FAIRY TALES OF HANS CHRIS TIAN ANDERSEN. These (Fairy Tales) have been read by thousands with delight, and have settled down to a place in the world's memory along with the traditional nursery tales of the race. The Ugly Duck ling and The Constant Tin Soldier are re membered in company with Goody Two Shoes or Little Red Riding Hood. The Tales' are among the most original works of the 19th century. Fairy tales are usually stories of legend and tradition; they grow up in the lives of simple peoples without any one's knowing who originally thought of them or told them. They are told and retold by the old people to the children, and then somebody comes and writes them down as, for instance, Mr. Harris wrote down the negro stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Of this kind are the famous 'Marche& of the Brothers Grimm and the (Contes) of Perrault and many others. These are old stories which have charmed generations put into literary form. Such also are some of the (Eventy0 or Wonder-stories of Andersen. He was born and brought up at Odinse in the island of Funen, a place, which, as he says himself, was in those days a hundred years behind the times. The old women, who made something of a pet of him, used to tell him old stories which re vealed to him "a world as rich as that of the Thousand and One Nights,') as he said himself afterward, not only in complete stories, but in ways of story-telling. "In the volume which I first published I had like Musaus but in my own manner related old stories which I had heard as a child. The tone in which they still sounded in my ears seemed a very natural one to me.D But much of his 'Tales,' and probably the most characteristic element, is something different; it is something of his own. Ander.
sen was a man of a peculiarly childlike nature. He was not very fond of children but he was in simplicity, imagination and impulsiveness not unlike them. In all that he wrote he was an idealist, as children are apt to be, without over much concern about the actualities of the real world. So when he told stories to children as
he often did he spoke naturally in the lan guage and thought which they recognized as their own. "I had written my narrative down upon paper in exactly the language and with the expressions in which I had related them to the little ones.° But he generally had in mind a larger audience and his tales were eagerly read by old as well as young. In fact a good many of them are not Fairy Tales at all, but little sketches or imaginations of life. One cannot read them with anything of a criti cal spirit without imagining that in his best stories he was always telling more or less directly of himself. So many of them are stories of travel—The Ugly Duckling, The Constant Tin Soldier, The Silver Shilling, Thumbelina— and so many of them are full of veiled comment on life, that one is continually reminded of the author who was himself always traveling and always seeing the world. The children, he says, were pleased generally with the story; older people, on the other hand, were interested in the deeper meaning. The (Tales> were extraordinarily popular; they were lcnown all over Europe and America and translated into a dozen languages. Andersen, himself, made friends everywhere and told his stories everywhere. He was really a poet, a novelist and a dramatist; he wrote much beside his 'Tales> and was, at first at least, inclined to value his deeper work more than his child's stories. But the world has found in his chil dren's stories the peculiar thing it wanted and these slight matters as he onginally thought them are the things. that have made him im mortal. There is nothing especially upon Andersen's