Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/113

Rh the travelers was to keep watch while the others slept. This fell to the lot of the theological student. Oh, how suffocating the air was in the room! The heat was oppressive, the mosquitoes were buzzing about and stinging, while the "miserabili" outside were heard whining in their sleep.

"Yes, traveling is all very well!" sighed the student, "if only one was not troubled with a body! If that could rest and the spirit fly! Wherever I go I feel a void which oppresses my heart; I want something better than the momentary, yes, something better—in fact, the best. But where and what is it? I think, however, I know what I really want. I want to reach a happy goal, the happiest of all!"

No sooner had he spoken these words than he was in his own home, the long white curtains were drawn across the window, and in the middle of the room stood a black coffin in which he was lying in his peaceful sleep of death. His wish had been fulfilled, the body rested, the spirit had fled. The truth of Solon's words, "Call no man happy until he is in his grave," were here again confirmed.

Every dead body is a sphinx of immortality. Nor did the sphinx in this black coffin solve what the living being two days before had written:

Two figures were moving about in the room; we know them both. They were the two fairies. Care and the messenger of Fortune; they were bending over the dead body. "Do you see," said Care, "what fortune your galoshes brought mankind after all?"

"They brought, at least, a lasting benefit to him who sleeps here," answered Fortune's messenger.

"Oh, no," said Care. "He passed away by his own wish; he was not called. His intellectual power here was not strong enough to raise the treasures yonder, which he, according to his destiny, had to raise. I will do him an act of kindness."

She then pulled the galoshes off his feet; the sleep of death was over, the dead man came to life again, and raised himself.

Care vanished, and with her the galoshes; she, no doubt, considered them her property.