Save the crackling of flame, and the small sound of branches overhead that were swayed a little by the draught from the fire on the forest floor, Dickon heard nothing while he waited for Andreas to finish the matter of which he had been speaking.

For the rude smithy-bred boy there was little meaning in the other\'s promise to teach him learning. No more meaning was there for Dickon in the young scholar\'s craving for types and a press to begin printing anew.

But the promise that Andreas would not part from him lingered in Dickon\'s ears, and uplifted his heart as he waited reverentially to hear again the gentle, convinced, and loving accents of the German youth.

At last Andreas spoke—as if he had not paused, and yet with a strange new wailing weakness in his voice:—

"And if the saints willed, thus might we win our way back to Augsburg. But that may never be, for I shall die here, here where I lie, and thou wilt turn to wild beast or robber when I am gone, and brave, goodly Augsburg will press on, leading all men, with never a thought of poor little me, dead here in the forest."

Dickon would have spoken in homely protest, but the change on his friend\'s face scared him to dumbness. Not even the flame-light could make it ruddy now. In the eyes there was a dimmed, far-away look which chilled Dickon\'s blood.

"Aye, when I lie forgotten here,"—the thin, saddened voice went on in increasing slowness,—"there the old gray walls and tiled gables will be, with the storks making their nests in the spring, and the convent boys singing at daybreak in the streets, and the good housewives stopping in the market-place on their way home from mass, and the smell of new grass and blossoms in the air ... and when Christmas comes I shall not know it ... these eyes shall not look again on the Tannenbaum. Woe! woe!"

"Is that the tree?" asked Dickon, some impulse to words and action stirring vaguely in his frightened heart.

"Aye," groaned Andreas, "the beautiful tree with candles blazing on its branches and shining gifts." He followed on in a weak murmuring of foreign words, seemingly without meaning.

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."

Andreas had no further words, but lifted his hand weakly upward, and Dickon knelt down and took it in his own hard palms.

Thus the two boys kept silence for a period—silence which spoke many things to both—and looked at the little rush-dips fluttering on the boughs against the curtain of black night.

Of a sudden, the stillness which had tenderly enwrapped them was roughly broken. If there had been warning sounds, the lads had missed them—for their hearts almost stopped beating with the shock that now befell.

A violent crushing of the bushes, a chance clank of metal—and two fierce-faced bowmen in half-armor stood in the firelight before their frightened gaze.

"Stir not—on your lives!" cried one of these strange intruders, with the cold menace of a pole-axe in his mailed hand. "What mummery is this?"

Somehow it dawned upon Dickon\'s consciousness that these warlike men, for all their terrifying mien, were as much frightened in their way as he was. This perception came doubtless from the lessons of a life spent with bold soldiers who yet trembled at sight of a will o\' the wisp. He kept his jaw from knocking together with an effort, and asked as if at his ease:

"What mean you, good sir? No mummery is here."

"There! there!" shouted the other man-at-arms, pointing with his spear to where the rush-lights—or what remained of them—twinkled fitfully in the tree.

"Oh, that," said Dickon, with nonchalance. "It is a trick of foreign parts, made by me to gladden the heart of this poor lad, my master, who lies here sore stricken with sickness. Wist you not it is Christmas? This is our Tonnybow, meet for such a time."

The two men looked sharply at the boys, and then, after a murmured consultation, one turned on his heel and disappeared. The other, espying the leathern bottle, grew friendlier, and lifted it to his lips by an undivided motion from the ground. Then he said, drawing nearer to the blaze and heaving a long, comforted breath:—

"Whose man art thou?"

"This is my master," replied Dickon, with his thumb toward Andreas, "who was most foully beset by robbers, and is like now to die if he win not help and shelter."

"That shall be as my lord duke willeth," said the soldier.

As he spoke, the sound of more clanking armor fell upon the air. In a moment a half-dozen mailed men stood at the entrance to the copse, gazing in with curious glances.

Behind them were men with flaring torches, and in their front was the stately figure of a young knight, tall and proudly poised. A red cloak and fur tippet were cast over his shining corselet.

This young man had a broad brow under his hanging hair, and grave, piercing eyes, which passed over Dickon as mere clay, and fastened a shrewd gaze on the lad in velvet.

"It is the German gift-tree," he said to those behind him, whom Dickon saw now to be gentles and no common soldiers. "I have heard oft of this,............