only household companions appear to be two old peasant
women, whom he employs as domestics; weather-beaten and decrepit old
creatures, with faces and forms very much like a pair of antiquated
nut-crackers. He occupies only two or three rooms plainly furnished,
and apparently lives in the simplest and most abstemious style.

When I called according to directions, one of the ancient nut-crackers
merely pointed to the door, and said she thought Herr Andersen was in,
but didn't know. I could knock there and try; so I knocked. Presently
I heard a rapid step, and the door was thrown open. Before me stood
the tall, thin, shambling, raw-boned figure of a man a little beyond
the prime of life, but not yet old, with a pair of dancing gray eyes
and a hatchet-face, all alive with twists, and wrinkles, and muscles;
a long, lean face, upon which stood out prominently a great nose,
diverted by a freak of nature a little to one side, and flanked by a
tremendous pair of cheek-bones, with great hollows underneath.
Innumerable ridges and furrows swept semicircularly downward around
the corners of a great mouth--a broad, deep, rugged fissure across the
face, that might have been mistaken for the dreadful child-trap of an
ogre but for the sunny beams of benevolence that lurked around the
lips, and the genial humanity that glimmered from every nook and turn.
Neither mustache nor beard obscured the strong individuality of this
remarkable face, which for the most part was of a dull granite color,
a little mixed with limestone and spotted with patches of porphyry. A
dented gutta-percha forehead, very prominent about the brows, and
somewhat resembling in its general topography a raised map of
Switzerland, sloped upward and backward to the top of the head; not a
very large head, but wonderfully bumped and battered by the operations
of the brain, and partially covered by a mop of dark wavy hair, a
little thin in front and somewhat grizzled behind; a long, bony pair
of arms, with long hands on them; a long, lank body, with a long black
coat on it; a long, loose pair of legs, with long boots on the feet,
all in motion at the same time--all shining, and wriggling, and
working with an indescribable vitality, a voice bubbling up from the
vast depths below with cheery, spasmodic, and unintelligible words of
welcome--this was the wonderful man that stood before me, the great
Danish improvisator, the lover of little children, the gentle Caliban
who dwells