Dickon bent one intent, long glance upon this childish, waxen face before him. Then he plucked a burning bough from the fire, and without a word pushed the bushes aside and plunged into the outer darkness of the forest. After some time he returned, bearing an armful of rushes. He warmed himself for a moment, and then, seated so that Andreas might not observe his work, began with his knife to cut these down into lengths of a span, and to strip off all but a winding rim of their outer cover. Then he hacked with his knife into the frozen boar's carcass. Cutting out portions of white, hard fat, he melted these a little at the fire, and then rolled them thinly between his palms about the trimmed rushes. This done, he flayed off a part of the boar's skin, scorched off the bristles, rubbed it all with ashes, and spreading it over his sallet, sliced it into a rude semblance of fine thongs. 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. "You said you never would see one again," he urged triumphantly. "Belike your speech about dying was no whit truer."