poems, and was quite well known to the public before he entered the university in 1828.  He next published a satirical story, and after a journey in Italy, his famous novel, “The Improvisatore,” which gave him an opportunity for a brilliant series of word-pictures describing the life and character of the parts of Italy he had visited.  Apart from his world-famous fairy tales, by which he set no great store, being ambitious of fame as a novelist, he wrote several successful plays, epic poems and novels.  His fairy tales have been translated practically into every language.  Hans Andersen died at the age of seventy, in Copenhagen, on August 4, 1875.

I.—­A Boyhood in Rome

My earliest recollections take me back to my tender youth, when I lived with my widowed mother in a little garret in a Roman square.  She supported us by sewing and by the rent of a larger room, sublet to a young painter.  On the house opposite there was an image of the Virgin, before which, when the evening bells rang, I and the neighbours’ children used to kneel and sing in honour of the Mother of God and the Child Jesus.  Once an English family stopped to listen; and the gentleman gave me a silver coin, “because of my fine voice,” as my mother told me.

My mother’s confessor, Fra Martino, always showed great kindness to me; and I spent many hours with him at the convent.  It was through him that I became chorister in the Capuchin church, and was allowed to carry the great censer.

Before I was nine, I was chosen as one of the boys and girls who were to preach between Christmas and the New Year in the church of Ara Croeli, before the image of Jesus.  I had no fear, and it seemed decided that I, of all children, gave most delight; but after me came a little girl of exquisitely delicate form, bright countenance, and so melodious a voice that even my mother, with all her pride of me, awarded her the palm, and declared that she was just like an angel.  But I had often to repeat my speech at home, and then made up a new one describing the festival in the church, which was considered just as good.

One moonlit evening, on returning with my mother from a visit in Trastevere, we found a crowd in the Piazza di Trevi, listening to a man singing to a guitar—­not songs like those which I had so often heard, but about things around him, of what we saw and heard, and we ourselves were in the song.  My mother told me he was an improvisatore; and Federigo, our artist lodger, told me I should also improvise, for I was really a poet.  And I tried it forthwith—­singing about the foodshop over the way, with its attractively set out window and the haggling customers.  I gained much applause; and from this time forth I turned everything into song.