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 “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 armor, 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 honor 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 around.
Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two
dealers’ voices murmuring unctuous words, in which “honor,”
“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 fret-work 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 Littenhausen 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 spinnet 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 Lachtleven’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
spinnet 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 home-spun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have
danced it perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when
crowns were duly honored, for the lovely lady always smiled
benignly and never scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself
to the stately measures the spinnet was playing that August could
not take his eyes off her till, their minuet ended, she sat down on
her own white-and-gold bracket.
“I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” 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 Königliche 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 Hirschvögel, 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 colors, staring colors, hot as
the colors 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 vulgarize 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 Pipe-clay,’—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 vulgarized,” said the Lady of Meissen,
angrily.
“My maker, the Krabbetje,[A] 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, wellnigh 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.”
“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 spinnet 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 honor 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-colored 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
labors of their lives outlive them. For many, many years I, once
honored 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 spinnet 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 upwards—upwards—upwards! Hirschvogel would
defend him.
The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the red-breast away, and
then tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered 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
recognized 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 sadly often felt 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-humoredly, 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 fire-palace 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 fret-work 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 labor 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 look 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-downwards 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 of
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 spinnet’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 new-comer 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, some one
bent down and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in
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