THE ANGEL

By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Whenever a good child dies, an angel from heaven comes down to earth, and takes the dead child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies away over all the places the child has loved, and picks quite a handful of flowers, which he carries up to the Almighty, that they may bloom in heaven more brightly than on earth.  And the Father presses all the flowers to His heart; but He kisses the flower that pleases him best, and the flower is then endowed with a voice, and can join in the great chorus of praise!

“See”—­this is what an angel said, as he carried a dead child up to heaven, and the child heard, as if in a dream, and they went on over the regions of home where the little child had played, and they came through gardens with beautiful flowers—­“which of these shall we take with us to plant in heaven?” asked the angel.

Now there stood near them a slender, beautiful rose bush; but a wicked hand had broken the stem, so that all the branches, covered with half-opened buds, were hanging drooping around, quite withered.

“The poor rose bush!” said the child.  “Take it, that it may bloom up yonder.”

And the angel took it, and kissed the child, and the little one half opened his eyes.  They plucked some of the rich flowers, but also took with them the despised buttercup and the wild pansy.

“Now we have flowers,” said the child.

And the angel nodded, but he did not yet fly upward to heaven.  It was night and quite silent.  They remained in the great city; they floated about there in a small street, where lay whole heaps of straw, ashes, and sweepings, for it had been removal-day.  There lay fragments of plates, bits of plaster, rags, and old hats, and all this did not look well.  And the angel pointed amid all this confusion to a few fragments of a flower-pot, and to a lump of earth which had fallen out, and which was kept together by the roots of a great dried field flower, which was of no use, and had therefore been thrown out into the street.

“We will take that with us,” said the angel.  “I will tell you why, as we fly onward.

“Down yonder in the narrow lane, in the low cellar, lived a poor sick boy; from his childhood he had been bedridden.  When he was at his best he could go up and down the room a few times, leaning on crutches; that was the utmost he could do.  For a few days in summer the sunbeams would penetrate for a few hours to the ground of the cellar, and when the poor boy sat there and the sun shone on him, and he looked at the red blood in his three fingers, as he held them up before his face, he would say, ‘Yes, to-day he has been out.’  He knew the forest with its beautiful vernal green only from the fact that the neighbor’s son brought him the first green branch of a beech-tree, and he held that up over his head, and dreamed he was in the beech wood where