Page:The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen (c1899).djvu/163

 The Girl who Trod on the Loaf

HE story of the girl who trod on the loaf lest she should soil her shoes, and of what happened to her, must be familiar to you. It has been both written and printed.

She was a poor child, but proud and arrogant; there was a poor foundation in her, as they say. As quite a little girl it was her one delight to get hold of flies and pull off their wings, so that they could only crawl. She took cockchafers and beetles, stuck them on needles, then held a green leaf or a little piece of paper to their feet, and the poor creatures held fast to it, and turned it about to get off the needle.

"Now the cockchafer is reading!" said little Inger; "see how it turns the leaf!"

As she grew bigger she became worse, instead of better; but she was handsome, and that was her misfortune, for otherwise she would have been more often chastised than she was.

"Your head will meet with some hard blow!" her own mother said. "You have often as a child trodden on my apron, and I am afraid that when you are older you will tread on my heart."

And certainly she did so.

She now came out into the country to be a servant to some people of rank; they treated her as if she had been their own child, and she was dressed as such. She looked well, and grew yet more arrogant.

When she had been out about a twelvemonth, her master said to her, "You ought to go and visit your parents, little Inger."

And she went; but it was in order to show herself, that they might see how fine she had grown. But when she came to the town gate, and saw girls and young men gossiping at the pond, while her mother sat on a stone hard by, with a bundle of firewood, which she had gathered in the forest, and rested herself, then Inger turned away; for she was ashamed that she, with all her fine clothes, should have for her mother a ragged woman who gathered sticks. It was not because she pitied her that she turned away; she was only vexed.

And now half a year passed by.

"You ought to go home one day and call on your old parents, little Inger," said her mistress. "Here is a large loaf of wheaten bread you can take to them; they will be pleased to see you."

And Inger put on her best clothes and her new shoes, and she raised her skirts and walked carefully, to keep her feet clean and smart; and I don't blame her for that. But when she came where the path crosses some boggy ground, and water and mud stood a long way in the road, then she flung the loaf into the mud, that she might step on it and come over dry-shod; then, when she stood with one foot on the loaf and raised the other, the loaf sank with her deeper and deeper: she was quite lost to sight, and there was only a black, bubbling pool.

That is the story.

Where had she gone to? She went down to the bog-wife, who was brewing. The bog-wife is aunt to the elf-maidens, who are pretty well known; songs have been written about them, and they have been painted; but about the bog-wife people only know that when the meadows steam in the summer it is because the bog-wife is brewing. It was down into her brewery that Inger sank, and there is no one who can stand that place long. A cesspool is a bright and splendid apartment compared with the bog-wife's brewery! Every vat stinks so that human beings would certainly faint away, and the vats stand quite close together; and if there is anywhere a little opening between them where one could squeeze through, still one would find it stopped up by all