THE NÜRNBERG STOVE

August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favourite name

for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial

little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming

Old-World places that I know, and August for his part did not know any

other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it,

and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved

streets and enchanting little shops that have all latticed panes and

iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, that has

the noblest blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead

knights, and a look of infinite strength and repose as a church should

have. Then there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of

greenery and looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid

river; and there is an old schloss which has been made into a

guard-house, with battlements and frescoes and heraldic devices in

gold and colours, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size

in his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close

at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a

colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich

chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past,

that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all

emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and it is so

clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its

historic colour, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing its

praises. The old pious heroic life of an age at once more restful and

more brave than ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is

the girdle of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,

peace, majesty.

In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his

people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church

stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at that time--a chubby-faced little

man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown

of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor, and there were

many mouths at home to feed. In this country the winters are long and

very cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow for many months, and

this night that he was trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb

red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had

shut their double shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered

dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains

indeed were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big

in frost. Hardly anyone was astir; a few good souls wending home from

vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled

horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August

hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who

were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go

early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled the

beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his

courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall soon be at

home with dear Hirschvogel."

He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the

guard-house, and so into the place where the great church was, and

where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a sculptured

Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings

painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand outside the

gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and broad white snow,

and had been belated, and had thought he had heard the wolves behind

him at every step, and had reached the town in a great state of

terror, thankful with all his little panting heart to see the oil-lamp

burning under the first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to call

for the beer, and he carried it carefully now, though his hands were

so numb that he was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.

The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the beautiful

old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the lambs,

the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung before

the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions

painted on the walls or let into the wood-work; here and there, where

a shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely

interior, with the noisy band of children clustering round the

house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and

listening to the cobbler's or the barber's story of a neighbour, while

the oil-wicks glimmered, and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chestnuts

sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little August saw all these

things as he saw everything with his two big bright eyes that had such

curious lights and shadows in them; but he went heedfully on his way

for the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make

him spill. At his knock and call the solid oak door, four centuries

old if one, flew open, and the boy darted in with his beer, and

shouted, with all the force of mirthful lungs, "Oh, dear Hirschvogel,

but for the thought of you I should have died!"

It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much pleasure,

and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood press,

handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and several wooden stools

for all its furniture; but at the top of the chamber, sending out

warmth and colour together as the lamp sheds its rays upon it, was a

tower of porcelain, burnished with all the hues of a king's peacock

and a queen's jewels, and surmounted with armed figures, and shields,

and flowers of heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest

summit of all.

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H.R.H., for it was

in every portion the handwork of the great potter of Nürnberg,

Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the world knows.

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for princes, had

warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the gold-broidered shoes

of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers and lent its carbon

to help kindle sharp brains in anxious councils of state; no one knew

what it had been or done or been fashioned for; but it was a right

royal thing. Yet perhaps it had never been more useful than it was now

in this poor desolate room, sending down heat and comfort into the

troop of children tumbled together on a wolfskin at its feet, who

received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.

"O, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August, kissing its

gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"

"No, dear. He is late."

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and with a

sweet, sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her shoulders,

even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla

family; and there were ten of them in all. Next to her there came Jan

and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their own living;

and then came August, who went up in the summer to the high Alps with

the farmers' cattle, but in winter could do nothing to fill his own

little platter and pot; and then all the little ones, who could only

open their mouths to be fed like young birds--Albrecht and Hilda, and

Waldo and Christof, and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda,

with eyes like forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of

their mother.

They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so common

in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies,

others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The father

was a good man, but weak and weary with so many to find for and so

little to do it with. He worked at the salt-furnaces, and by that

gained a few florins; people said he would have worked better and kept

his family more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a draught of

ale too well; but this had only been said of him after his wife's

death, when trouble and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too

vigorous, and to enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As

it was, the wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla household,

without a wolf from the mountains coming down. Dorothea was one of

those maidens who almost work miracles, so far can their industry and

care and intelligence make a home sweet and wholesome and a single

loaf seem to swell into twenty. The children were always clean and

happy, and the table was seldom without its big pot of soup once a

day. Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea's heart ached with

shame, for she knew that their father's debts were many for flour and

meat and clothing. Or fuel to feed the big stove they had always

enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold

wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his

grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and

hapless, dreamy ways.

"Father says we are never to wait for him: we will have supper, now

you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she might fret

her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended their shirts,

never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the children; only to August

she did speak a little sometimes, because he was so thoughtful and so

tender of her always, and knew as well as she did that there were

troubles about money--though these troubles were vague to them both,

and the debtors were patient and kindly, being neighbours all in the

old twisting streets between the guard-house and the river.

Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread

swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down: the bowl was soon

emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys slipped

off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labour in the snow all

day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and set it

whirring, and the little ones got August down upon the old worn

wolfskin and clamoured to him for a picture or a story. For August was

the artist of the family.

He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and some

sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had seen in

the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the children had seen

enough of it and sketching another in its stead--faces and dogs'

heads, and men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and

pine-trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and

then--very reverently--a Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for

there was no one to teach him anything But it was all life-like, and

kept the whole troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching

breathless, with wide open, wondering, awed eyes.

They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside? Their

little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea,

troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and

August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda's

cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried out

loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove that was shedding its head

down on them all:

"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the sun!

No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away nobody

knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not care how

people die for want of him; but you--you are always ready: just a

little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make a summer for us all

the winter through!"

The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface

at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known

three centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.

It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faïence which so

excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nürnberg that in a body

they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be

forbidden to make any more of them--the magistracy, happily, proving

of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the

artisans to cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre which

Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to

the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the

statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and

splendour as his friend Albrecht Dürer could have given unto them on

copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into

panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the

borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other

foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World

moralising, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to

have on their chimney-places and their drinking cups, their dishes and

flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was

radiant everywhere with that brilliant colouring of which the

Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as they

were, were all masters.

The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel had

made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he was an

imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many things for the

Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the Burgher's daughter,

who gained an Archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his

honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day

in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug

it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without

a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because

it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and

ever since then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room,

warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen

nothing prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children

tumbled now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the

Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born to beauty; white

or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went

into the church to mass, with their curling locks and their clasped

hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off

some fresco.

"Tell us a story, August," they cried, in chorus, when they had seen

charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he did every

night, pretty nearly, looked up at the stove and told them what he

imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows of the human

being who figured on the panels from his cradle to his grave.

To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid a

mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs

and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country. In

winter all their joys centred in it, and scampering home from school

over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing that they would soon be

cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its

noble tower, which rose eight feet high above them with all its spires

and pinnacles and crowns.

Once a travelling peddler had told them that the letters on it meant

Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great German

potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-sanctified

city of Nürnberg, and had made many such stoves, that were all

miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his heart and his

soul and his faith into his labours, as the men of those earlier ages

did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church, had

told August a little more about the brave family of Hirschvogel, whose

houses can be seen in Nürnberg to this day; of old Veit, the first of

them, who painted the Gothic windows of St. Sebald with the marriage

of the Margravine; of his sons and of his grandsons, potters,

painters, engravers all, and chief of them great Augustin, the Luca

della Robbia of the North. And August's imagination, always quick,

had made a living personage out of these few records, and saw

Hirschvogel as though he were in the flesh walking up and down the

Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Innspruck, and maturing beautiful

things in his brain as he stood on the bridge and gazed on the

emerald-green flood of the Inn.

So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if it

were a living creature, and little August was very proud because he

had been named after that famous old dead German who had had the

genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children loved the stove,

but with August the love of it was a passion; and in his secret heart

he used to say to himself, "When I am a man, I will make just such

things too, and then I will set Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a

house that I will build myself in Innspruck just outside the gates,

where the chestnuts are, by the river: that is what I will do when I

am a man."

For August, a salt-baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was

anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high Alps

with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him, was quite

certain that he would live for greater things than driving the herds

up when the springtide came among the blue sea of gentians, or toiling

down in the town with wood and with timber as his father and

grandfather did every day of their lives. He was a strong and healthy

little fellow, fed on the free mountain air, and he was very happy,

and loved his family devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as

playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of

them went a very long way for a little boy who was only one among

many, and to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach

him his letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a

little, hungry schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or

to bring the loaves from the bake-house, or to carry his father's

boots to the cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of

cow-boys, who drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle,

ringing their throat-bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the

sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in the heights among the

Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the snow-summits near. But he

was always thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; and under his

little sheepskin winter coat and his rough hempen summer shirt his

heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's ever had--great Hofer, who

is a household word in all the Innthal, and whom August always

reverently remembered when he went to the city of Innspruck and ran

out by the foaming water-mill and under the wooded height of Berg

Isel.

August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children

stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as his

imagination glowed to fever heat. That human being on the panels, who

was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing among flowers,

as a lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in the midst of

strife, as a father with children round him, as a weary, old, blind

man on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels,

had always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made,

not one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same

tale twice. He had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and

his mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him

Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many

things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing, and

then she is of no use at all.

"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea,

looking up from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you must

not sit up for him."

"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little rosy

and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel is so

warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us another

tale, August?"

"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his story

had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands clasped on his

knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove.

"It is only a week to Christmas," he said, suddenly.

"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five

years old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else.

"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured

Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty might

pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would not find

some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little sister's

socks.

"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the calf's

life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he had told them

so that month, he was so proud of it.

"And Aunt Maïla will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of

flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their aunt Maïla had a châlet

and a little farm over on the green slopes toward Dorf Ampas.

"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said

August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine boughs

and ivy and mountain-berries. The heat soon withered the crown; but it

was part of the religion of the day to them, as much so as it was to

cross themselves in church and raise their voices in the "O Salutaris

Hostia."

And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christmas night,

and one little voice piped loud against another's, and they were as

happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses and

jewelled toys, and the big goose in the soup-pot seemed to them such a

meal as kings would envy.

In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air and a

spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and reached

them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins and the great stove. It

was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it was their father

who had come home.

The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the one

wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set the

jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe; for

their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice in

anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had loved to

dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.

To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'

welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat down

heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.

"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.

"I am well enough," he answered, dully and sat there with his head

bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with labour.

"Take the children to bed," he said, suddenly, at last, and Dorothea

obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at nine years

old, and when one earns money in the summer from the farmers, one is

not altogether a child any more, at least in one's own estimation.

August did not heed his father's silence: he was used to it. Karl

Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was

usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his beer

and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin dreamy and comfortable, looking

up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of

the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been

made for, and what grand places and scenes it had known.

Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the

cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father and

the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. She

thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had been often so with

him of late.

There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice; August

dropped asleep, his curls falling over his face; Dorothea's wheel

hummed like a cat.

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the pipe

to the ground.

"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and

ashamed in his throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang erect

out of his sleep.

"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix on

the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have shuddered

under the horror of a greater blasphemy.

"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla, in the same husky,

dogged voice. "I have sold it to a travelling trader in such things

for two hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double that. He saw it

this morning when you were all out. He will pack it and take it to

Munich to-morrow."

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:

"Oh, father?--the children--in midwinter!"

She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her

throat.

August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as his

cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their winter's

prison.

"It is not true. It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting,

father?"

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.

"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too? that the bread

you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over

your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid

for, for months and months; if it had not been for your grandfather I

should have been in prison all summer and autumn, and he is out of

patience and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the

masters go to younger men: they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can

keep his head above water with ten hungry children dragging him down?

When your mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I

were a mad dog. You have made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes,

goes to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep

me out of prison for a little and with the spring things may turn--"

August stood like a creature paralysed. His eyes were wide open,

fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his face

had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with tearless

sobs.

"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to him

that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could

take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God's

sun out of the heavens.

"You will find it true," said his father, doggedly, and angered

because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away

the heirloom and treasure of his race, and the comfort and healthgiver

of his young children. "You will find it true. The dealer has paid me

half the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow when

he packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a

great deal more--at least I suppose so, as he gives that--but beggars

cannot be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm

you all just as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor

house like this, when one can make two hundred florins by it?

Dorothea, you never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it,

when all is said?--a bit of hardware, much too grand-looking for such

a room as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would

have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground.

'It is a stove for a museum,' the trader said when he saw it. 'To a

museum let it go.'"

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for its

death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.

"Oh, father, father!" he cried, convulsively, his hands closing on

Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with

terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say? Send

_it_ away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? we shall all die

in the dark and the cold. Sell _me_ rather. Sell me to any trade or

any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel! it is like

selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You could

not do such a thing--you could not--you who have always been gentle

and good, and who have sat in the warmth here year after year with our

mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as you say; it is a living

thing, for a great man's thoughts and fancies have put life into it,

and it loves us, though we are only poor little children, and we love

it with all our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead

Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I will go and try and get work

to-morrow; I will ask them to let me cut ice or make the paths through

the snow. There must be something I could do, and I will beg the

people we owe money to, to wait; they are all neighbours, they will be

patient. But sell Hirschvogel! oh, never! never! never! Give the

florins back to the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the

shroud out of mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's

head! Oh, father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"

Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children, though

he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to him. But beside

emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that August roused

in him: he hated and despised himself for the barter of the heirloom

of his race, and every word of the child stung him with a stinging

sense of shame.

And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.

"You are a little fool," he said, harshly, as they had never heard him

speak. "You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The stove is

sold. There is no more to be said. Children like you have nothing to

do with such matters. The stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-morrow.

What is it to you? Be thankful I can get bread for you. Get on your

legs, I say, and go to bed."

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it slowly as

a man who had no cares.

August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face; the

blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet: his great soft eyes

flamed alight with furious passion.

"You _dare_ not!" he cried, aloud, "you dare not sell it, I say! It

is not yours alone; it is ours--"

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that shivered

it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a blow that

felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all his life that he

had ever raised his hand against any one of his children.

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off to

his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.

"What has happened?" said August, a little while later, as he opened

his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the wolfskin before the

stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had fallen on the

hard bricks where the wolfskin did not reach. He sat up a moment, with

his face bent upon his hands.

"I remember now," he said, very low, under his breath.

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.

"But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?" she murmured. "It

was very wrong."

"No, I was right," said August, and his little mouth, that hitherto

had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a fixed and bitter

seriousness. "How dare he? How dare he?" he muttered, with his head

sunk in his hands. "It is not his alone. It belongs to us all. It is

as much yours and mine as it is his."

Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was too frightened to speak.

The authority of their parents in the house had never in her

remembrance been questioned.

"Are you hurt by the fall dear August?" she murmured, at length, for

he looked to her so pale and strange.

"Yes--no. I do not know. What does it matter?"

He sat up upon the wolfskin with passionate pain upon his face; all

his soul was in rebellion, and he was only a child and was powerless.

"It is a sin; it is a theft; it is an infamy," he said slowly, his

eyes fastened on the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.

"Oh, August, do not say such things of father!" sobbed his sister.

"Whatever he does, _we_ ought to think it right."

August laughed aloud.

"Is it right that he should spend his money in drink?--that he should

let orders lie unexecuted?--that he should do his work so ill that no

one cares to employ him?--that he should live on grandfather's

charity, and then dare sell a thing that is ours every whit as much as

it is his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would sooner sell my

soul!"

"August!" cried Dorothea, with piteous entreaty. He terrified her, she

could not recognise her little, gay, gentle brother in those fierce

and blasphemous words.

August laughed aloud again; then all at once his laughter broke down

into bitterest weeping. He threw himself forward on the stove,

covering it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart would burst

from his bosom.

What could he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing!

"August, dear August," whispered Dorothea piteously, and trembling all

over--for she was a very gentle girl, and fierce feeling terrified

her--"August, do not lie there. Come to bed: it is quite late. In the

morning you will be calmer. It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of

cold, at least the little ones; but if it be father's will--"

"Let me alone," said August, through his teeth, striving to still the

storm of sobs that shook him from head to foot. "Let me alone. In the

morning!--how can you speak of the morning?"

"Come to bed, dear," sighed his sister. "Oh, August, do not lie and

look like that! you frighten me. Do come to bed."

"I shall stay here."

"Here! all night!"

"They might take it in the night. Besides, to leave it _now_."

"But it is cold! the fire is out."

"It will never be warm any more, nor shall we."

All his childhood had gone out of him, all his gleeful, careless,

sunny temper had gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily, choking

down the great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the end of the

world had come.

His sister lingered by him while striving to persuade him to go to his

place in the little crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo and

Christof. But it was in vain. "I shall stay here," was all he answered

her. And he stayed--all the night long.

The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the

hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified and the

air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he lay with his

face downward on the golden and rainbow hued pedestal of the household

treasure, which henceforth was to be cold for evermore, an exiled

thing in a foreign city in a far-off land.

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the stairs

and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going to his work

in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt-works. They did not

notice him; they did not know what had happened.

A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make

ready the house ere morning should break.

She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.

"Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!"

August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that

she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lips were like

fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given

way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless trances, which had

alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible

hours.

"It will never be warm again," he muttered, "never again!"

Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.

"August! do you not know me!" she cried, in an agony. "I am Dorothea.

Wake up, dear--wake up! It is morning, only so dark!"

August shuddered all over.

"The morning!" he echoed.

He slowly rose up on to his feet.

"I will go to grandfather," he said, very low. "He is always good:

perhaps he could save it."

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned his

words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole:

"Let me in! Quick!--there is no time to lose! More snow like this, and

the roads will be all blocked. Let me in. Do you hear? I am come to

take the great stove."

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.

"You shall never touch it!" he screamed; "you shall never touch it!"

"Who shall prevent us?" laughed a big man, who was a Bavarian, amused

at the fierce little figure fronting him.

"I!" said August "You shall never have it! you shall kill me first!"

"Strehla," said the big man, as August's father entered the room,

"you have got a little mad dog here: muzzle him."

One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little

demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the

Bavarian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men, and

his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of the back

entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful stove set to

work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.

When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in sight.

She went back to little 'Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over the

child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly understanding that

with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of their bodies, all the

light of their hearth.

Even their father now was very sorry and ashamed; but two hundred

florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the

children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron stove

in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now or not, the work

of the Nürnberg potter was sold irrevocably, and he had to stand still

and see the men from Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear it

out into the snowy air to where an ox-cart stood in waiting for it.

In another moment Hirschvogel was gone--gone forever and aye.

August stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from the

violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the

house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of

other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the

peaks of the mountains.

Into the court an old neighbour hobbled for water, and, seeing the

boy, said to him:

"Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?"

August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.

"Well, for sure he is a fool," said the neighbour. "Heaven forgive me

for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was worth a

mint of money. I do remember in my young days, in old Anton's time

(that was your great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw

it, and said that it was worth its weight in gold."

August's sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.

"I loved it! I loved it!" he moaned. "I do not care what its value

was. I loved it! _I loved it_!"

"You little simpleton!" said the old man, kindly. "But you are wiser

than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, he should have

taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Sprüz, who would have given him

honest value. But no doubt they took him over his beer, ay, ay! but if

I were you I would do better than cry. I would go after it."

August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.

"Go after it when you are bigger," said the neighbour, with a

good-natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a small

thing after all: I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time, and I

know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it; anything

that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in cotton wool

by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will see your stove again

some day."

Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of water at

the well.

August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing and his

heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented itself to his

mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. He thought, "Why not go

with it?" He loved it better than anyone, even better than Dorothea;

and he shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father

who had sold Hirschvogel.

He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the

impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still

wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the

court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of

the church. From there he could watch unseen his father's house-door,

at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are

common and so picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let

to a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed

through to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heart gave

a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought out and

laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men

mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept over the snow of

the place--snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble old minster looked

its grandest and most solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its vast

archways, and its porch that was itself as big as many a church, and

its strange gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the snow on its

roof and on the pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it; he

only watched for his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure

enough, like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of

his brothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving uneven

square, and followed in the wake of the dray.

Its course lay toward the station of the railway, which is close to

the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of clean little

Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From Hall the iron road

runs northward through glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague,

Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going

north or south? This at least he would soon know.

August had often hung about the little station, watching the trains

come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and vanish. No one

said anything to him for idling about; people are kind-hearted and

easy of temper in this pleasant land, and children and dogs are both

happy there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and vociferating a great

deal, and learned that they meant to go too and wanted to go with the

great stove itself. But this they could not do, for neither could the

stove go by a passenger train nor they themselves go in a goods-train.

So at length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and

consented to send it by a luggage train which was to pass through Hall

in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the existence

of Hall at all.

August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his little

mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible thought

to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting in the cold at home, then

set to work to execute his project. How he managed it he never knew

very clearly himself, but certain it is that when the goods-train from

the north, that had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, moved

out of Hall, August was hidden behind the stove in the great covered

truck, and wedged, unseen and undreamt of by any human creature,

amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna

toys, of Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which

shared the same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No

doubt he was very naughty, but it never occurred to him that he was

so: his whole mind and soul were absorbed in the one entrancing idea,

to follow his beloved friend and fire-king.

It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little window

above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell in it from

the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But August was not

frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be

closer still; for he meant to do nothing less than get inside

Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little boy, and having had by great

luck two silver groschen in his breeches-pocket, which he had earned

the day before by chopping wood, he had bought some bread and sausage

at the station of a woman there who knew him, and who thought he was

going out to his uncle Joachim's châlet above Jenbach. This he had

with him, and this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,

thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a train

of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast, and being a

child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how or when he ever

would eat again.

When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he thought

was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to buy anything

more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a hole in the

withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If it had been put

in a packing-case he would have been defeated at the onset. As it was,

he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and pushed, just as a mouse would

have done, making his hole where he guessed that the opening of the

stove was--the opening through which he had so often thrust the big

oak logs to feed it. No one disturbed him; the heavy train went

lumbering on and on, and he saw nothing at all of the beautiful

mountains, and shining waters, and great forests through which he was

being carried. He was hard at work getting through the straw and hay

and twisted ropes; and get through them at last he did, and found the

door of the stove, which he knew so well, and which was quite large

enough for a child of his age to slip through, and it was this which

he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done

at home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if he could anyhow

remain during many hours. He found that he could; air came in through

the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable caution in such a

little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and straw together,

rearranged the ropes, so that no one could ever have dreamed a little

mouse had been at them. Then he curled himself up again, this time

more like a dormouse than anything else; and, being safe inside his

dear Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he went fast asleep as if he were

in his own bed at home with Albrecht, and Christof on either side of

him. The train lumbered on, stopped often and long, as the habit of

goods-trains is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher, and

rumbling through the deep heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow

like the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child slept

soundly, for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite dark

outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was in

absolute darkness; and for a while he was solely frightened, and

trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken fashion,

thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would be!

How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather's at Dorf

Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he had taken

refuge with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for the sorrow he

must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but it never occurred

to him to try and go back. If he once were to lose sight of

Hirschvogel how could he ever hope to find it again? how could he ever

know whither it had gone--north, south, east or west? The old

neighbour had said that the world was small; but August knew at least

that it must have a great many places in it; that he had seen himself

on the maps on his school-house walls. Almost any other little boy

would, I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position

in which he found himself; but August was brave, and he had a firm

belief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. The

master-potter of Nürnberg was always present to his mind, a kindly,

benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porcelain

tower whereof he had been the maker.

A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has quite

as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.

So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so

utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the stove

was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through the

fretwork running round the top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled

with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at all tell

the hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the banging,

stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on, his heart

seemed to jump up into his mouth. If they should find him out!

Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the other, a sack

here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead chamois. Every time the

men trampled near him, and swore at each other, and banged this and

that to and fro, he was so frightened that his very breath seemed to

stop. When they came to lift the stove out, would they find him? and

if they did find him, would they kill him? That was what he kept

thinking of all the way, all through the dark hours, which seemed

without end. The goods-trains are usually very slow, and are many days

doing what a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker

than most, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still,

it took all the short winter's day and the long winter's night and

half another day to go over ground that the mail-trains cover in a

forenoon. It passed great armoured Kuffstein standing across the

beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes

of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in

out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of

Bavaria. And here the Nürnberg stove, with August inside it, was

lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was lifted

out, the boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to

and fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of

his beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though they

swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that a

living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the platform

and set it down under the roof of the goods-shed. There it passed the

rest of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the

while within it.

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the

vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had not been

whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron rails of the

snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily for August, the

thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped and the stoutness of

its own make screened him from the cold, of which, else, he must have

died--frozen. He had still some of his loaf, and a little--a very

little--of his sausage. What he did begin to suffer from was thirst;

and this frightened him almost more than anything else, for Dorothea

had read aloud to them one night a story of the tortures some wrecked

men had endured because they could not find any water but the salt

sea. It was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the

wooden spout of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling,

ice-cold water of the hills.

But, fortunately for him, the stove having been marked and registered

as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like a mere bale of

goods, and the Rosenheim stationmaster, who knew its consignees,

resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that would leave there at

daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage

belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg,

was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the

winter under the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made

the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get

used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and

jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always

accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so mightily

clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he

kept feeling the earthenware sides of the Nürnberg giant and saying,

softly, "Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"

He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out in the

world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that they

must have been all over the world in all this time that the rolling

and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up

in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in

Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good house at Dorf, of gnomes

and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the

black horse of night, and--and--and he began to sob and to tremble

again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming

itself so loudly that no one, had there been anyone nigh, would have

heard him; and in another minute or so the train stopped with a jar

and a jerk, and he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "München!

München!"

Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart of

Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by the

Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a black bear

he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had

taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name

of Bavaria a terror to August.

"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the stove

said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak

without fire than a man can see without light. Give it fire, and it

will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in return all the

sympathy you ask.

"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread

augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and

midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of

jäger and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped; Munich

was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking like a

little aspen-leaf, felt himself once more carried out on the shoulders

of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set down, where he knew

not, only he knew he was thirsty--so thirsty! If only he could have

reached his hand out and scooped up a little snow!

He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in truth

the stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a shop in

the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set upright on its

four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect having been affixed to

its written label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in the small

dark curiosity-shop of one Hans Rhilfer.

"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice say;

and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken stillness

that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to peep through

the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square room filled with

pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, old steel armour,

shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all

the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a _bric-à-brac_ dealer's. It

seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water

in it all? That was his single thought; for his tongue was parching,

and his throat felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked

as with dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice

window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered

with snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his

hiding place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his

mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the hay

and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and shut the

brass door down on himself. He had brought some big icicles in with

him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only temporarily,

quenched. Then he sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening

intently, wide awake, and once more recovering his natural boldness.

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience with

a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If I can take

her back Hirschvogel then how pleased she will be, and how little

'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all selfish in his love for

Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at home quite as much as for

himself. There was at the bottom of his mind a kind of ache of shame

that his father--his own father--should have stripped their hearth and

sold their honour thus.

A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a

house-eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his

pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so easily on

the frozen snow.

In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made faint by

the stove-wall and the window-glass that was between him and it, but

still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the robin, singing after

feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard, burst into tears. He

thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw out some grain or some

bread on the snow before the church. "What use is it going _there_,"

she said, "if we forget the sweetest creatures God has made?" Poor

Dorothea! Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little soul! He thought of

her till his tears ran like rain.

Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home. Hirschvogel

was here.

Presently the key turned in the lock of the door; he heard heavy

footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father, "You

have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay, you have

called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I have gotten for

two hundred dirty florins. _Potztausend_! never did _you_ do such a

stroke of work."

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men

approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat,

pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a cheese and

hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove

of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the

hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly; that too, he

knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture

which broke from the man who had not seen it before.

"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!

Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime! magnificent!

matchless!"

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell of

lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August crouching in

his stronghold. If they should open the door of the stove! That was

his frantic fear. If they should open it, it would be all over with

him. They would drag him out; most likely they would kill him, he

thought, as his mother's young brother had been killed in the Wald.

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had

control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by the

Nürnberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling,

expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a little

distance and began talking of sums of money and divided profits, of

which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he could make out

was that the name of the king--the king--the king came over very often

in their arguments. He fancied at times they quarrelled, for they

swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and high; but after a while

they seemed to pacify each other and agree to something, and were in

great glee, and so in these merry spirits came and slapped the

luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel, and shouted to it:

"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you were

smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker's kitchen all these years!"

Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and

clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to them

that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his father, when

he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word or make a sound

was to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever from Hirschvogel.

So he kept quite still, and the men barred the shutters of the little

lattice and went out by the door, double-locking it after them. He had

made out from their talk that they were going to show Hirschvogel to

some great person: therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets

below--the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, and bursts

of that military music which is so seldom silent in the streets of

Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on the stairs kept

him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity of his anxiety, he

forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from cheerful, Old World

little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the ramparts of

the mountains all round.

Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two

dealers' voices murmuring unctuous words, in which "honour,"

"gratitude," and many fine long noble titles played the chief parts.

The voice of another person, more clear and refined than theirs,

answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nürnberg stove and the

boy's ear, ejaculated a single "_Wunderschön_!" August almost lost his

terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel

being thus admired in the great city. He thought the master-potter

must be glad too.

"_Wunderschön_!" ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then

examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed long

on all its devices.

"It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian," he said at last;

and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was "hugged up into

nothing," as you children say, dreading that every moment he would

open the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the brass-work

of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching August passed

unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The

gentleman shut to the door at length, without having seen anything

strange inside it; and then he talked long and low with the tradesmen,

and, as his accent was different from that which August was used to,

the child could distinguish little that he said, except the name of

the king and the word "gulden" again and again. After a while he went

away, one of the dealers accompanying him, one of them lingering

behind to bar up the shutters. Then this one also withdrew again,

double-locking the door.

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe aloud.

What time was it?

Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they had

lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and through the

brass fretwork had seen the lines of light.

He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and

Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If only

he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang of how at

this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it

from Aunt Maïla's farm orchard, and sang together, and listened to

Dorothea's reading of little tales, and basked in the glow and delight

that had beamed on them from the great Nürnberg fire-king.

"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the dear

Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only now the

black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father!

August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his

father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell

Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings, when

they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab-apples in

it, and listened to the howling of the wind and the deep sound of the

church-bells, and tried very much to make each other believe that the

wolves still came down from the mountains into the streets of Hall,

and were that very minute growling at the house door--all this memory

coming on him with the sound of the city bells, and the knowledge that

night drew near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and

his fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth

time since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he would starve

to death, and wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was

sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with

alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme and

honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had he ever forgotten when Santa

Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all

around?

"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old

fire-king, and forgot poor little man, that he had come on this

wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!

After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they weep, and

little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they where they may.

It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly shut up, and

very full of things, and at the back of it were the hot pipes of an

adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. Moreover,

August's clothes were warm ones, and his blood was young. So he was

not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in the nights of December;

and he slept on and on--which was a comfort to him, for he forgot his

woes, and his perils, and his hunger for a time.

Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the

city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to put

his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a strange

bright light was round him.

It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is

perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did what

he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done you or me.

For what he saw was nothing less than all the _bric-à-brac_ in motion.

A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a minuet

with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a

gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll porcelain

figure of Zitzenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in _terre

cuite_ of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a

queer little shrill plaintive music that thought itself merry came

from a painted spinet covered with faded roses; some gilt Spanish

leather had got up on the wall and laughed; a Dresden mirror was

tripping about, crowned with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding

along on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a

stout Ferrara sabre, all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in

white Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in _grès

gris_ was calling aloud, "Oh, these Italians! always at feud!" But

nobody listened to him at all. A great number of little Dresden cups

and saucers were all skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with their

broad round faces, were spinning their own lids like teetotums; the

high-backed gilded chairs were having a game of cards together; and a

little Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at its throat, was running from

one to another, whilst a yellow cat of Cornelis Zachtleven's rode

about on a Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the

brilliant light shed on the scene came from three silver candelabra,

though they had no candles set up in them; and, what is the greatest

miracle of all, August looked on at these mad freaks and felt no

sensation of wonder! He only, as he heard the violin and the spinet

playing, felt an irresistible desire to dance too.

No doubt his face said what he wished; for a lovely little lady, all

in pink and gold and white, with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes,

and all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up

to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a

minuet. And he danced it perfectly--poor little August in his thick,

clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough

homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it

perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were

duly honoured, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never

scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately

measures the spinet was playing that August could not take his eyes

off her till, the minuet ended, she sat down on her own white-and-gold

bracket.

"I am the Princess of Saxe-Royal," she said to him, with a benignant

smile; "and you have got through that minuet very fairly."

Then he ventured to say to her:

"Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the figures

and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner like

lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?"

For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the _bric-à-brac_ was all

full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a single

thrill in it.

"My dear child," said the powdered lady, "is it possible that you do

not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are _imitation_."

This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered it a

condensed but complete answer.

"Imitation?" repeated August, timidly, not understanding.

"Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!" said the princess in pink

shoes, very vivaciously. "They only _pretend_ to be what we are! They

never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any soul in it

yet."

"Oh!" said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood entirely

yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul within it:

would it not wake up and speak? Oh dear! how he longed to hear the

voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he stood by a lady

who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, with the year 1746

cut on it, and the Meissen mark.

"What will you be when you are a man?" said the little lady, sharply,

for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were smiling. "Will

you work for the _Konigliche Porcellan-Manufactur_, like my great dead

Kandler?"

"I have never thought," said August, stammering; "at least--that is--I

do wish--I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin Hirschvogel

at Nürnberg."

"Bravo!" said all the real _bric-à-brac_ in one breath, and the two

Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "_Benone_!" For there is not

a bit of true _bric-à-brac_ in all Europe that does not know the names

of the mighty masters.

August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as

red as the lady's shoes with bashful contentment.

"I knew all the Hirschvogel, from old Veit downwards," said a fat

_grès de Flandre_ beer-jug: "I myself was made at Nürnberg." And he

bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver

hat--I mean lid--with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have

learned from burgomasters. The stove, however, was silent, and a

sickening suspicion (for what is such heart-break as a suspicion of

what we love?) came through the mind of August: _Was Hirschvogel only

imitation_?

"No, no, no, no!" he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel

never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it! After

all their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy

he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion's

feet he had kissed in his babyhood? "No, no, no, no!" he said, again,

with so much emphasis that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at

him.

"No," she said, with pretty disdain; "no, believe me, they may

'pretend' forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even our

marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they

_chassent de race_."

"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's "They daub

themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted;

but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages can give that!"

"And _my_ imitations are all in primary colours, staring colours, hot

as the colours of a hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of Meissen,

with a shiver.

"Well, there is a _grès de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to be a

Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with

his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner. "He has

copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he

might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference there is! How

crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black

letters! He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a

lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in

his becomes actual deformity!"

"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a

contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a

table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my

name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film

and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias,

worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand

the Most Christian. _His_ gilding is one part gold to eleven other

parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a

brush--_a brush_--pah! of course he will be as black as a crock in a

few years' time, whilst I am as bright as when I first was made, and,

unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on

forever."

"They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and

call it _me_" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.

"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarise you so much as the cups

they paint to-day and christen after _me_," said a Carl Theodor cup

subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.

"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping _me_,"

interposed the princess in the pink shoes.

"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a

_Trauerkrug_ of Regensburg in black-and-white.

"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!" sighed

the little white maid of Nymphenburg.

"And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates, calling

them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of

to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its

year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.

"That is what is so terrible in these _bric-à-brac_ places," said the

princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low,

imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under

glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."

"And they get even there," sighed the _grès de Flandre_. "A terrible

thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a _terre cuite_ of Blasius

(you know the _terres cuites_ of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he was

put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found

himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at

Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with

a grin? 'Old Pipeclay,' that is what he called my friend, 'the fellow

that bought _me_ got just as much commission on me as the fellow that

bought _you_, and that was all that _he_ thought about. You know it is

only the public money that goes!' And the horrid creature grinned

again till he actually cracked himself. There is a Providence above

all things, even museums."

"Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public money,"

said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.

"After all, does it matter?" said a Dutch jar of Haarlem, "All the

shamming in the world will not _make_ them us!"

"One does not like to be vulgarised," said the Lady of Meissen,

angrily.

"My maker, the Krabbetje,[1] did not trouble his head about that,"

said the Haarlem jar, proudly. "The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen,

the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries

ago, and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at

home; yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining

canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine."

[Footnote 1: Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born

1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.]

"Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio plate,

thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the

Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome souls of the

dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing

cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the

spinet sighed--thinking of dead hands.

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and only

the swords went on quarrelling, and made such a clattering noise that

the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and knocked them both

right over, and they lay straight and still, looking foolish, and the

little Nymphenburg maid, though she was crying, smiled and almost

laughed.

Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little human

comrade gave a great jump of joy.

"My friends," said that clear voice from the turret of Nürnberg

faïence, "I have listened to all you have said. There is too much

talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called the

Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much vain

speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty

boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble

mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to

weaken and envenom all his undertakings. For over two hundred years I

have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only

speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me.

If we all might but go back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We

were made in days when even men were true creatures, and so we, the

work of their hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days,

derive all the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us

with zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith--not to win fortunes

or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create for

the honour of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human thing

who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves Art. Now, I

want him forever to remember this night and these words; to remember

that we are what we are, and precious in the eyes of the world,

because centuries ago those who were of single mind and of pure hand

so created us, scorning sham and haste and counterfeit. Well do I

recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless

life, and wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time beautiful

thereby, like one of his own rich, many-coloured church casements,

that told holy tales as the sun streamed through them. Ah, yes, my

friends, to go back to our masters!--that would be the best that could

befall us. But they are gone, and even the perishable labours of their

lives outlive them. For many, many years I, once honoured of emperors,

dwelt in a humble house and warmed in successive winters three

generations of little, cold, hungry children. When I warmed them they

forgot that they were hungry; they laughed and told tales, and slept

at last about my feet. Then I knew that humble as had become my lot it

was one that my master would have wished for me, and I was content.

Sometimes a tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because she

was near me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby

in her arms. That was better than to stand in a great hall of a great

city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to gaze and throngs of

fools gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I go now I know

not; but since I go from that humble house where they loved me, I

shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon--those fleeting mortal

lives! Only we endure--we the things that the human brain creates. We

can but bless them a little as they glide by: if we have done that, we

have done what our masters wished. So in us our masters, being dead,

yet may speak and live."

Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light that

had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light died down

in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through

the room. It came from the old, old spinet that was covered with the

faded roses.

Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks of

the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the

Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found himself

lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber; and all the

_bric-à-brac_ was lying quite still all around. The pretty Lady of

Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket, and the little Saxe

poodle was quiet at her side.

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not sensible

of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty entrails. He

was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that he

had seen and heard.

All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning come?

Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard the tiny

song of the robin.

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a moment

in which to scramble back into the interior of the great stove, when

the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing burning candles

with them to see their way.

August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold or

hunger. A marvellous sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was

about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding him and lifting him

upward--upward--upward! Hirschvogel would defend him.

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the red-breast away; and then

tramped about in their heavy boots and chatted in contented voices,

and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw and hay and

cordage.

It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they look

inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell again for

all its glorious beauty of exterior.

The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come to

him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.

Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove,

heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some sick

prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six stout

Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the Marienplatz.

Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy bite of the

intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter's day in Munich. The

men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so that he had

often been far more roughly shaken in his big brothers' arms than he

was in his journey now; and though both hunger and thirst made

themselves felt, being foes that will take no denial, he was still in

that state of nervous exaltation which deadens all physical suffering

and is at once a cordial and an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel

speak; that was enough.

The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the

Nürnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right across

Munich to the railway-station, and August in the dark recognised all

the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing railway-noises, and

thought, despite his courage and excitement, "Will it be a _very_ long

journey?" For his stomach had at times an odd sinking sensation, and

his head often felt sadly light and swimming. If it was a very, very

long journey he felt half afraid that he would be dead or something

bad before the end, and Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what

he thought most about; not much about himself, and not much about

Dorothea and the house at home. He was "high strung to high emprise,"

and could not look behind him.

Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe, the

stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up into a

great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two dealers as

well as the six porters were all with it.

He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The train

glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the men

say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was strange

to him, and he could not make out what these names meant.

The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of steam,

and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on

account of the snow which was falling, and which had fallen all night.

"He might have waited till he came to the city," grumbled one man to

another. "What weather to stay on at Berg!"

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out at

all.

Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the season,

they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed often, and,

when they swore, did so good-humouredly, and promised their porters

fine presents at New Year; and August, like a shrewd little boy as he

was, who even in the secluded Innthal had learned that money is the

chief mover of men's mirth, thought to himself, with a terrible pang:

"They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum! They have sold him

already!"

Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very well

that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus; and what

new owner of the great fireplace would ever permit him to dwell in it?

"Never mind; I _will_ die," thought he; "and Hirschvogel will know

it."

Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not.

It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.

It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to pass

from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg but this morning the

journey was much slower, because the way was encumbered by snow. When

it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and the Nürnberg stove was lifted

out once more, August could see through the fretwork of the brass

door, as the stove stood upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See

was a calm and noble piece of water, of great width, with low wooded

banks and distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.

It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had come forth; there was a clear

gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay white and

smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water, which before long

would itself be ice.

Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green gliding

surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a large boat that

was in waiting--one of those very long and huge boats which the women

in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber-rafts. The

stove, with much labour and much expenditure of time and care, was

hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and giddy with the

heaving and falling if his big brothers had not long used him to such

tossing about, so that he was as much at ease head, as feet, downward.

The stove, once in it safely with its guardians, the big boat moved

across the lake to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got

that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat

was a long time crossing; the lake here is about three miles broad,

and these heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though

they are towed and tugged at from the shore.

"If we should be too late!" the two dealers muttered to each other, in

agitation and alarm. "He said eleven o'clock."

"Who was he?" thought August; "the buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel."

The slow passage across the Wurm-See was accomplished at length: the

lake was placid; there was a sweet calm in the air and on the water;

there was a great deal of snow in the sky, though the sun was shining

and gave a solemn hush to the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer

were going up and down; in the clear frosty light the distant

mountains of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible;

market-people, cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on the

banks; the deep woods of the shores were black and gray and brown.

Poor August could see nothing of a scene that would have delighted

him; as the stove was now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten

wood of the huge barge.

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.

"Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward at

Christmas time," said one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout,

strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at their

task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the

Nürnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight, but little

dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting, trembling boy;

for August began to tremble now that he was about to see the future

owner of Hirschvogel.

"If he looks a good, kind man," he thought, "I will beg him to let me

stay with it."

The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the

village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over his

head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky. He had

been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little

mountaineer, used to hanging head-downward over crevasses, and,

moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of the

hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been made ill

and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of position to

which he had been subjected.

The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road was

heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still. The

dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one breath;

besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for a clock was

striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach their destination

at that hour, and, though the air was so cold, the heat-drops rolled

off their foreheads as they walked, they were so frightened at being

late. But the porters would not budge a foot quicker than they chose,

and as they were not poor four-footed carriers their employers dared

not thrash them, though most willingly would they have done so.

The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the

plodding porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he kept

sinking and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their steps.

Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time he

lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the

brass-work above, and felt by their movements beneath him that they

were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great many different

voices, but he could not understand what was being said. He felt that

his bearers paused some time, then moved on and on again. Their feet

went so softly he thought they must be moving on carpet, and as he

felt a warm air come to him he concluded that he was in some heated

chambers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could put two and two

together, though he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty stomach

felt so strangely. They must have gone, he thought, through some very

great number of rooms, for they walked so long on and on, on and on.

At last the stove was set down again, and, happily for him, set so

that his feet were downward.

What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he had

seen in the city of Innspruck.

The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go away,

far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out,

but he peeped through the brass-work, and all he could see was a big

carved lion's head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a

velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair, only the ivory lion.

There was a delicious fragrance in the air--a fragrance as flowers.

"Only how can it be flowers?" thought August. "It is November!"

From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as

sweet as the spinet's had been, but so much fuller, so much richer,

seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all together. August

ceased to think of the museum; he thought of heaven. "Are we gone to

the Master?" he thought, remembering the words of Hirschvogel.

All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except the

sound of the far-off choral music.

He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and the

music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant

room some of the motives of "Parsival."

Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice

say, close behind him, "So!" An exclamation no doubt, he thought, of

admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.

Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no doubt,

as August thought, this newcomer was examining all the details of the

wondrous fire-tower, "It was well bought; it is exceedingly beautiful!

It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel."

Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass

door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within grew

sick with fear.

The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, someone bent down

and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise of its

beauty called aloud, in surprise, "What is this in it? A live child!"

Then August, terrified beyond all self control, and dominated by one

master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell at the

feet of the speaker.

"Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!" he sobbed. "I have

come all the way with Hirschvogel!"

Some gentlemen's hands seized him, not gently by any means, and their

lips angrily muttered in his ear, "Little knave, peace! be quiet! hold

your tongue! It is the king!"

They were about to drag him out of the august atmosphere as if he had

been some venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the voice

he had heard speak of the stove said, in kind accents, "Poor little

child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to me."

The word of a king is law to his courtiers: so, sorely against their

wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide out of

their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough sheepskin coat and

his thick, mud-covered boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle,

in the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of, and

in the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes

full of dreams and fire; and the young man said to him:

"My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid:

tell me the truth. I am the king."

August in an instinct of homage cast his great battered black hat with

the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded

his little brown hands in supplication. He was too intensely in

earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted out of himself by

his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly

majesty. He was only so glad--so glad it was the king. Kings were

always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords.

"Oh, dear king!" he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint little

voice, "Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and

father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I

said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside

it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. And I do pray

you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut

wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. No one

ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves

me; it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it had

been happier with us than if it were in any palace--"

And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little eager,

pale face to the young king's, great tears were falling down his

cheeks.

Now, the king liked all poetic and uncommon things, and there was that

in the child's face which pleased and touched him. He motioned to his

gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.

"What is your name?" he asked him.

"I am August Strehla. My father is Hans Strehla. We live in Hall, in

the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long--so long!"

His lips quivered with a broken sob.

"And have you truly travelled inside this stove all the way from

Tyrol?"

"Yes," said August; "no one thought to look inside till you did."

The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.

"Who bought the stove of your father?" he inquired.

"Traders of Munich," said August, who did not know that he ought not

to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little

brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea.

"What sum did they pay your father, do you know?" asked the sovereign.

"Two hundred florins," said August, with a great sigh of shame. "It

was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us."

The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. "Did these dealers of

Munich come with the stove?"

He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought for

and brought before him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on the

errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.

"You are very pale, little fellow: when did you eat last?"

"I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I finished

it."

"You would like to eat now?"

"If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very

dry."

The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but

August, though he drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. His mind

was in too great a tumult.

"May I stay with Hirschvogel?--may I stay?" he said with feverish

agitation.

"Wait a little," said the king, and asked, abruptly, "What do you wish

to be when you are a man?"

"A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel was--I mean the master that

made _my_ Hirschvogel."

"I understand," said the king.

Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign's presence.

They were so terribly alarmed, not being either so innocent or so

ignorant as August was that they were trembling as though they were

being led to the slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished too at

a child having come all the way from Tyrol in the stove, as a

gentleman of the court had just told them this child had done, that

they could not tell what to say or where to look, and presented a very

foolish aspect indeed.

"Did you buy this Nürnberg stove of this little boy's father for two

hundred florins?" the king asked them; and his voice was no longer

soft and kind as it had been when addressing the child, but very

stern.

"Yes, your majesty," murmured the trembling traders.

"And how much did the gentleman who purchased it for me give to you?"

"Two thousand ducats, your majesty," muttered the dealers, frightened

out of their wits, and telling the truth in their fright.

The gentleman was not present: he was a trusted counselor in art

matters of the king's, and often made purchases for him.

The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made out

the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.

"You will give at once to this boy's father the two thousand gold

ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that

you paid him," said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects.

"You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more greatly punished."

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these gave

the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their

ill-gotten gains.

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. Two thousand gold

Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need to go

any more to the salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats or for

florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let

him stay with it?--would he?

"Oh, do! oh, please do!" he murmured, joining his little brown

weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who

himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception so basely

practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a trusted counsellor

was bitter to him.

He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.

"Rise up, my little man," he said, in a kind voice; "kneel only to

your God. Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will, you

shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a painter--in

oils or on porcelain as you will--and you must grow up worthily, and

win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when you are

twenty-one years old you have done well and bravely, then I will give

you your Nürnberg stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who

reign after me shall do so. And now go away with this gentleman, and

be not afraid, and you shall light a fire every morning in

Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and cut the wood."

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make

August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but

August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy. He threw

his two arms about the king's knees, and kissed his feet passionately;

then he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger,

and tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.

As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy

the voice from Hirschvogel saying:

"Let us be worthy our maker!"

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises to

be a great man. Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, where

the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. In the old house-room

there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the king's gift to

Dorothea and 'Gilda.

And August never goes home without going into the great church and

saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter's journey in

the Nürnberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers' room that night,

he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he

saw it all and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who shall say that

he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to

see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that

others cannot hear?

X