he part which young Andersen
performed in the saloon of Madame Schall.

As the dancing does not succeed, he next offers himself as an
actor--proceeding, quite as a matter of course, to the manager of a
theatre to ask for an engagement. The manager was facetious--said he was
"too thin for the theatre." Hans would be facetious too. "Oh," he
replied, "if you will but engage me at one hundred rix-dollars banco
salary, I shall soon get fat." Then the manager looked grave, and bade
him go his way, adding, that he engaged only people of education.

But he had many strings to his bow--he could sing. It was at the opera
evidently that he was destined to become famous. Here he met with what,
for a moment, looked like success. A voice he certainly possessed,
though uncultivated, and Seboni, the director of the Academy of Music,
promised to procure instruction for him. But a short time afterwards he
lost his voice, through insufficient clothing, as he thinks, and bad
shoe leather. (Those boots could not be new always--doubtless got sadly
worn tramping through the streets of Copenhagen.) Seboni dropped his
_protege_, counselled him to go back to Odense, and learn a trade.

As well learn a trade in Copenhagen, if it was to come to that. He still
stayed in the capital, and still lingered round the theatre, sometimes
getting a lesson in recitation, sometimes one in dancing, and overjoyed
if only as one of a crowd of masked people he could stand before the
scenes. There never surely was so irrepressible a vanity combined with
so sensitive a temperament; never so strong an impulse for distinction
accompanied with such vague notions of the means to attain it. At this
period of his life his utter childishness, his affectionate simplicity,
his superstition, his unconquerable vanity, present a picture quite
unexampled in all biographies we have ever read. He has to make a
bargain with an old woman (no better than she should be) for his board
and lodging. She had left the room for a short time; there was in it a
portrait of her deceased husband. "I was so much a child," he says,
"that, as the tears rolled down my own cheeks, I wetted the eyes of the
portrait with my tears, in order that the dead man might feel how
troubled I was, and influence the heart of his wife."

Great as his susceptibility to ridicule, his vanity is always greater,
can surmount it, and find a gratification where a sterner nature would
have felt only mortification. In