as "a venerable, toothless old man, with a pack of children crowding round," as he expressed it.
Andersen, by the time he was middle-aged, was celebrated over a great part of the world. He was fashionable in his own town of Copenhagen, and people would nudge one another in the street as he passed, saying, "There goes the Poet." Actresses recited his stories, and he himself read them aloud at parties, which would be considered very great occasions. In some ways it sounds rather trying. He had a way of reading his favorites over and over again, and demanding absolute attention; the ladies must stop knitting, the gentlemen must cease to smoke. In spite of these rules and regulations his extraordinary way of reading, his charming voice, his faces and antics, astonished and interested his audience so much that they put up with anything, and would have been willing to stand on their heads, if he had asked them to.
Andersen was made very happy by success, and he says in his "Life," that it made up to him for all the hard words the critics had spoken. "There came within me," he says, "a sense of rest, a feeling that all, even the bitter in my life, had been needful for my development and fortune."
It was a constant source of wonder and delight to him to find himself where he was. He, the son of a poor cobbler and a washerwoman, who had run about as a child in wooden shoes, now to be treated by the most important people as their equal, and to enjoy
