Almost every one has read the story of The Ugly Duckling. In the story, the little duck just out of the shell looked about him and said, “How wide the world is!” And his mother replied, “This is not all the world. The world stretches far across the garden, quite into the parson’s field.”

Now that duck might have lived in the back yard of a small house in the town of Odense, which lies in the center of an island in the middle of Denmark, with water all around it. That is where the man who wrote the story of The Ugly Duckling lived. That man was Hans Christian Andersen.

The boy Hans might have been that Ugly Duckling himself. At least the world in which he lived was as hard for the boy as the poultry yard was for the duck. Hans’s father was a poor man who made and mended shoes for a living. He died when Hans was only eleven years old. Hans’s mother washed clothes for other people, to earn money enough to buy food. As she stood on the river bank washing, Hans sat by and dreamed his dreams of fairy people. Perhaps that is where he saw Thumbelina sailing on a water lily.

Other boys made fun of Hans. So the lonely boy made playmates for himself in his dreams. He made the darning needle walk and talk; his tin soldier became a great hero. He cut fairy figures out of scrap paper.

But Hans dreamed other dreams too. He wanted to do great things in the real world. His mother said, “You must go to work to earn money. The tailor will let you work in his shop.” Hans was unhappy at the thought of sitting on a stool all day sewing and sewing. So he left the town of Odense and went to the big city of Copenhagen. He said, “I’ll go on the stage and act parts in plays.” And he tried to act, but he was so awkward that he never could act well. Then he said, “I’ll sing beautiful songs on the stage.” But the teachers said that his voice was not good enough.

He made some friends in the city. They helped him get money to go to a good school. By that time he was older than the other young people studying at the school. They were not friendly to him. So once more he forgot his loneliness by dreaming dreams, and writing the stories he dreamed.

Many, many children love the Snow Queen, and the Little Match Girl. Hans Christian Andersen wrote the stories about them. He wrote many, many other tales too and won even greater fame than he had ever dreamed for himself.

He travelled much in other lands. Everywhere he went he found children reading his books or listening to his tales. Some men would have felt very important to have so much fame. But Hans Christian Andersen said, “When I see how far my thoughts have flown, I am frightened. I wonder whether I have kept my thoughts pure enough for so many children to read them.”

Little did he dream just how great was his fame. He wrote those fairy tales more than a hundred years ago. And even today no stories are more loved by children all over the world than the stories by that great teller of tales.

But perhaps the children of Denmark hear the most about the man who wrote those tales, for he was born in their country. A few years ago, the children of Denmark celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen. At the schools they acted the stories that Andersen wrote. In Copenhagen movie cameras took pictures of the plays acted by the school children. Those pictures are still shown to many children in Denmark.

In the town of Odense still stands the house where Hans Christian Andersen was born. The people of Denmark have built a building beside that old house in which to keep the things which belonged to Andersen. The street in front of that house looks much the same as it looked when the little boy, Hans, played there.

On the shelves in Andersen’s old home are his fairy tales in Danish, in English, in French, in Spanish, and in other languages too. Andersen wrote the stories in the Danish language, of course. But people in other lands wanted their children to read those wonderful tales too. So the stories have been rewritten in nearly every language in the world.

When children visit that building, they like to look into the case in which stand dolls dressed like the characters in their best-loved stories. Those dolls were dressed by little girls who lived when Andersen was writing his tales. Many children like, too, the fairy figures which Hans cut from paper. Some of those paper cuttings lie in a glass case, and beside them are the scissors Hans used when he cut them.

In the hall of that building to the memory of Andersen stands a statue of Hans Christian Andersen. Many other statues of Andersen have been erected, but none is liked better by Danish children than this one in which he is the children’s teller of tales.