Pack of Cards

Busy Londoners scurrying home from "the city" were arrested last week by an appeal from newsboy throats which was not to be withstood: "Get your Evening News! New story by Hans Christian Andersen! Paper, sir?"

As they whirled home through the underground, the purchasers of this rare pennyworth perused a little story, in the now familiar vein, which described the adventures of a boy with the kings, queens and knaves of a pack of cards. In the end all the royal cards are burnt, and this denouement seemed commonplace enough to most of the stolid Londoners. Here and there, however, there was one who remembered that as an old man

Hans Andersen trembled for his safety because of that ending. In the year 1868, when the story was written, it was not wise to talk of burning even cardboard kings in Denmark.

A few years earlier the present ruling house of Schleswig-Holstein- Sonderburg-Gliicksburg had displaced the Oldenburgs upon the Danish throne. The Oldenburgs, notably Frederik VI, had been patrons of Hans Andersen. Hence Fabulist Andersen's friends warned him that the publication of the story might brand him as disloyal to the new reigning house. Ever easily frightened, he cautiously suppressed the manuscript, which was only recently unearthed by Herr Julius Clausen of the Royal Library at Copenhagen.

It was the ironic fate of Hans Andersen that he aspired vainly to almost every form of literary composition except the one in which he excelled. It was the tragedy of this neurotic genius's life that even the women he loved would not have him. He was the original "ugly duckling," and he never evolved into anything better than an ugly drake. After following Jenny Lind, famed "Swedish Night-ingale," over half the world, he died in discontented bachelorhood at

Rolighed, his famed estate near Copenhagen.

Friends of Andersen have alleged that on at least one occasion his wit came to the rescue of his timidity where royalty was concerned. Frederik VII, grandson of Andersen's original benefactor, Frederik VI, challenged the aged fabulist to a drinking bout. He accepted, but bribed a royal servitor to fill the silver cup passed to him with water. Some hours later, Frederik, by then in no mood to be trifled with, detected the fraud. '"Cheat! Will you pledge your King in water?"

Trembling but clearheaded, Andersen parried all rebuke: "Sire! As I drink to my King the water changes to wine!"