The Little Match Seller
On the last evening of the old year, it was bitterly cold and almost dark, and snow was falling heavily. A poor little girl wandered the streets in the cold night, bareheaded and barefoot. Actually, she was wearing slippers when she left the house, but they were useless. The slippers were enormous, so enormous that they had belonged to her mother, and the poor little thing lost them while racing across the street to avoid two carriages moving at breakneck speed. She could not find one of the slippers, and a boy grabbed the other and fled with it, saying he could use it for cradling children when he had his own. And the little girl moved on with her small bare feet that were red and blue from the cold. She wore an old apron and had a bundle of matches in it and the palms of her hands. Nobody bought anything from her all day, and no one had paid her a penny. She crawled along, trembling with cold and hunger; poor little girl, she resembled the image of suffering. Snowflakes landed on her long, fair hair, which draped in curls over her shoulders, but she paid no attention to them.
There were lights flashing from every window, and there was a tasty fragrance of roast goose. Ah, it was New Year's Eve, yes, she recalled that. She slid down and curled up in a nook between two houses, one of which protruded beyond the other. She folded her small feet under her, but she was unable to keep the cold away, and she couldn't go home since she hadn't sold any matches and couldn't take home even a penny of money. Her father would undoubtedly beat her; furthermore, it was nearly as cold at home as it was here, for they had just the roof to shelter them, through which the wind howled, despite the fact that the greatest holes had been filled with straw and rags. The cold had almost frozen her little hands. Oh! Maybe a burning match would be useful if she could pull it from the bundle and strike it against the wall to warm her fingers. She took out one. "Scratch!" It spat as it burned! As she put her palm over it, it let forth a warm, brilliant glow, much like a little candle. It was a very beautiful light. The small girl saw herself seated next to a massive iron stove with polished brass feet and a brass decoration. What a blazing fire! The child put out her feet as if to warm them when the flame went out, the stove disappeared, and there were only the remains of the half-burnt match in her hand.
She rubbed yet another match against the wall. It exploded into flame, and where its light hit on the wall, it became as clear as a veil, allowing her to see inside the chamber. A pure white tablecloth covered the table that had a magnificent dinner set and a hot roast goose packed with apples and dried plums. Moreover, the goose leapt out of the dish and hobbled across the floor to the little girl, carrying a knife and fork in its breast. Soon the flame went out, and all that left was the thick, wet, chilly wall in front of her.
She lit another match and found herself seated beneath a lovely Christmas tree. It was larger and more ornately adorned than the one she had seen through the rich merchant's glass door. Thousands of tapers burned on its green branches, and colored portraits, similar to those she had seen in the show-windows, peered down on it all. The match burned out as the little creature extended her hand toward them.
The Christmas lights grew higher and higher until they resembled the stars in the sky to her. Then she saw a falling star, leaving behind a dazzling track of fire. "Someone is dying," the child believed, since her grandmother, the one person who had ever loved her and was now gone, had taught her that when a star fell, a soul went up to God.
The little girl rubbed another match on the wall, and the light shone around her; her grandmother appeared in the light, clear and dazzling, yet calm and kind in look. "Grandmother," the child sobbed, "take me with you; I know you'll vanish when the match goes out; you'll disappear like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the big, gorgeous Christmas-tree." And she hurriedly lit the entire packet of matches because she wanted to keep her grandmother there. The matches gleamed brighter than the midday sun, and her grandmother had never seemed so enormous or so pretty. She carried the little girl in her arms and flew high above the world in light and joy, where there was no cold, hunger, or suffering, since they were with God.
The poor child lay leaning against the wall at dawn, with pale cheeks and smiling lips; she had been frozen to death in the last evening of the year, and the New Year's sun dawned and shone a light on her tiny body! The little girl sat there, deathly stiffed, holding the matches in her palm, one bundle of which she had burned. "She tried to warm up herself," several people remarked. Nobody could have thought the wonderful sights she had seen, or the splendor she had gone into with her grandmother on New Year's Day.
