Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/31

 had the happiness of listening to "The Cripple." At that time Andersen had a suite of rooms in Copenhagen, but he was much more frequently to be found at the mansion of some friends just outside the fortifications, called Rolighed or "Quietude." This house had been the residence of several interesting people, among others of no less a person than Örsted. It was now owned by a wealthy and liberal merchant, Mr. Moritz Melchior, who had rebuilt it, and who had turned it into a miniature of Rosenborg Castle, with a tower, and with high balconies overlooking the Sound. In this house Andersen was so constantly welcome that a portion of it — three or four charming rooms — was set apart entirely for his service, and he came and went in them without constraint. "Rolighed" is the subject of Andersen's latest poem, in which he says : —

It was here, in his bright room open to the east, with the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below, "like a flock of wild swans," as he said, with the white towns of Malmö and Landskrona sparkling on the Swedish coast, and the sunlight falling on Tycho Brahe's island, that Andersen proposed to recite to me a new fairy tale. He read in a low voice, which presently sank to almost a hoarse whisper; he read slowly, out of mercy to my imperfect apprehension, and as he read he sat beside me, with his amazingly long and bony hand — a great brown hand, almost like that of a man of the woods — grasping my shoulder. As he read, the color of everything, the twinkling sails, the sea, the opposite Swedish coast, the burnished sky above, kindled with sunset. It seemed as it Nature herself were flushing with ecstasy at the sound of Andersen's voice.

When he had finished, he talked to me a little about the story, and confided to me that he intended this, "The Cripple," to be his last. He was very much pleased with it; he thought it summed up all his methods, and that in a certain sense it presented symbolically his lesson, his imaginative message, to mankind. The reader may not recollect this story, since it is far from being the best known of Andersen's tales; nor is it really one of the most characteristic, for there is nothing supernatural or fantastic about it. It has, therefore, not been included in this collection. It presents a little complicated episode of humble manners. A gardener and his wife have five children, of whom the eldest, a fine boy, has the misfortune to be a bed-ridden cripple. The parents, worthy, narrow people, live engrossed in their materialistic interests, and when some one from whom a present is expected gives the cripple a book, they ungraciously say to one another, "He won't get fat on that." But it is