A Teller of Tales
Almost every one has read the story of The Ugly Duckling. In the story, the little duck just out of the shell looked about him and said, “How wide the world is!” And his mother replied, “This is not all the world. The world stretches far across the garden, quite into the parson’s field.”
Now that duck might have lived in the back yard of a small house in the town of Odense, which lies in the center of an island in the middle of Denmark, with water all around it. That is where the man who wrote the story of The Ugly Duckling lived. That man was Hans Christian Andersen.
The boy Hans might have been that Ugly Duckling himself. At least the world in which he lived was as hard for the boy as the poultry yard was for the duck. Hans’s father was a poor man who made and mended shoes for a living. He died when Hans was only eleven years old. Hans’s mother washed clothes for other people, to earn money enough to buy food. As she stood on the river bank washing, Hans sat by and dreamed his dreams of fairy people. Perhaps that is where he saw Thumbelina sailing on a water lily.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF HANS ANDERSEN
Other boys made fun of Hans. So the lonely boy made playmates for himself in his dreams. He made the darning needle walk and talk; his tin soldier became a great hero. He cut fairy figures out of scrap paper.
But Hans dreamed other dreams too. He wanted to do great things in the real world. His mother said, “You must go to work to earn money. The tailor will let you work in his shop.” Hans was unhappy at the thought of sitting on a stool all day sewing and sewing. So he left the town of Odense and went to the big city of Copenhagen. He said, “I’ll go on the stage and act parts in plays.” And he tried to act, but he was so awkward that he never could act well. Then he said, “I’ll sing beautiful songs on the stage.” But the teachers said that his voice was not good enough.
He made some friends in the city. They helped him get money to go to a good school. By that time he was older than the other young people studying at the school. They were not friendly to him. So once more he forgot his loneliness by dreaming dreams, and writing the stories he dreamed.