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Main > Fairy tale > All authors > Andersen Hans Christian > Fairy tale "A Good Humor"

A Good Humor

Yes, it is all so natural and simple. One can live very happily, and be happily buried, if one reads the Advertiser -and then when death comes about, one has such a lot of paper that one can rest softly on it, if one doesn't care to rest on wood shavings. The churchyard and the Advertiser were as always the things that most elevated my mind.

Everyone is free, of course, to read the Advertiser, but if anybody would like to share my walks in the churchyard, let him join my someday when the sun is shining and the trees are green.

Then let us ramble together among the old graves; each one is like a closed book with the cover toward you, so you can read the title that tells you what the book contains and yet says nothing at all. But from my father, and through my own experiences, I know all about it. I have written it all in a book for my own especial benefit and instruction; there is something written about most of them.

Now we are in the churchyard.

Behind this white-painted trellis, where once grew a rosebush-it is dead now, but a stray bit of evergreen from the next grave stretches a long green finger across the sod, as if to make up for the loss-there rests a man who was singularly unhappy. Yet you would not have called him unfortunate; he had sufficient income and never suffered any great calamity. His unhappiness was of his own making; as we say it, he took everything, especially his "art," too much to heart. Thus, if he spent an evening at the theater, he nearly went out of his mind if the machinist had put too strong a light into each cheek of the moon, or if canvases representing the sky were hanging in front of the scene instead of behind, or if a palm tree appeared in a local landscape, cacti on the Tirolean plains, or beech trees in the high mountains of Norway. What does it matter; who cares! It is only a play intended for amusement. The audience was sure to be wrong, sometimes applauding too much and sometimes too little. "Look, that is wet wood tonight," he said.

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