The young fir trees in the forest began to long for Christmas, but it was a
long time to Christmas yet.
“Here I am standing yet!” said the Thistle. “It is as if nobody thought of
me, and yet I managed the match. They were betrothed, and they have had
their wedding; it is now a week ago. I won’t take a single step-because I
can’t.”
A few more weeks went by. The Thistle stood there with his last single
flower large and full. This flower had shot up from near the roots; the wind
blew cold over it, and the colors vanished, and the flower grew in size, and
looked like a silvered sunflower.
One day the young pair, now man and wife, came into the garden. They
went along by the paling, and the young wife looked across it.
“There’s the great thistle still growing,” she said. “It has no flowers now.”
“Oh, yes, the ghost of the last one is there still,” said he. And he pointed
to the silvery remains of the flower, which looked like a flower themselves.
“It is pretty, certainly,” she said. “Such an one must be carved on the
frame of our picture.”
And the young man had to climb across the palings again, and to break
off the calyx of the thistle. It pricked his fingers, but then he had called it a
ghost. And this thistle-calyx came into the garden, and into the house, and
into the drawing-room. There stood a picture-”Young Couple.” A thistle-
flower was painted in the buttonhole of the bridegroom. They spoke about
this, and also about the thistle-flower they brought, the last thistle-flower,
now gleaming like silver, whose picture was carved on the frame.
And the breeze carried what was spoken away, far away.
“What one can experience!” said the Thistle Bush. “My first born was put
into a buttonhole, and my youngest has been put in a frame. Where shall I
go?”
And the Ass stood by the road-side, and looked across at the Thistle.
