自考英語綜合一 上冊 lesson2
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Hans Christian Andersen's Own Fairy Tale(1)
Once upon a time there was a poor boy who lived in Denmark.
His father,a shoemaker,had died,and his mother had married again.
One day the boy went to ask a favor of the Prince of Denmark.
When the Prince asked him what he wanted,the boy said,
"I want to write plays in poetry and to act at the Royal Theater."
The Prince looked at the boy,at his big hands and feet,
at his big nose and large serious eyes,and gave a sensible answer.
"It is one thing to act in plays,another to write them.
I tell you this for your own good;learn a useful trade like shoemaking."
So the boy,who was not sensible at all,went home.
There he took what little money he had,
said good-bye to his mother and his stepfather
and started out to seek his fortune.
He was sure that some day the same Hans Christian Andersen
would be known all over Denmark.
To believe such a story one would have to believe in fairy tales!
Hans Christian knew many such tales.
He had heard some of them from his father,who had worked hard at his trade,
but liked to read better than to make shoes.
In the evenings,he had read aloud from The Arabian Nights.
His wife understood very little of the book,
but the boy,pretending to sleep,understood every word.
By day,Hans Christian went to a house where did women worked as weavers.
There he listened to the tales that the women told
as they worked at their weaving.
In those days,there were almost as many tales in Denmark
as there were people to tell them.
Among the tales told in the town of Odense,where Andersen was born in 1805,
was one about a fairy who brought death to those who denced with her.
To this tale,Hans Christian later added a story from his own life.
Once,when his father was still alive,a young lady ordered a pair of red shoes.
When she refused to pay for them,unhappiness filled the poor shoemaker's house.
From that small tragedy and the story of the dancing fairy,
the shoemaker's son years later wrote the story that millions of people
now know as The Red Shoes.
The genius of Andersen is that he put so much of everyday life
into the wonder of his fairy tales.
When Hans Christian's mother was a little girl,
she was sent out on the streets to beg.
She did not want to beg,so she sat out of sight under one of the city bridges.
She warmed her cold feet in her hands,for she had no shoes.
She was afraid to go home.Years later,her son,in his pity for her
and his anger at the world,wrote the angry story
She's No Good and the famous tale The Little Match Girl.
Through his genius,he changed every early experience,
even his father's death,into a fairy tale.
One cold day the boy had stood looking at the white patterns
formed on the window by the frost.
His father showed him a white,woman-like figure among the frost patterns.
That is the Snow Queen,"said the shoemaker.
"Soon she will be coming for me."A few months later he was dead.
And years later,Andersen turned that sad experience into a fairy tale,
The Snow Queen.
After the Prince told him to learn a trade,Hans Christian went to Copenhagen.
He was just fourteen years old at the time.
When he arrived in the city,
he went to see as many important people as he could find
dancers,writers and theater people of Copenhagen.
But none of them lent a helping hand to the boy with the big hands,
the big feet and the big nose.Finally,he had just seven pennies left.
The boy had a beautiful high,clear voice.
One day a music teacher heard him singing and decided to help him.
He collected money from his friends and gave it to the boy
so that he could buy food and clothing while he studied singing.
Hans Christian was happier than he had ever been in his life.
But soon his boy's voice broke.
The beautiful high voice was gone forever.
The boy soon found new friends who admired his genius.
There was even a princess who gave him a little money from time to time
for food and clothes.
But Hans Christian bought little food and no clothes.
