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The Thistle told this event to every blossom that unfolded itself, and not many days had gone by before the Thistle heard, not from men, not from the twittering of the birds, but from the air itself, which stores up the sounds, and carries them far around out of the most retired walks of the garden, and out of the rooms of the house, in which doors and windows stood open, that the young gentleman who had received the thistle-flower from the hand of the fair Scottish maiden had also now received the heart and hand of the lady in question.
From Scotland Memory's sprite appears as a powerful lad with bare knees; the plaid hangs over his shoulder, the thistle-flower is fixed on his cap; Burns's songs then fill the air like the heath-lark's song, and Scotland's wild thistle flowers beautifully fragrant as the fresh rose. But now for Memory's sprite from Sweden, from Upsala.
"It blooms in the scutcheon of my country. Give me yonder flower." And he brought the fairest blossom, and pricked his fingers as completely as if it had grown on the sharpest rose bush. She placed the thistle-flower in the buttonhole of the young man, and he felt himself highly honored.
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, in spite of all his efforts to control his thoughts, he espied every tiny blade of grass that thrust itself up by Albine's skirts; he saw a little thistle-flower fastened in her hair, against which he remembered that he had pricked his lips.
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