Page:Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (Walker).djvu/254

214 shone on the pool where she lay, earth of the earth, under the birch. Never more will she come back to the land of Egypt."

Then they both wept, and the father stork who heard it clattered with his beak and said, "Pack of lies; I should like to drive my beak right into their breasts!"

"Where it would break off, and a nice sight you would be then," said the mother stork. "Think of yourself first and then of your family; everything else comes second to that!"

"I will perch upon the open cupola to-morrow when the wise and learned folk assemble to talk about the sick man; perhaps they will get a little nearer to the truth!"

The sages met together and talked long and learnedly, but the stork could neither make head nor tail of it. Nothing came of it, however, either for the sick man or for his daughter who was buried in the Wild Bog; but we may just as well hear what they said and we may, perhaps, understand the story better, or at least as well as the stork.

"Love is the food of life! The highest love nourishes the highest life! Only through love can this life be won back!" This had been said and well said, declared the sages.

"It is a beautiful idea!" said Father Stork at once.

"I don't rightly understand it," said the mother stork; "however, that is not my fault, but the fault of the idea. It really does not matter to me, though; I have other things to think about!"

The sages had talked a great deal about love, the difference between the love of lovers, and that of parent and child, light and vegetation, and how the sunbeams kissed the mire and forthwith young shoots sprang into being. The whole discourse was so learned that the father stork could not take it in, far less repeat it. He became quite pensive and stood on one leg for a whole day with his eyes half shut. Learning was a heavy burden to him.

Yet one thing the stork had thoroughly comprehended: