Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/337

Rh "Let me see him," said the young man, with a smile and a shake of the head. "Well, I don't suppose it can be he, but I remember an adventure I had with a tin soldier when I was a little boy." And so he told his wife about the old house and the old man, and about the tin soldier which he had sent across to him because he was so terribly lonely. And he told it exactly as it had happened, so that the young wife had tears in her eyes over the story of the old house and the old man.

"It may be that it is the same tin soldier," she said; "I should like to keep it and remember all you have told me. But you must show me the old man's grave."

"I don't know where it is," he said, "and no one knows. All his friends were dead, nobody looked after it, and I was only a little boy."

"How terribly lonely he must have been!" she said.

"Terribly lonely!" said the tin soldier; "but it is delightful not to be forgotten!"

"Delightful!" something close by exclaimed, but nobody except the tin soldier saw that it was a bit of the pigskin hangings. All the gilding had gone off it, so that it looked like wet soil; but it had one opinion, and that it expressed:

Gilding soon may perish, But pigskin will forever flourish."

But the tin soldier did not believe it.