The Little Match Girl

5-7 min read
14 pages

The little match girl by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. New Year's Eve, no shoes, and a box of matches nobody will buy.

It was the last evening of the year, and it was bitterly cold, and it was snowing in the dark. A little girl was walking along the street with nothing on her head and nothing on her feet.

She had had slippers when she came out, but they were her mother's and far too big, and she lost them crossing in front of two carriages. One was not found and a boy ran off with the other.

In her apron she was carrying matches, and she had one bundle in her hand. Nobody had bought anything from her all day. Nobody had given her anything either.

She sat down in the corner between two houses, where one stuck out further than the other, and drew her feet up under her. She did not dare go home, because there were no matches sold and no money, and her father would say something about it.

The windows above her were bright, and the whole street smelled of roast goose, because it was New Year's Eve.

She took one match out of the bundle and struck it against the wall. It made a small warm light, and she held her hands round it, and while it burned she was sitting in front of a big iron stove with brass feet. Then it went out, and there was the wall.

She struck a second. Where the light fell on the wall the wall went thin as gauze, and she could see into the room: a table with a white cloth and china on it, and a goose on the dish. The goose got down off the dish and came across the floor towards her with the knife still in it. Then that match went out too.

She struck a third and sat under a Christmas tree, bigger than any she had seen through any window, with a thousand candles on it. She put her hands up towards them and the match went out, and the candles went up and up and were stars.

One of the stars fell, and drew a long line of fire down the sky. «Somebody has died,» said the little girl, because her grandmother, who was the only person who had ever been good to her, had told her that a falling star means a soul going up.

She struck another against the wall, and in the light stood her grandmother, clear and bright and looking straight at her with her face as it used to be.

«Grandmother,» said the little girl. «Take me with you. I know you go when the match burns out — like the stove, and the goose, and the tree.»

And she struck all the rest of the bundle at once, because she wanted to hold on to her, and the whole handful burned up at the same time with a light brighter than day.

Her grandmother took her by the hand, and the two of them went up together — higher than the roofs, and higher than the cold, and out of the street altogether, to somewhere there was no hunger and nothing to be frightened of. In the morning, in the corner between the two houses, the little girl was sitting with her cheeks red and a smile on her mouth. Frozen, on the last evening of the old year.

The people going past said she must have been trying to keep warm, and that it was a pity, and one of them noticed the burned matches in her lap and did not understand them at all. But nobody in that street knew what she had seen, or how brightly it had all been lit, or whose hand she had been holding when the year turned.

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Text source: Plot by Hans Christian Andersen, public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Little Match Girl

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