Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/17

 wooden frame, made to support the coffin of some count in the neighborhood, whose body lay in state before his interment. This frame, covered with black cloth, and which the young shoemaker purchased at a very low price, served as the family bedstead many years. Upon this humble bed was born, on the second of April, 1805, Hans Christian Andersen.

The father of Andersen was not without education; his mother was the kindest of human beings; they lived on the best terms with each other, but still the husband was not happy. He read comedies and the Arabian Tales, and made a puppet theatre for his little son, and often on Sundays took him out with him into the woods round Odense, where the solitude was congenial to his mind.

Andersen’s grandmother had also great influence over him, and to her he was greatly attached. She was employed in taking care of a garden belonging to a lunatic asylum, and here he spent most of the summer afternoons of his early childhood.

Among his earliest recollections is the residence of the Spaniards in Funen, in the years