The gentleman laughed, and, pointing to a door, told Jacob he would find his brother there. While the boy happily recounted his adventures, particularly the story of his kindly guide, the handsome gentleman passed through the room and nodded to him with his twinkling smile.
“There is my jolly gentleman,” said Jacob, as he nodded back.
His brother jumped to his feet and bowed low.
“Good gracious!” he said, when the stranger had passed out. “You don’t mean to say he was your guide? Why, boy, that was the King!”
So Jacob learned that in Denmark even a king, whom he had always thought of as wearing a jeweled crown and a trailing robe of velvet and ermine held by dainty silken pages, could go about in a plain blue overcoat like any other man, and be just as simple and neighborly.
In Copenhagen the king of his fairy-book world was a neighbor, too. Hans Christian Andersen was a familiar figure on the streets at that time. Jacob and his companions often met him walking under the lindens along the old earthen walls that surrounded the city.
“Isn’t he an ugly duck, though!” said Jacob one evening, as the awkward old man, with his long, ungainly neck and limbs and enormous hands and feet, came in sight. Then the merry young fellows strung themselves along in Indian file, each in turn bowing low as he passed, and saying with mock reverence, “Good evening, Herr Professor!”
But when the gentle old man, with the child’s heart, seized their hands in his great grasp and thanked them delightedly, they slunk by shamefacedly, and, while they chuckled a little, avoided meeting each other’s eyes. For in their hearts they loved the old man whose stories had charmed their childhood, and they knew that the spirit within the lank, awkward body was altogether lovely.
All the time that Jacob was working with hammer and saw, he was, like that first Jacob of whom we read, serving for his Rachel. From the time he was a clumsy lad of twelve he knew that his playmate Elizabeth, with the golden curls and the fair, gentle looks, was the princess of his own fairy-tale. Like all good fairy-tales, it simply had to turn out happily.
When his apprenticeship was over and he had learned all about building houses for people to live in, he hurried at once to Ribe to build his own house. It seemed, however, that nobody realized that he was the hero who was to marry the princess. Why, Elizabeth’s father owned the one factory in town, and they lived in a big house, which some people called a “castle.” Small chance that he would let his pretty daughter marry a carpenter!