The Complete Fairy Tales & Other Stories
By Hans Christian Andersen - online book

Oxford Complete Illustrated Edition all his stories written between 1835 and 1872.

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	THE ANGEL                             225 1 Now we have flowers,' said the child. And the angel nodded, but he did not^yet fly upwards to heaven. It was night and quite silent. They remained in the great city ; they floated about there in one of the narrowest streets, 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.' So they flew, and the angel related, * Down yonder in the narrow lane, in the low cellar, lived a poor sick boy ; from his childhood he had been bed-ridden. 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 front of the cellar, and when the poor boy sat there and the sun ANDERSEK                                                    T