educated man. Now that the father was dead the mother must go out to wash, to keep them from starving. Hans went to work in a factory.

After a while the mother married again. While the stepfather was not unkind to Hans, yet he did not care to educate him. Do you wonder then, that when Hans was fourteen, he asked his mother to let him go to the great city of Copenhagen? There, he felt sure he could go to school and also get work.

The mother did not know what to say. So she went to a wise old woman and asked her advice. This old woman knew Hans to be a very unusual boy. She knew also that he had no longer any chance to go to school. She said to the mother, "Your son will become a great man, and in honor of him Odense will one day be illuminated."

Hans's mother wept when she heard this for she did not want him to go away. So she said to herself, "I will allow him to go but when he gets sight of the rough sea, he will be frightened and turn back again." She packed up his clothes in a small bundle, and sent him with the driver

of a post carriage to Copenhagen. She went with him to the city gate. There stood the kind old grandmother. She fell upon his neck and wept but was not able to say one word. Then the postboy blew his horn, and Hans started off for Copenhagen, down a long sunny road.

For weeks he wandered about the streets of Copenhagen, trying to find work. Just as his money was almost gone, he went to the house of the director of the Academy of Music to beg for work. There was a dinner party that evening and Hans offered to sing for the guests. He had an excellent voice, and the company became interested in him. They raised some money, and the director himself undertook to give Hans voice lessons. From that time Hans Andersen never failed for friends, although for a long time he was very, very poor. He was sent away to school. While there he began his writing. It was not long till people everywhere were reading The Brave Tin Soldier, The Darning Needle and all of those charming stories about What the Moon Saw.

Soon he was famous. The great Danish sculp

tor, Thorwaldsen, became his friend and asked Hans Andersen to visit him. In the evening they listened to music with half-shut eyes, then Thorwaldsen would come softly behind Andersen and ask, “Shall we little ones hear any tales to-night?" Then Then Andersen would tell them another story about Ole Luk-Oie, the Dustman.

He was great friends with Charles Dickens, and Felix Mendelssohn. The King and the Queen honored him by invitations to their palace. They also gave him a pension.

Just fifty years after he left Odense, the town held a great feast in his honor. He says of it : "The town is beautifully decorated, and all the schools have a festival.

I feel cast down, humble

and poor, as if I were standing before my God. I think of Aladdin, who, when by his wonderful lamp he had built his grand castle, stepped to the window and said, 'Down there I walked, a poor boy.' So has God given me the lamp of poetry, and when men said that light shone from Denmark, then my heart beat with happiness."

Now do you see why he calls himself the Ugly Duckling?

LITTLE BROWN HANDS

BY MARY HANNAH KROUT

They drive home the cows from the pasture, Up through the long shady lane,

Where the quail whistles loud in the wheatfields

That are yellow with ripening grain.

They toss the new hay in the meadow,
They gather the elder blooms white,
They find where the dusky grapes purple
In the soft-tinted October light.

They wave from the tall rocking tree-top,
Where the oriole's hammock nest swings;
And at night they are folded in slumber
By a song that a fond mother sings.

Those who toil bravely are strongest,
The humble and poor become great,
And so from these brown-handed children
Shall grow mighty rulers of state.

The

pen

of the author and statesman, The noble and wise of the land, The sword and the chisel and palette Shall be held in the little brown hand.