Then, still uttering no word, he was gone again, once more bearing with him a lighted torch.
In front of Andreas, but to one side, as he lay in half trance and utter faintness watching the smoke, there rose at two rods' distance the dark outline of a fir tree, the lower parts of which were hidden by shrubs.
Suddenly the sick boy's gaze was diverted to the dim black cone of this tree, where a reddish radiance seemed spreading upward from the tangle underneath. Then a sparkling spot of white light made itself visible high up among the dusky branches—then another—and another. At last nearly a dozen there were, all brightly glowing like stars brought near.
Andreas gazed in languid marvelling at the development of this strange thing—as one quietly contemplates miracles in sleep. It seemed but a natural part of his dying vision of Augsburg—the Tannenbaum making itself weirdly real before his fading sight.
The rosy smoke parted to shape a frame for this mystic picture in its centre, and Andreas saw it all—the twinkling lights, the deep-shadowed lines of boughs, the engirdling wreaths of fiery vapor—as a part of the dreamland whose threshold he stood upon. And his heart sang softly within him at the sight.
Then all at once he awoke from the dream; for Dickon was standing over him, flushed with a rude satisfaction in his work, and saying:—
"Gifts had I none to hang, Andreas, save it were the bottle and what is left of the cheese. Look your fill at it, for boar's fat never yet was tallow, and the rushes are short-lived."
The dream mists cleared from the German boy's brain.
"Oh, it is thine!" he faintly murmured, in reviving comprehension. "Thou hast made it—for me!"
Dickon glanced out to where, in his eyes, some sorry dips guttered for a brief space on a tree-top. More than one of the lights was already flickering to collapse in the breeze.