fantastic, and amusing. At one moment he makes us cry, the next instant we laugh. Andersen had been able to keep the imagination of a child of five or six, though he was a grown-up man of over thirty when he began to publish his stories. He saw through a child's eyes, and never felt any difficulty in imagining all the playthings coming alive. He does not, for one thing, distinguish between things and persons. He makes inanimate things human, and he does it without any effort or apparent stretching of the imagination. It seems quite the most ordinary thing in the world, when Andersen tells us about it, that an ink-*pot should talk with a pen, and that flowers, dolls, earwigs, beetles, clouds, and the necks of bottles should all converse with one another, and have their special personalities. He could write about anything, and the telling of utterly improbable things quite simply and naturally, is one of his great gifts. "Tell us a story about a darning-needle," said the Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen, who was never tired of hearing him; and that was how the story came to be written. "I am not a fellow, I am a young lady," said the darning-needle, and how could a darning-needle be anything else?
Many incidents of Andersen's curious childhood inspired his stories as well as folk-lore. Beautifully as he has adapted legends—such as the "Wild Swans" and the "Swineherd"—his own inventions are, I think, the best of all. What more lovely and
