Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/12

x in the town, and the boy’s natural abilities and love of reading made him take advantage of the instruction he there received.

Not, however, for long; his father’s death in 1814, left his mother a sorrowing widow, in poor circumstances, with an orphan boy of nine years. It therefore became necessary for him to leave school, and try to help his mother in earning a home for them both. An opportunity for him to work at a factory in the town was offered to his mother, and eagerly accepted by her, and for some years the now famed and renowned poet and author, worked as a factory boy.



There was a something, however, so different in the coarse and illiterate workmen at the factory to the refined and tender-hearted child, that his patient sufferings of their taunts and torments must have been terrible to bear. At last he complained to his mother, and she removed him. An opening for the youth, now in his fourteenth year, to become a tailor presented itself; but the boy of intellectual tastes implored his mother, even with tears, to allow him to choose his own career in life.