Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/101

Rh put on the galoshes because they had not been called for, and as the streets were very dirty he thought they would be of great service to him.

He liked the poem very much.

The idea took his fancy; he thought he would like to have a pair of spectacles of that sort; if one used them properly one might perhaps look right into people's hearts. That would really be more interesting, he thought, than to see what was going to happen next year, for one was sure to get to know that—but about the other matter one could never get to know anything. "I can just imagine to myself all the gentlemen and ladies in the front row. It one could only look straight into their hearts!—there would, of course, have to be some opening to see through, as if you were looking into a shop. How my eyes would like to roam about in these shops!

"In yon lady's heart I should no doubt find a large millinery establishment! The next lady's is empty, but it would be none the worse for a little cleaning; but there are sure to be some shops of stability! Alas, yes!" he sighed, "I know of one where everything is genuine, but there is already a shopman there, and he is the only useless thing in the whole shop!

"From some of them I should hear, 'Please walk in!' Yes, I should like to step inside, just as a beautiful, fleeting thought passes through the heart!"

This was sufficient for the galoshes; the student disappeared altogether, and a most unusual journey began through the hearts of the spectators in the front row. The first heart he entered was that of a lady, but he thought he had suddenly been transported to an orthopædic institution, which they call the place where the doctors take away human deformities and make people straight; he was in the room where the plaster casts of the deformed limbs hang on the walls, but with this difference, that at the institution the casts are taken when the patients arrive, but in this heart they were taken and preserved after the worthy people were gone. They were the casts of female friends, their bodily and mental defects, were here preserved.

He quickly passed into another female heart; this appeared to him like a large sacred church, where the white dove of innocence was hovering over the high altar. He would gladly have gone down on his knees, but he had to proceed farther on his way to the next heart. He still heard the tones of the organ, and felt as if he himself had become a new and better