Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/285

 forest in my bundle, and it has been burnt to ashes long ago. But I did not know any better.”

“You did not know any better! Ignorance upon ignorance, indeed!”

The poor swineherd took these words to heart, for they were addressed to him; he knew not that there were others who were equally ignorant. Not even a leaf of the plant could be found. There was one, but it lay in the coffin of the dead; no one knew anything about it.

Then the king, in his melancholy, wandered out to the spot in the wood, “Here is where the plant stood,” he said; “it is a sacred place.” Then he ordered that the place should be surrounded with a golden railing, and a sentry stationed near it.

The botanical professor wrote a long treatise about the heavenly plant, and for this he was loaded with gold, which improved the position of himself and his family.

And this fact is really the most pleasant part of the story. For the plant had disappeared, and the king remained as melancholy and sad as ever, but the sentry said he had always been so.