-hills
<>  Story of a Mother, The
<>  Story of the Wind, The
<>  Story of the Year, The
<>  Story (The) Old Joan Told
<>  Story (The) Old Johanna Told
<>  String Of Pearls, A
<>  Summer-Gowk, The
<>  Sunbeam (The) and the Captive
<>  Sunshine Stories
<>  Swans’ Nest, The
<>  Sweethearts, The
<>  Swiftest Runners, The
<>  Swine, The
<>  Swineherd, The
TOP
T
<>  Teapot, The
<>  There Is a Difference
<>  There Is No Doubt About It
<>  Thistle’s Experiences, The
<>  Thumbelina
<>  Thumbelisa
<>  Thumbling
<>  Thorny Path of Glory, The
<>  Thorny Path of Honour, The
<>  Tinderbox, The
<>  Toad, The
<>  Tommelisa
<>  Top (The) and the Ball
<>  Travelling Companion, The
<>  Twelve by the Mail-Coach
<>  Two Brothers
<>  Two Maidens
TOP
U
<>  Ugly Duckling, The
<>  Under the Willow Tree
<>  Uttermost Parts of the Sea, The
TOP
V
<>  View from Vartou’s Window
<>  Vision of the Last Day, A
TOP
W
<>  Watchman of the Tower, The
<>  Wicked Prince, The
<>  Wild Swans, The
<>  Will-o’-the Wisp (The) Is in the Town

<>  Wind (The) Tells about Valdemar Daae and His Daughters

<>  Wind’s Tale, The
<>  Windmill, The
<>  What Father Does Is Always Right
<>  What Happened to the Thistle
<>  What Old Johanne Told
<>  What One Can Invent
<>  What the Good-Man Does Is Always Right
<>  What The Moon Saw
<>  What the Old Man Does Is Always Right
<>  What the Whole Family Said
<>  Which Was the Happiest?
<>  Winners, The
<>  Wood Nymph, The
<>  World’s Fairest Rose, The
TOP
Y
<>  Year’s Story, The

Editing Notes

—

This book is my own compilation, and is based on an amalgam of several translations. Selections were taken from texts obtained from multiple online sources.

From the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/

wonderstoriestol00ande
storiestales00ande
Wonder Stories Told for Children (1870),
Stories and Tales (1871);
“Author’s Edition” series.
Publ. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1870; 1871.
Translator(s) not credited.

faerytalesfromha00ande
Faery Tales from Hans Andersen,
Publ. J. M. Dent & Co., London & New York, 1910.
Translation by Mrs. Edgar Lucas (1851–1935), first published 1899.

fairytalesstorie00ande
Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen,
Publ. The Century Co., New York, 1900.
Translated by Hans Lien Braekstad (1845–1915).

From HathiTrust:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/

Record/008980259
Stories & Fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen
Publ. George Allen, London, 1893.
Translated by Heinrich Oskar Sommer (1861–1929).

Record/000544996
Scribners’ Monthly, Jan 1872, Aug 1872, Apr 1873.
Translations by Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902).

Record/008699163
Aunt Judy’s Christmas Volume For 1873.
Translations by A. G. Bell and E. Bell (?–?).

From Faded Page:
https://www.fadedpage.com/

csearch.php?author=James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
Forty-Two Stories, by Hans Christian Andersen
Publ. 1930.
Translated by M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James (1862–1936).

From HCA.Gilead:
http://hca.gilead.org.il/

Miscellaneous stories.
Translations by Mrs. H. B. Paull (1812–1888); first published 1872.

Cover by ECM.

Embedded fonts used for titling: “Argos” by Rick Mueller, “Macondo” by John Vargas Beltran, “Fontin” by Jos Buivenga.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.

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