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 NURNBERG 
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 She gave him her hand and led him out to a minuet
 
 
 THE 
 NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 BY 
 
 OUIDA 
 
 (LOUISE DE LA RAMEE) 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1908, 
 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
 
 
 The Niirnberg 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 
 green mountains all about it, and the grey- 
 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 her- 
 aldic 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 far- 
 
 573177
 
 6 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 ther 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 7 
 
 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 in- 
 deed were beautiful, all snow-white under the 
 stars that are so big in frost. Hardly any one 
 was astir; a few good souls wending home from 
 vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill 
 blast from his tasselled horn as he pulled up 
 his sledge before a hostelry, and little August 
 hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheep- 
 skin 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, for 
 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 after- 
 noon, over the frozen fields and the broad
 
 8 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 pant- 
 ing little 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 Cruci- 
 fixions painted on the walls or let into the 
 woodwork ; here and there, where a shutter had 
 not been closed, a ruddy firelight lit up a 
 homely interior, with the noisy band of chil- 
 dren 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 Au- 
 gust 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 9 
 
 went heedfully on his way for the sake of the 
 beer, which a single shp 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, send- 
 ing out warmth and colour together as the 
 lamp shed 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 sur- 
 mounted 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 Niirnberg, 
 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-
 
 10 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 seen 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 wolf- 
 skin at its feet, who received frozen August 
 am.ong them with loud shouts of joy. 
 
 " Oh, 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 shoul- 
 ders, 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, gain- 
 ing 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 win- 
 ter 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE ii 
 
 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 en- 
 feeble 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 mira- 
 cles, 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,
 
 12 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 and Dorothea's heart ached with shame, for 
 she knew that their father's debts were many 
 for flour and meat and clothing. Of 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 w^ere pa- 
 tient 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 NURNBERG STOVE 13 
 
 the snow all day, and Dorothea drew her spin- 
 ning-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 art- 
 ist 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 
 Hfe-like, and kept the whole troop of children 
 shrieking with laughter, or watching breath- 
 less, 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
 
 14 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 up at the stove that was shedding its heat 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 no- 
 body 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 irridescent 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 faience which so excited the jealousy 
 of the other potters of Niirnberg that in a body 
 they demanded of the magistracy that Augus- 
 tin 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 after-
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 15 
 
 wards married. There was the statue of a 
 king at each corner, modelled with as much 
 force and splendour as his friend Albrecht 
 Diirer could have given unto them on copper- 
 plate 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 chemis- 
 try 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 fash- 
 ioned 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 honours 
 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
 
 i6 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 find- 
 ing 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 pret- 
 tier perhaps in all its many years than the chil- 
 dren tumbled now in a cluster like gathered 
 flowers at its feet. For the Strehla children, 
 born to nothing else, were all born with 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 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 17 
 
 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 crack- 
 ing 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 Niirnberg, 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 think- 
 ing 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 Niirnberg 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
 
 i8 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 beau- 
 tiful 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 Hirsch- 
 vogel in the family, as if it were a living crea- 
 ture, 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 Hirsch- 
 vogel 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 
 cowkeeper 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 spring-tide came among the 
 blue sea of gentians, or toiling down in the
 
 THE NtJRNBERG STOVE 19 
 
 town with wood and with timber as his father 
 and grandfather did every day of their Hves. 
 He was a strong and healthy Httle 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 at- 
 tention 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 cowboys, 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-sum- 
 mits near. But he was always thinking, think- 
 ing, 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
 
 20 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 Au- 
 gust, 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," 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 ! "
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 21 
 
 they pleaded; and little rosy and golden Er- 
 mengilda climbed up into her lap. " Hirsch- 
 vogel is so warm, the beds are never so warm 
 as he. Cannot you tell us another tale, Au- 
 gust?" 
 
 " 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 Maila will be sure to send us 
 wine and honey and a barrel of flour; she al- 
 ways does," said Albrecht. Their aunt Maila
 
 22 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 had a chalet and a Httle farm over on the green 
 slopes towards Dorp Ampas. 
 
 " I shall go up into the woods and get 
 Hirschvogel's crown," said August; they al- 
 ways 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 Christ-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 wolf- 
 skins 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 joyously 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 23 
 
 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 wear- 
 ily 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 daugh- 
 ter 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, grey before his time, 
 and bowed with labour. 
 
 " Take the children to bed," he said sud- 
 denly, 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 esti- 
 mation. 
 
 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,
 
 24 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 looking up through his drooping eyeHds 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 cor- 
 ner struck eight; she looked to her father and 
 the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spin- 
 ning, 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 on 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 the father had 
 dashed the holy crucifix on the floor at their 
 feet and spat on it, they could not have shud-< 
 dered 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 25 
 
 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 mid- 
 winter ! " 
 
 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 1 " he mut- 
 tered. " 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 iDcen for your grand- 
 father 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 drag- 
 ging him down? When your mother lived, it 
 was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I
 
 26 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 were a mad dog! You have made a god of 
 yon china thing. Well — it goes: goes to- 
 morrow. Two hundred florins, that is some- 
 thing. 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 the father dog- 
 gedly, 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 health-giver of his young chil- 
 dren. " 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 sup- 
 pose so, as he gives that, — but beggars cannot 
 be choosers. The little black stove in the
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 27 
 
 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 hun- 
 dred 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 him- 
 self 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 ter- 
 ror. " 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
 
 28 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 
 besides 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.
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 29 
 
 " 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, ris- 
 ing 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
 
 30 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 while later, as he opened his eyes and saw 
 Dorothea weeping above him on the wolfskin 
 before the stove. He had been struck back- 
 ward, 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.
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 31 
 
 '"' Yes — -Jio. 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 rebel- 
 lion, and he was only a child and was power- 
 less. 
 
 " 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 unex- 
 ecuted ? — 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 
 I would sooner sell my soul ! " 
 
 " August ! " cried Dorothea, with piteous 
 entreaty. He terrified her; she could not rec- 
 ognise 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
 
 32 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 as though his heart would burst from his 
 bosom. 
 
 What could he do? Nothing, nothing, 
 nothing ! 
 
 " August, dear August," whispered Doro- 
 thea 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 calm.er. 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 
 h*is gleeful, careless, sunny temper had gone
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 33 
 
 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. lo 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 for- 
 eign city in a far-off land. 
 
 Whilst yet it was dark his three elder broth- 
 ers 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.
 
 34 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 *'* 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 
 all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear? I 
 am come to take the great stove."
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 35 
 
 August sprang erect, his fists doubled, liis 
 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 Bava- 
 rian 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 Au- 
 gust 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 sorry and
 
 36 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 Niirnberg 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 had 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 neigh- 
 bour. " 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE Z7 
 
 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, impet- 
 uous course. 
 
 " I loved it ! I loved it ! " he moaned. " I 
 do not care what its value was. I loved it! 
 1 loved it I" 
 
 " 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 
 Spriiz, 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."
 
 38 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 any one, 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 exalta- 
 tion 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 courtyard 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-grey pitchers, such as are com- 
 mon 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-en- 
 wrapped stove brought out and laid with in- 
 finite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 39 
 
 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 grey 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 Au- 
 gust 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 towards 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 dam- 
 age. From Hall the iron road runs northward 
 through glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, 
 Prague, Buda, and southward over the Bren- 
 ner into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going north 
 or south? This, at the least, he would soon 
 know. 
 
 August had often hung about the little sta- 
 tion, watching the trains come and go and 
 dive into the heart of the hills and vanish.
 
 40 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 No one said anything to him for idHngf 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 Hirsch- 
 vogel 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 man- 
 aged 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-
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 41 
 
 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 ab- 
 sorbed 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. Be- 
 ing 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 go- 
 ing out to his Uncle Joachim's chalet above 
 Jenbach. This he had with him, and this he 
 ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pound- 
 ing, 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
 
 42 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 pru- 
 dent (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 moun- 
 tains, 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 him- 
 self up there to see if he could anyhow remain
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 43 
 
 during many hours. He found that he could ; 
 air came in through the brass fret-work of 
 the stove; and with admirable caution in such 
 a little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and 
 straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so 
 that no one could ever have dreamed a little 
 mouse had been at them. Then he curled him- 
 self 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, stopping 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 fash- 
 ion, 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 sorely 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 per-
 
 44 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 haps 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 Au- 
 gust knew at least that it must have a great 
 many places in it : that he had seen himself on 
 the maps on his schoolhouse 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 Hirsch- 
 vogel would take care of him. The master- 
 potter of Nurnberg 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 45 
 
 came through the fret-work 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, stamp- 
 ing, shouting, and jangling of chains that went 
 on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. 
 If they should find him out ! Sometimes por- 
 ters 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 an- 
 other day to go over ground that the mail- 
 trains cover in a forenoon. It passed great 
 armored Kuffstein standing across the beau- 
 tiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of
 
 46 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 Niirn- 
 berg 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 47 
 
 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 al- 
 most 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 station- 
 master, who knew its consignees, resolved to 
 send it on by a passenger train that would leave 
 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 valu- 
 able," 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 in- 
 cessant pounding and jumbling and rattling 
 and shaking with which modern travel is al- 
 ways accompanied, though modern invention
 
 48 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 
 Niirnberg giant and saying softly, " Take care 
 of me; oli, take care of me, dear Hirsch- 
 vogel!" 
 
 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 hiss- 
 ing 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 out- 
 right. But the steam was screaming itself so 
 loudly that no one, had there been any one 
 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, " Miinchen ! Miinchen ! " 
 
 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 excite-
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 49 
 
 ment of hunting a black bear he had over- 
 passed the hmits 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 Tyro- 
 leans, by reason of those bitter struggles and 
 midnight shots and untimely deaths which 
 come from those meetings of jager and hun- 
 ter 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
 
 50 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 af- 
 fixed 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, dag- 
 gers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish 
 rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated 
 rubbish of a hric-a-hrac 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 51 
 
 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, listen- 
 ing intently, wide awake, and once more re- 
 covering 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. Au- 
 gust 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,
 
 52 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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. Potztau- 
 send! 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.
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 53 
 
 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 ovei; 
 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 Niirnberg master's work for nigh an hour, 
 praising, marvelling, expatiating in the lengthy 
 German tongue, the men moved to a little dis- 
 tance 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
 
 54 THE NiJRNBERG STOVE 
 
 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, 
 jusl 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 : there- 
 fore 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 sel- 
 dom silent in the streets of Munich. An hour
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 55 
 
 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 cheer- 
 ful, Old-World little Hall, lying by the clear, 
 grey river water, with the ramparts of the 
 mountains all around. 
 
 Presently the door opened again sharply. 
 He could hear the two dealers' voices murmur- 
 ing 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, an- 
 swered them curtly, and then, close by the 
 Niirnberg stove and the boy's ear, ejaculated 
 a single " Wunderschon! " 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. 
 
 " Wunderschon! " 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
 
 56 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 accom- 
 pany 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, li only 
 he could have had something to eat! He 
 thought with a pang of how at this hour at
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE - 57 
 
 home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with 
 apples in it from Aunt Maila's farm orchard, 
 and sang together, and hstened to Dorothea's 
 reading of Httle tales, and basked in the glow 
 and delight that had beamed on them from the 
 great Niirnberg 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
 
 58 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 edel- 
 weiss 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 for- 
 got, 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 hun- 
 ger, for a time. 
 
 Midnight was once more chiming from all
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 59 
 
 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 in- 
 deed; 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 alarmed you or me. For what he 
 saw was nothing less than all the bric-a-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 an- 
 cient chair; a very droll porcelain figure of 
 Littenhausen was bowing to a very^ stiff sol- 
 dier 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 bronze was riding along on a grif- 
 fin; a slim Venetian rapier had come to blows 
 with a stout Ferrara sabre, all about a little 
 pale-faced chit of a damsel in whie Nymphen-
 
 6o THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 burg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher 
 in gres gris was calHng aloud, " Oh, these Ital- 
 ians ! always at feud ! " But nobody listened 
 to him at all. A great number of little Dres- 
 den cups and* saucers were all skipping and 
 waltzing; the teapots, with their broad round 
 faces, were spinning their own lids like tee- 
 totums; 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 Cornells Lachtleven's rode about 
 on a delf 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 fair- 
 est 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,
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 6i 
 
 and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his 
 rough homespun Hnen, 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 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-a-brac was all full of life and mo- 
 tion, 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 rea- 
 son? Why, those silent, dull things are imita- 
 tion! " 
 
 This she said with so much decision that she
 
 62 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 evidently considered it a condensed but com- 
 plete answer. 
 
 " Imitation? " repeated August, timidly, not 
 understanding. 
 
 " Of course ! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica- 
 tions ! " 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, stam- 
 mering; "at least — that is — I do wish — I do 
 hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin 
 Hirschvogel at Niirnberg." 
 
 " Bravo ! " said all the real bric-a-brac in one 
 breath, and the two Italian rapiers left off
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 63 
 
 fighting to cry " Benone!" For there is not a 
 bit of true bric-d-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 gres de Flandre beer- 
 jug : " I myself was made at Nurnberg." And 
 he bowed to the great stove very politely, tak- 
 ing off his own silver hat — I mean lid — with a 
 courtly sweep that he could scarcely have 
 learned from the 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
 
 64 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 statu- 
 ette 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 col- 
 ours, staring colours, hot as the colours of a 
 hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of 
 Meissen, with a shiver. 
 
 " Well, there is a gres 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 evi- 
 dently done over the glaze are his black letters ! 
 He has tried to give himself my very twists; 
 but what a lamentable exaggeration of that 
 playful deviation in my lines which in his be- 
 comes actual deformity ! " 
 
 " And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan 
 leather, with a contemptuous glance at a broad 
 piece of gilded ieather spread out on a table. 
 " They will sell him cheek by jowl with me.
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 65 
 
 and give him my name ; but look ! / am over- 
 laid 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 vulgar- 
 ise 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 com- 
 mon 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 Eng- 
 lish china creatures ! " sighed the little white 
 maid of Nymphenburg.
 
 66 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 " 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-a- 
 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 
 gres de Flandre. " A terrible thing happened 
 to a dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Bla- 
 sius (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.
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE (^7 
 
 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,* 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." 
 
 " Ah ! if we could all go back to our mak- 
 ers!" 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 danc- 
 ing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that 
 were playing cards ; and the violin stopped its 
 
 *Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 
 i6ro, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem,
 
 58 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 merry music with a sob, and the spinnet 
 sighed, — thinking of dead hands. 
 
 Even the httle Saxe poodle howled for a 
 master forever lost; and only the swords went 
 on quarrelling, and made such a clattering 
 noise that the Japanese bronze 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 for joy. 
 
 " My friends," said that clear voice from the 
 turret of Niirnberg faience, " 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 us not 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 mouth- 
 ings, 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 69 
 
 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 in- 
 tegrity, 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 cre- 
 ated us, scorning sham and haste and counter- 
 feit. 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 la- 
 bours of their lives outlive them. For many.
 
 70 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 many years I, once honoured of emperors, 
 dwelt in a humble house and warmed in suc- 
 cessive 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 sunk 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE ^l 
 
 melody stole gently through the room. It 
 came from the old spinnet that was covered 
 with 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 Bayer- 
 ischenwald. August awoke with a great start, 
 and found himself lying on the bare bricks of 
 the floor of the chamber, and all the bric-a-brac 
 was lying quite still all around. The pretty 
 Lady of Meissen was motionless on her porce- 
 lain 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 en- 
 trails. He was absorbed in the wondrous sight, 
 in the wondrous sounds, that he had seen and 
 heard. 
 
 All was dark about him. Was it still mid- 
 night 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 deal- 
 ers entered, bringing burning candles with 
 them to see their way.
 
 T2 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 August was scarcely conscious of danger 
 more than he was of cold or hunger. A mar- 
 vellous sense of courage, of security, of happi- 
 ness, was about him, like strong and gentle 
 arms enfolding him and lifting him upwards 
 — upwards — upwards ! Hirschvogel would de- 
 fend 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 in- 
 side. 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 did not feel afraid. A great exal- 
 tation 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 doors 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 73 
 
 care, so that he had often been far more 
 roughly shaken in his big brother's 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 Niirnberg 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 sadly often felt light and swim- 
 ming. If it was a very, very long journey he 
 felt half afraid that he would be dead or some- 
 thing 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 Au-
 
 74 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 gust 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, Au- 
 gust 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, when 
 they swore, did so good-humoredly, and prom- 
 ised their porters fine presents at New-Year; 
 and August, like a shrewd little boy as he was, 
 who, even in the secluded Inrthal had learned 
 that money is the chief mover of men's mirth, 
 thought to himself, with a terrible pang:
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 75 
 
 " 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-place 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 
 Niirnberg stove was lifted out once more, Au- 
 gust 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 peace- 
 ful, serene place, full of rest. 
 
 It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had 
 come forth ; there was a clear grey sky here- 
 abouts; the snow was not falling, though it
 
 'j^ THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 ex- 
 penditure 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 Ba- 
 varian 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE TJ 
 
 passage across the Wurm-See was accom- 
 plished 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 grey 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 dis- 
 position to grumble at their task. Encouraged 
 by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the 
 Niirnberg stove, grumbling again at its pre- 
 posterous 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 Hirsch- 
 vogel.
 
 78 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 ft 
 
 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, grey sky. He had been tilted on to his 
 back, and if he had not been a little moun- 
 taineer, 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 por- 
 ters would not budge a foot quicker than they 
 chose, and as they were not poor four-footed 
 carriers, their employers dared not thrash
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 79 
 
 them, though most willingly would they have 
 done so. 
 
 The road seemed terribly long to the anx- 
 ious 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 fel- 
 low, 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
 
 8o THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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, leav- 
 ing 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 be- 
 longed 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 Decem- 
 ber!" 
 
 From afar off, as it seemed, there came a 
 dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spin- 
 net'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 Mas- 
 ter?" 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 8l 
 
 distant room some of the motives of " Parsi- 
 val." 
 
 Presently he heafd 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 pause, dur- 
 ing 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 undoubt- 
 edly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel." 
 
 Then* the hand of the speaker turned the 
 round handle of the brass door, and the faint- 
 ing 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 praise 
 of its beauty called aloud, in surprise, " What 
 is this in it? A live child! " 
 
 Then August, terrified beyond all self-con- 
 trol, 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 ! "
 
 82 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 Some gentlemen's hands seized him, not 
 gently by any means, and their Hps 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 ven- 
 omous, 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 cham- 
 ber he had ever dreamed of, and in the pres- 
 ence 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 83 
 
 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 likes all poetic and uncom- 
 mon things, and there was that in the child's 
 face which pleased and touched him. He mo- 
 tioned to his gentlemen to leave the little boy 
 alone.
 
 84 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 " What is your name ? " he asked him. 
 
 " I am August Strehla. My father is Hans 
 Strehla. We Hve 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 de- 
 sired them to be sought for and brought before
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 85 
 
 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 ig- 
 norant as August was, that they were trem- 
 bling as though they were being led to the 
 slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished,
 
 86 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 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 Niirnberg 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 ad- 
 dressing the child, but very stern. 
 
 " Yes, your majesty," murmured the trem- 
 bling traders. 
 
 " And how much did the gentleman who 
 purchased it for me give to you? " 
 
 " Two thousand ducats, your majesty," mut- 
 tered the dealers, frightened out of their wits, 
 and telling the truth in their fright. 
 
 The gentleman was not present: he was a 
 trusted counsellor 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. "
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 87 
 
 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 coun- 
 sellor 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
 
 88 THE NURNBERG STOVE 
 
 your Nurnberg- stove, or, if I am no more liv- 
 ing, 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 any- 
 how ; 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 of our maker ! " 
 
 He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy 
 scholar, and promises to be a great man. Some- 
 '•jmes 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
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE 89 
 
 in the Niirnberg 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 that others can- 
 not see and to hear the sounds that others can- 
 not hear?
 
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