a slender, beautiful rose bush; but a wicked
hand had broken the stem, so that all the branches, covered with
half-opened buds, were hanging drooping around, quite withered.

"The poor rose bush!" said the child. "Take it, that it may bloom up
yonder."

And the angel took it, and kissed the child, and the little one half
opened his eyes. They plucked some of the rich flowers, but also took
with them the despised buttercup and the wild pansy.

"Now we have flowers," said the child.

And the angel nodded, but he did not yet fly upward to heaven. It was
night and quite silent. They remained in the great city; they floated
about there in a small street, where lay whole heaps of straw, ashes,
and sweepings, for it had been removal-day. There lay fragments of
plates, bits of plaster, rags, and old hats, and all this did not look
well. And the angel pointed amid all this confusion to a few fragments
of a flower-pot, and to a lump of earth which had fallen out, and which
was kept together by the roots of a great dried field flower, which was
of no use, and had therefore been thrown out into the street.

"We will take that with us," said the angel. "I will tell you why, as we
fly onward.

"Down yonder in the narrow lane, in the low cellar, lived a poor sick
boy; from his childhood he had been bedridden. When he was at his best
he could go up and down the room a few times, leaning on crutches; that
was the utmost he could do. For a few days in summer the sunbeams would
penetrate for a few hours to the ground of the cellar, and when the poor
boy sat there and the sun shone on him, and he looked at the red blood
in his three fingers, as he held them up before his face, he would say,
'Yes, to-day he has been out.' He knew the forest with its beautiful
vernal green only from the fact that the neighbor's son brought him the
first green branch of a beech-tree, and he held that up over his head,
and dreamed he was in the beech wood where the sun shone and the birds
sang. On a spring day the neighbor's boy also brought him field flowers,
and among these was, by chance, one to which the root was hanging; and
so it was planted in a flower-pot, and placed by the bed, close to the
window. And the flower had been planted by a fortunate hand; and it
grew, threw out new shoots, and bore flowers every year. It became as a
splendid flower-garden to the sickly boy--his little treasure here on
earth. He watered it, and tended it, and took car