Page:Fairy tales and other stories (Andersen, Craigie).djvu/363

 Rh but, like the other peasants of the neighbourhood, they said, 'The horse eats itself up'—that is to say, it eats as much as it earns. Jeppe-Jens cultivated his field in summer. In the winter he made wooden shoes, and then he had an assistant, a journeyman, who understood how to make the wooden shoes strong, and light, and graceful. They carved shoes and spoons, and that brought in money. It would have been wronging the Jeppe-Jenses to call them poor people.

Little Ib, a boy seven years old, the only child of the family, would sit by, looking at the workmen, cutting at a stick, and occasionally cutting his finger. But one day he had cut two pieces of wood, so that they looked like little wooden shoes; and these he wanted to give to little Christine. She was the boatman's daughter, and was graceful and delicate as a gentleman's child; had she been differently dressed, no one would have imagined that she came out of the hut on the neighbouring heath. There lived her father, who was a widower, and supported himself by carrying firewood in his great boat out of the forest down to the eel-weir of Silkeborg, and sometimes even to the distant town of Banders. He had no one who could take care of little Christine, who was a year younger than lb, and therefore the child was almost always with him in his boat, or in the forest among the heath plants and barberry bushes. When he had to go as far as Banders, he would bring little Christine to stay at the Jeppe-Jenses'.

Ib and Christine agreed very well in every particular: they dug in the ground together for treasures, and they ran and crept, and one day they ventured together up the high ridge, and a long way into the forest; they found a few snipe's eggs there, and that was a great event for them.

Ib had never been on the heath, nor had he ever been on the river. But even this was to happen; for Christine's father once invited him to go with them, and on the evening before the excursion, Ib went home with him.

Next morning early, the two children were sitting high up on the pile of firewood in the boat, eating bread and raspberries. Christine's father and his assistant propelled