e could find a heart that is disquieted. He would
follow the banner of him who had "opened a career to all the talents."
But the regiment in which he enlisted got no further than Holstein.
Peace was concluded; he had to return to his native place, and fall back
as well as he could into the old routine. His march to Holstein had,
however, shaken his health, and he died shortly after his return.

"I was," says our author, "the only child, and was extremely spoilt; but
I continually heard my mother say how very much happier I was than she
had been, and that I was brought up like a nobleman's child." No
nobleman's child could, at all events, be brought up with less
restraint, or more completely left to his own fancies. Poor as were his
parents, he never felt want; he had no care; he was fed and clothed
without any thought on his part; he lived his own dreamy life, nourished
by scraps of plays, songs, and all manner of traditionary stories. There
was a theatre at Odense, and young Andersen was now and then taken to it
by his parents. He himself constructed a puppet-show, and the dressing
and drilling of his dolls was for a long time the chief occupation of
his life. As he could rarely go to the theatre, he made friends with the
man who sold the play-bills, who was charitable enough to give him one.
With this upon his knee, he would sit apart and construct a play for
himself; putting the _dramatis personae_ into movement as well as he
could, and at all events despatching them all at the close; for he had
no idea, he tells us, of a tragedy "that had not plenty of dying."

Of what is commonly called education he had little enough. He was sent
to a charity-school, where, by a somewhat startling error of the press,
Mrs Howitt is made to say "he learned only _religion_, writing, and
arithmetic." Of the _reading_, writing, and arithmetic there taught, he
seemed to have gained little; certainly the writing, and the arithmetic
went on very slowly. To make amends, he used to present his master on
his birth-day with a poem and a garland. Both the wreath and the verses
seemed to have been but churlishly received, and the last time they were
offered, he got scolded for his pains.

It would be difficult, however, to conceive of a life more suitable to
the fostering of the imagination than that which little Hans was
leading. Besides the play-house, and the scraps of dramas read to him by
his father, himself a strange and dreamy man, we ca