called Geography—and I began to fear I should never swim through them all." He was terribly frightened of failing, and began to think he was a dunce, for he was seventeen and had to be put with the smallest boys in the school, which was very discouraging, but it was greatly the master's fault. He treated Hans as he would ninety-nine boys out of a hundred. He never ceased laughing at him, and seldom, if ever, encouraged him; so damping was he that Andersen really began to feel he was not worth all the trouble and money that were being spent upon him. Andersen, with his sensitive, imaginative nature, was apt to make mountains out of molehills. His imagination, indeed, was quite extraordinary, extravagant, and out of proportion to his other faculties. He needed a kind, understanding person to guide him, but he was left to himself and had few, if any, friends. The ordinary dull routine of school life made him suffer. He describes it all in his book as a sort of "Dotheboys Hall," when it was really just an ordinary school like any other at that date. His anxiety to get on may be guessed at when we read that he nearly worried himself to death, because he got "Very good" in a report for conduct, instead of "Remarkably good." "I am a strange being," he once wrote. "If the wind blows a wee bit sharply the water always comes into my eyes, though I know very well that life cannot be a perpetual May day."
When he was twenty his master moved to Elsinore,
