spring up about five o'clock in the evening to recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[1] has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.—On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.—Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then
- ↑ These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equal gusto in another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit of gilt sweet-meats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c., &c., are specified with the same fidelity as here.—Ed.
