The Sand-Hills of Jutland

by H. C. Andersen

"So I set off to the westward, out into the wide world, to become a poet.

"Good sense I knew was the most important of all things, the two other qualities not being so highly esteemed. So I went first after good sense. Well, where did it dwell? 'Go to the ant; consider her ways, and be wise,' a great king of the Hebrews has said. I knew this from the library, and I never stopped until I reached a large ant-hill; and there I settled myself to watch them.

"They are a very respectable tribe, the ants, and full of good sense; everything among them is as correctly done as a well-calculated sum in arithmetic. 'To labour and to lay eggs,' say they, 'is to live in the present, and to provide for the future;' and that they assuredly do. They divide themselves into the clean ants and the dirty ones. Rank is distinguished by a number. The queen ant is number one, and her will is their only law. She has swallowed all the wisdom, and it was of consequence to me to listen to her; but she said so much and was so profoundly wise, that I could scarcely comprehend her.

"She said that their hill was the highest in the world; but close to the hill stood a tree that was higher, certainly much higher. She could not deny this, so she did not allude to it. One evening an ant had lost his way, and finding himself on the tree, he crept up the trunk, not as far as the top, but much higher than any ant had ever gone before; and when he descended, and found his way home at last, he imprudently told in the ant-hill of something much higher at a little distance from it. This was taken by one and all as an affront to the whole community, and the offending ant was condemned to have his mouth muzzled, as well as to perpetual solitude. But shortly after another ant got as far as the tree, and made a similar journey and a similar discovery. He spoke of it, however, discreetly and mysteriously, and as he happened to be an ant of consideration—one of the clean—they believed him; and when he died they placed an egg-shell over him as a monument in honour of his extensive knowledge.

"I observed," said the little mouse, "that the ants continually move with their eggs on their backs. One of them dropped hers. She tried very hard to get it up again, but could not succeed; then two others came and helped her with all their might, until they had nearly lost their own eggs, whereupon they let the attempt alone, for one is nearest to one's self; and the queen ant remarked that both heart and good sense had been shown. 'These two qualities place us ants among reasonable beings,' she said. 'Sense ought to be, and is, of the most consequence; and I have the most of that;' and she raised herself, in her self-satisfaction, on her hind leg. I could not mistake her, and I swallowed her. 'Go to the ant; consider her ways, and be wise.' I had now the queen.

"I then went nearer to the above-mentioned large tree: it was an oak. It had high branches, a majestic crown of leaves, and was very old. I perceived that a living creature resided in it—a female. She was called a Dryad. She had been born with the tree, and would die with it. I had heard of this in the library; and now I beheld one of the real trees, and a real oak-nymph. She uttered a frightful shriek when she saw me near her; for she was like all women, very much afraid of mice. She, however, had more reason to be afraid of me than others of her sex have, for I could have gnawed the tree in two, and on it hung her life. I spoke to her kindly and cordially. This gave her courage, and she took me in her slender hand; and when she understood what had brought me out into the wide world, she promised that I should, perhaps that very night, become possessed of one of the two treasures of which I was in search. She told me that Imagination was her very particular friend; that he was as charming as the God of Love; and that he often, for many an hour, sought repose under the spreading foliage of the tree, which then sighed more musically over the two. He called her his dryad, she said, and the tree his tree. The mighty, gnarled, majestic oak was just to his taste, with its broad roots sunk deep into the earth, its trunk and its coronal rising so high in the free air, meeting the drifting snow, the cutting winds, and the bright sunshine, before they had reached the ground. All this she said, and she continued: 'The birds sing up yonder, and tell of foreign lands, and upon the only decayed branch the stork has built a nest; and it is a pleasure to hear of the country where the pyramids stand. All this Fancy can well depict, and very much more. I myself can describe life in the woods from the time that I was quite little, and this tree was so tiny that a nettle could have covered it, until now, when it is so strong and mighty. Sit down yonder under the woodruffs, and be on the look-out. When Fancy comes I shall find an opportunity of pinching his wing, and stealing a little feather from it. You shall take that, and no poet will ever have been better provided. Will that do?'

"And Imagination came; a feather was plucked from him, and I got it," said the little mouse. "I held it in the water till it became soft. It was still hard of digestion, but I managed to gnaw it all up. It is not at all easy to stuff one's self so as to be a poet—there is so much to be put in one. I had now got two of the ingredients—good sense and imagination; and I knew by their help that the third ingredient was to be found in the library; for a great man has said and written that there are romances which are useful in easing people of a superfluity of tears, and which also act as a sort of swamp to cast feelings into. I remembered some of these books; they had always looked very enticing to me. They were so thumbed, so greasy, they must have been very popular.

"I returned home to the library, ate almost as much as a whole romance—that is to say, the soft part of it, the pith—but the crust, the binding, I let alone. When I had digested this, and another to boot, I perceived how my inside was stirred up; so I ate part of a third, and then I considered myself a poet, and every one about me said I was. I had headaches, of course, and all sorts of aches. I thought over what story I could work up about a sausage-stick, and there was no end of sticks and pegs crowding my mind. The queen ant had had an uncommon intellect. I remembered the man who took a white peg into his mouth, and both he and it became invisible. All my thoughts ran upon sticks. A poet can write even upon these; and I am a poet I trust, for I have fagged hard to be one. I shall be able every day in the week to amuse you with the story of a stick. This is my soup."

"Let us hear the third," said the King of the Mice.

"Pip, pip!" said a little mouse at the kitchen door. It was the fourth of them, the one they thought dead. She tripped in, and jumped upon the upper end of the sausage-stick with the black crape. She had been journeying day and night, travelling on the railroad by the goods train, in which she took great pleasure, and yet she had almost arrived too late; but she hurried forward, puffing and panting, and looking very much jaded. She had lost her sausage-stick, but not her voice; for she began talking with the utmost velocity, as if every one was dying to hear her, and no one could say anything to the purpose but herself. How she did chatter! But she had arrived so unexpectedly that no one had time to find fault with her or her talking, so she went on. Now let us listen.