She begs for her sick
poor as she goes along--meat here, some bread there, a bottle of
good red wine: I fancy few refuse her. She nursed me once, the
good little sister, with unceasing care and devotion, and all the
dignity of a scant five feet. "Ach, Du lieber Gott, such gifts!"
she added, with a radiant smile, and vanished up a dirty stairway.
In the Quergasse a jay fell dead at my feet--one of the many birds
which perished thus--he had flown townwards too late. Up at the
Jagdschloss the wild creatures, crying a common truce of hunger,
trooped each day to the clearing by the Jager's cottage for the
food spread for them. The great tusked boar of the Taunus with his
brother of Westphalia, the timid roe deer with her scarcely braver
mate, foxes, hares, rabbits, feathered game, and tiny songbirds of
the woods, gathered fearlessly together and fed at the hand of
their common enemy--a millennial banquet truly.
The market-place was crowded, and there were Christmas trees
everywhere, crying aloud in bushy nakedness for their rightful
fruit. The old peasant women, rolled in shawls, with large
handkerchiefs tied over their caps, warmed their numb and withered
hands over little braziers while they guarded the gaily decked
treasure-laden booths, from whose pent-roofs Father Winter had hung
a fringe of glittering icicles.
Many of the stalls were entirely given over to Christmas-tree
splendours. Long trails of gold and silver Engelshaar, piles of
candles--red, yellow, blue, green, violet, and white--a rainbow of
the Christian virtues and the Church's Year; boxes of frost and
snow, festoons of coloured beads, fishes with gleaming scales,
glass-winged birds, Santa Klaus in frost-bedecked mantle and
scarlet cap, angels with trumpets set to their waxen lips; and
everywhere and above all the image of the Holy Child.
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