Citation
The Nurnberg stove

Material Information

Title:
The Nurnberg stove
Alternate Title:
The Nürnberg stove
Creator:
Ouida, 1839-1908
Joseph Knight Company ( Publisher )
Art Publishing Co.
Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
Place of Publication:
Boston
Publisher:
Joseph Knight Company
Manufacturer:
Illustrated and printed by the Art Publishing Co.
Publication Date:
Copyright Date:
1892
Language:
English
Physical Description:
vii, 123 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 21 cm.

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
Children -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Poverty -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Brothers and sisters -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Parent and child -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Avarice -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Kindness -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Stoves -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Dreams -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Imagination -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Painters -- Juvenile fiction ( lcsh )
Juvenile fiction -- Hall (Germany) ( lcsh )
Bldn -- 1893
Genre:
novel ( marcgt )
Spatial Coverage:
United States -- Massachusetts -- Boston
Target Audience:
juvenile ( marctarget )

Notes

Summary:
When poor August's father is forced to sell a magnificent stove created by Augustin Hirschvogel, August hides inside it on the trip to the royal palace so he is not parted from it.
General Note:
Frontispiece printed in colors.
Statement of Responsibility:
by Louisa De la Ramé ("Ouida") ; illustrated.

Record Information

Source Institution:
University of Florida
Holding Location:
University of Florida
Rights Management:
This item is presumed to be in the public domain. The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries respect the intellectual property rights of others and do not claim any copyright interest in this item. Users of this work have responsibility for determining copyright status prior to reusing, publishing or reproducing this item for purposes other than what is allowed by fair use or other copyright exemptions. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions may require permission of the copyright holder. The Smathers Libraries would like to learn more about this item and invite individuals or organizations to contact The Department of Special and Area Studies Collections (special@uflib.ufl.edu) with any additional information they can provide.
Resource Identifier:
026897913 ( ALEPH )
ALH5664 ( NOTIS )
03570239 ( OCLC )
06033290 ( LCCN )

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THE NURNBERG STOVE.







THE NURNBERG STOVE

BY

LOUISA DE LA RAME

(*OUIDA””)

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY

1893



Copyright, 1892, by
Joseph Knicut Company.

Illustrated and Printed by The Art Publishing Co.



es

“< a



The Niirnberg Stove... . . . . «© «Frontispiece.

Headpiece to List of Illustrations

Tailpiece to List of Illustrations

Initial, The Muntze Tower 3 eh oe

“Tt has paved streets and enchanting little shops *’

The Valley ofthe Inn . .....

ss A few good souls wending home from vespers ’’

‘¢ Past the stone man-at-arms of the guard-house’’

‘« The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice ”’

“* At his knock and call the heavy oaken door flew open ”’

‘* He loved his pipe and a draught of ale too well’’

‘Dorothea drew her spinning wheel by the stove and set
it whirring ”’

‘* A travelling peddler ’’ sau G aie

‘* A little cow-keeper when he was anything ’’

‘¢ Lived up with the cattle in the heights among the Alpine
roses °’ Taimefem st uiaueston seit teresa Wat he

‘¢ Their Aunt Maila had a chalet and a little farm ’”’

‘*T have sold Hirschvogel’’ .

‘©¢Qh, father, father!’ he cried’’ .

“«*T remember now,’ he said, very low, under his

breath’’

PAGE

rary

on DAM PN

12

14
20
22

24
27
31
35-

38



vi . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

i PAGE
“He lay with his face downward on the pedestal of the :

: household treasure ”’ ibs COE ae ye eae ee Deets ae AS
‘* His sister came down with a lightin herhand” . . 43
“« «Go after it when you are bigger,’ said the neighbor *” 48
‘* His Grandfather’s at Jenbach”?. . . . . . . .) 54
The boundary between Austria and Bavaria. . . . . 60
‘* All the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of

snow ” Riistumeae es : . 61
“A gallant young chamois-hunter who had eee him to

handle a trigger and loada muzzle”. . . » 65
‘* The small, dark curiosity shop of one Hans Rhilfer.’ 67
‘CA right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-

tivalledsthing!e? oe wee seen to Sera ay
An Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen . . . . . . «O79
‘© A very.droll figure of Zitzenhausen was bowing to a

: very stiff soldier in serve cuzte’’ eRaro dps toad eae sag pate O
‘¢ A slim Venetian rapier and a stout Ferrara sabre’’. . 80
‘¢ Little Dresden cups andsaucers’”? . . . . . . . 80
‘« The tea-pots with their broad, round faces*’> . . . . 80
‘* A Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489”. : eseteh
“‘T am the Princess of Saxe-Royal’”?. . . - . . . 82
“A fat grés de Flandre beer-jug ”’ es aod
‘A bronze statuette of Vischer’s”* . ©. © 1... 85
‘‘ Little white maid of Nymphenburg’”’ . . . . . . 88
‘© A stout plate of Gubbio ’’ Se et nk to aes cee Rs OS
‘‘And what do you think the miserable creature said to

himsawithiarerinse ee pln) aoa y pea ae eae 8g

‘©A Dutch jarof Haarlem’ « . . . 2... . . 90



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. vil

PAGE
“« ‘My friends,’ said that clear voice from the turret of

Niirnberg faience ”’ Liner une pag Nanna, One eek EO &
The Marienplatz . . . PES) Fa tik Gouaue cesueere ee OP)
The castle Berg, on Lake Santen SP Panesar aan to LOO.
The Wurm-See, or Lake of Starnberg . - - . + 102
‘The big boat moved across the lake to Leoni ’’ . 104
‘« The porters began their toilsome journey”? . . . + 106
‘ The most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of” 112

“ Inthe presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face ’’ 113
‘- Helifted his face to the young king ”’ ase wise severe eek.
‘¢ ©Ves, your Majesty,’ murmured the trembling traders *’ 118

Mailpiecem co amin ee ey eerie pasa hae





THE NURNBERG STOVE.

called Hall. Hall is a favorite
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 Au-
gust for his part did not know
any other. It has the green meadows and
the great mountains all about it, and the
gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it.
It has paved streets and enchanting little
shops that have all latticed panes and
iron gratings to them; it has a very grand
old Gothic church, that has the noblest
blendings of light and shadow, and marble:

I





2 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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



THE NURNBERG STOVE. B

made into a guard-house, with battlements
and frescoes and heraldic devices in gold
and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in
stone standing life-size in his niche and
bearing his date 1530. A little farther on,
but close at hand, is a cloister with beauti-
ful 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 color, 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



4 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

the stone-paved irregular square where
the grand church stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at
that time, —a chubby-faced little man with
rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters
of curls the brown of ripe nuts.. His
mother was dead, his father was poor, and
there were many mouths at home to feed.



In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped
in snow for many months, and this night
that he was trotting home, with a jug of
‘beer in his numb red hands, was terribly
cold and dreary. The good burghers of
Hall had shut their double shutters, and
the few lamps there were flickered dully.
behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron cas-



THE NURNBERG STOVE. . 5

ings. The mountains indeed were beauti-
ful, 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 tasseled
horn as he pulled up
his sledge before a
hostelry, and __ little
August hugging his
jug of beer to his rag-
ged 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, or
he would have spilled the beer; he was
half frozen and a little frightened, but he
kept up his courage by saying over and
over again to himself, “TI shall soon be at
home with dear Hirschvogel.”

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





6° THE NURNBERG STOVE.”

and so into the place where the great
church was, and where near it stood his
father Karl Strehla’s house, with a sculp-

CLL \
ZN Wg,
wi Wes Q



tured Bethlehem over the door-way, and
the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings painted
on its wall. He had been sent ona long



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 7

errand outside the gates in the afternoon,
over the frozen fields and broad white
snow, and had been belated, and had
thought he had heard the wolves behind
him at every step, and had reached the
town in a great state of terror, thankful
with all his little panting

burning under the fer SN
ee ae a wf : s



not forgotten to call for —.
the beer, and he carried it #Z7lu! Za









carefully now, though his fT —— .
hands were so numb that - ECA \
he was afraid they would ay I \ N
let the jug down every aru aS



-moment. "Le

The snow outlined with
white every gable and cornice of the beau-
tiful 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; cov-
ered lamps burned before the Nativities
and Crucifixions painted on the walls or



8 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

let into the wood-work; here and there,
where a shutter had not been closed, a
ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior,
with the noisy band of children clustering
round the house-mother and a big brown
loaf, or some gossips spinning and listening
to the cobbler’s or the barber’s story of a
neighbor, while the oil-wicks glimmered,
and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chest-
nuts sputtered in their iron roasting-pot.
Little August saw all these things, as he
saw everything with his two big bright
eyes that had such curious lights and
shadows in them; but he went heedfully
on his way for the sake of the beer which a
single slip of the foot would. make him
spill. At his knock and call the solid oak
door, four centuries old if one, flew open,
and the boy darted in with his beer, and
shouted, with all the force of mirthful
lungs, “Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the
thought of you I should have died!”

It was a large barren room into which
he rushed with so much pleasure, and the
bricks were bare and uneven. It had a



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 9

walnut-wood press, handsome and very
old, a broad deal table, and several wooden
stools for all its furniture ; but at the top of







—



—

the chamber, sending out warmth and
color together as the lamp sheds its rays
upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished



IO THE NURNBERG STOVE.

with all the hues of a king’s peacock and a
queen’s jewels, and surmounted with
armed figures, and shields, and flowers of
heraldry, and a great golden crown upon
the highest summit of all.

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were
the letters H.R. H., for it was in every
portion the handwork of the great potter
of 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-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 ona
wolfskin at its feet, who received frozen Au-
gust among them with loud shouts of joy.



THE NURNBERG STOVE. II

‘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 shoulders, even whilst still a mere
‘baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla
family; and there were ten of them in all.
Next to her there came Jan and Karl and
Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their
own living; and then came August, who
went up in the summer to the high Alps
with the farmers’ cattle, but in winter could
do nothing to fill his own little platter and
pot; and then all the little ones, who could
only open their mouths to be fed like
young birds,— Albrecht and Hilda, and
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little
three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them
the life of their mother.

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



12 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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
anda draught of ale
too well; but this had
only been said of him
after his wife’s death,
when trouble and per-
plexity had begun to dull a brain never too
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a charac-
ter already too yielding. As it was, the
wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla
household, without a wolf from the moun-
tains coming down. Dorothea was one of





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 13

those maidens who almost work miracles,
so far can their industry and care and
intelligence make a home sweet. and whole-
some and a single loaf seem to swell into
twenty. .The children were always clean
and happy, and the table was seldom
without its big pot of soup once a day.
Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea’s
heart ached with shame,.for she knew that
their father’s debts were many for flour
and meat and clothing. 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



Ida THE NURNBERG STOVE.

speak a little sometimes, because he was
so thoughtful and so tender of her always,
and knew as well as she did that there
were troubles about money,—though these
troubles were vague to them both, and the
debtors were patient and kindly, being

neighbors 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 bob-

; \ bing up and down: the
€\ bow! was soon emptied by
_ ten wooden spoons, ‘and
then the three eldest boys slipped off to
bed, being tired with their rough bodily
labor in the snow all day, and Dorothea
drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and
set it whirring, and the little ones got
August down upon the old worn wolf-skin
and clamored to him for a picture or a story.
For August was the artist of the family.





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 15

He had a piece of planed deal that his
father had given him, and some sticks of
charcoal, and he would draw a. hundred
things he had seen in the day, sweeping
each out with his elbow when the children
had seen enough of it and sketching
another in its stead,—faces and dogs’
heads, and men in sledges, and old women
in their furs, and pine-trees, and cocks and
hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and
then — very reverently —a Madonna and

Child. It was all very rough, for there
“was no one to teach him anything. But it
was all life-like, and kept the whole troop
of children shrieking with laughter, or
watching breathless, with wide open, won-
dering, 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 shoul-
der, glowing after his frozen afternoon,



16 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

cried out loud, smiling, as he looked 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 nobody knows where all these
long, dark, cold hours, and does not care
how people die for want. of him; but
you—you are always ready: just a
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will
make a summer for us all the winter
through! ”

The grand old stove seemed to smile
through all its iridescent surface at the
praises of the child. No doubt the stove,
though it had known three centuries and
more, had known but very little gratitude.

It was one of those magnificent stoves
in enamelled faience which so excited the
jealousy of the other potters of Niirnberg
that in a body they demanded of the
magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel
should be forbidden to make any more of ©
them,—the magistracy, happily, proving



THE NURNBERG STOVE. | 17

of a broader mind, and having no sym-
pathy with the wish of the artisans to
cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with
all the majolica lustre which Hirschvogel
learned to give to his enamels when he
was making love to the young Venetian
girl whom he afterwards married. There
was the statue of a king at each corner,
modelled with as much force and splendor
as his friend Albrecht Diirer could have
given unto them on copperplate or canvas.
The. body of the stove itself was divided
into panels, which had the Ages of Man
painted on them in polychrome; the bor-
ders of the panels had roses and holly and
laurel and other foliage, and German
mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World
moralizing, 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 coloring of which the Hirschvogel



18 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

family, painters on glass and great in
chemistry as they were, were all masters.
_ The stove was a very grand thing, as I
say: possibly Hirschvogel had made it for
some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time
when he was an imperial guest at Inn-
spruck and fashioned so many things for
the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine
Welser, the Burgher’s daughter, who
gained an Archduke’s heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her
wit. Nothing was known of the stove at
this latter day in Hall. The grandfather
Strehla, who had been a master-mason,
had dug it up out of some ruins where he _
was building, and, finding’it without a flaw, -
had taken it home, and only thought it
worth finding because it was such a good
one to burn. That was now sixty years
past, and ever since then the stove had
stood in the big desolate empty room,
warming three generations of the Strehla.
family, and having seen nothing prettier
perhaps in all its many years than the
children tumbled now in a cluster like



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 19

gathered flowers at its feet. For the

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

they were equally lovely to look upon, and

when they went into the church to mass,

with their curling locks and their clasped

hands, they stood under the grim statues

like cherubs flown down off some fresco.

“Tell us a story, August,” they cried, in
chorus, when they had seen charcoal pic-
tures 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 nom his cradle to
his grave.

To the children the stove was a house-
hold god. In summer they laid a mat of
fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up
with green boughs and the numberless
beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country.
In winter all their joys centered in it, and
scampering home from school over the ice
and snow they were happy, knowing that



20 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

\

they would soon be cracking nuts or roast-
ing 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
_onit meant Augustin Hirsch-
vogel, 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 workman-
ship, putting all his heart
and his soul and his faith
into his labors, as the men
of those earlier ages did, and
thinking but little of gold or praise.

- An old trader, too, who sold curiosities
not far from the church, had told August
a little more about the brave family of
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 21

in Niirnberg to this day; of old Veit, the
first of them, who painted the Gothic win-
dows of St. Sebald with the marriage of
the Margravine; of his sons and of his
grandsons, potters, painters, engravers all,
and chief of them great Augustin, the
Luca della Robbia of the North. And
August’s imagination, always quick, had,
made a living personage out of these few
records, and saw Hirschvogel as though
he were in the flesh walking up and down

_ the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Inn-

spruck, and maturing beautiful things in
his brain as he stood on the bridge and
gazed on the emerald-green flood of the
Inn.

So the stove had got to be called Hirsch-
vogel in the family, as if it were a living
creature, and little August was very proud
because he had been named after that
famous old dead German who had had the
genius to make so glorious a thing. All
the children loved the stove, but with
August the love of it was a passion; and
in his secret heart he used to say to him-



22 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

self, ‘When I am aman, I will make just
such things too, and then I will set
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house
that I will build myself in Innspruck just
outside the gates, where the chestnuts are,
by the river: that is what I will do when I
am a man.”
For August, a salt-baker’s
son and a little cow-keeper
when he was anything, was
. a dreamer of dreams, and
zz, when he was upon the high




around him, was quite cer-
tain 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 town with
wood and with timber as his father and
grandfather did every day of their lives.
He was a strong and healthy little fellow,
fed on the free mountain-air, and he was
very happy, and loved his family devotedly,



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 23

and was as active as a squirrel and as
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts
' to himself, and some of them went a very
long way for a little boy who was only one
among many, and to whom nobody had
ever paid any attention except to teach
him his letters and tell him to fear God.
August in winter was only a little, hungry
school-boy, trotting to be catechised by
the priest, or to bring the loaves from the
bake-house, or to carry his father’s boots
to the cobbler; and in summer he was
only one of hundreds of cow-boys, who
drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumb-
ling cattle, ringing their throat-bells, out
into the sweet intoxication of the sudden
sunlight, and lived up with them .in the ©
heights among the Alpine roses, with only
the clouds and the snow-summits near.
But he was always thinking, thinking,
thinking, for all that; and under his little
sheep-skin 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



24 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

all the Innthal, and whom August always
reverently remembered when he went to
the city of Innspruck and ran out by the






sam
ws





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 excite-



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 25

ment 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 ran-
somed soul raised up by angels, had always .
had the most intense interest for August,
and he had made, not one history for him,
but a thousand; he seldom told them the
same tale twice. He had never seen a
story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had.
But nature had given him Fancy, and she
is a good fairy that makes up for the want
of very many things! only, alas! her wings
are so véry soon broken, poor thing, and
then she is of no use at all.

“Tt is time for you all to go to bed,
children,” said Dorothea, looking up from
her spinning. “Father is very late
to-night; you must not sit up for
him.”



26 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“Oh, five minutes more, dear Doro-
thea!” they pleaded; and little rosy and
golden Ermengilda climbed up into her
lap. ‘‘ Hirschvogel is so warm, the beds
are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell
us another tale, August?”

‘“No,” cried August, whose face had
lost its light, now that his story had come
to an end, and who sat serious, with his
hands clasped on his knees, gazing on to
the luminous arabesques of the stove.

“Tt 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



a

THE NURNBERG STOVE. 27

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;



1 ee
zs ww eg:

nee PATA 2
_~

= Roe

she always does,” said Albrecht. Their
aunt Maila had a chalet and a little farm
over on the green slopes toward Dorf
Ampas.

“T shall go up into the woods and get
Hirschvogel’s crown,” said August; they
always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas
with pine boughs and ivy and mountain-



28 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 jew-
elled 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 joyous to
meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove,
and August flew to set the jug of beer on



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 29

a little round table, and fill a long clay
pipe; for their father was good to them
all, and seldom raised his voice in anger,
and they had been trained by the mother
they had loved to dutifulness and obedience
and a watchful affection.

To-night Karl Strehla responded very
wearily to the young ones’ welcome, and
came to the wooden chair with a tired step
and sat down heavily, not noticing either
pipe or beer.

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

- “Tam well enough,” he answered, dully
and sat there with his head bent, letting
the lighted pipe grow cold.

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

“Take the children to bed,” he said,
suddenly, at last, and Dorothea obeyed.
August stayed behind, curled before the
stove; at nine years old, and when one
earns money in the summer from the
farmers, one is not altogether a child any
more, at least in one’s own estimation.



30 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 wolf-skin,
dreamy and comfortable, looking up
through his drooping eyelids at the golden
coronets on the crest of the great stove,
and wondering for the millionth time
whom it had been made for, and what
grand places and scenes it had known.

Dorothea came down from putting the
little ones in their beds; the cuckoo-clock
. in the corner struck eight; she looked to
her father and the untouched pipe, then
sat down to her spinning, saying nothing.
She thought he had been drinking in some
tavern; it had been often so with him of late.

There was a long silence; the cuckoo
called the quarter twice; August dropped
asleep, his curls falling over his face;
Dorothea’s wheel hummed like a cat.

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on

the table, sending the pipe on the ground.



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 31

“JT have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and
his voice was husky and ashamed in his
throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. -
August sprang erect out of his sleep.

“Sold Hirschvogel!” If their father

had dashed the holy
crucifix on the floor
at their feet and spat

on it, they could not |
have shuddered under \

the horror of a greater
blasphemy.













“Thavesold Hirsch- ‘i

vogel!” said Karl
Strehla, in the same
husky, doggéd voice.
“T have sold it to a
travelling trader in
such things for two
hundred florins. What

would you?—I owe double that. He saw
it this morning when you were all out.
He will pack it and take it to Munich to-

morrow.”

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:



32 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“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.

“lt1s. not’ true! ltas: not trie! he
muttered. ‘You are jesting, father?”

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.

“Tt is true. Would you like to know
what is true too?—that the bread you eat,
and the meat you put in this pot, and the
roof you have over your heads, are none
of them paid for, have been none of them
paid for, for months and months: if it had
not been for your grandfather I should
have been in prison all summer and
autumn, and he is out of patience and will
do no more now. There is no work to be |
had; the masters go to younger men:
they say I work ill; it may be so. Who
can keep his head above water with ten
hungry children dragging him down?



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 33

When your mother lived it was different.
Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad
dog! You have made a god of yon china
thing. Well—it goes: goes to-morrow.
Two hundred florins, that is something.
It will keep me out of prison for a little,
and with the spring things may turn ae

August stood like a creature paralyzed.
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.

“Tt 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 Hirsch-
vogel. They might as soon talk of tearing
down God’s sun out of the heavens.

“You will find it true,” said his father,
doggedly, and angered because he was in
his own soul bitterly ashamed to have
bartered away the heirloom and treasure
of his race, and the comfort and health-
giver of his young children. “You will
find it true. The dealer has paid me half





34 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

the money to-night, and’ will pay me the
other half to-morrow when he packs it up
and takes it away to Munich. No doubt
it is worth a great deal more,— at least I
suppose so, as he gives that,— but beggars
cannot be choosers. The little black stove
in the kitchen will warm you all just as
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted
thing in a poor house like: this, when one
can make two hundred florins by it?
Dorothea, you never sobbed more when
your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?—a bit of hardware, much too grand-
looking for such a room as this. If all the
Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was
dug up out of the ground. ‘It isa stove
for a museum,’ the trader said when he
saw it. Toa museum let it go.”

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s
when it is caught for its death, and threw
himself on. his knees at his father’s feet.

“Oh, father, father!” he cried, convul-.
sively, his hands closing on Strehla’s
knees, and his uplifted face blanched and



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 35

distorted with terror. ‘‘Oh, father, dear
father, you cannot mean what you say?
Send z¢ 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 Hirsch-
vogel | —it is like sell-
ing the very cross off
the altar! You must
be in jest. You could
not do such a thing
—you could not! —
you who have always
been gentle and good,
and who have sat in
the warmth here year
after year with our
mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as
you say; it is a living thing, for a great
man’s thoughts and fancies have put life
into it, and it loves us though we are only
poor little children, and we love it with all
our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I
am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows!





36 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 neighbors, 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 him-
self for the barter of the heirloom of his
race, and every word of the child stung
him with a stinging sense of shame.

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

‘You are a little fool,” he said, harshly,



THE NURNBERG STOVE. a

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-mor-
row. 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 aman who
had no cares.

August sprang to his feet and threw
his hair back off his face; the blood rushed
into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his
great soft eyes flamed alight with furious
passion.

“You dare not!” he cried, aloud, “you
dare not sell it, I say! It is not yours
alone; it is ours

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the
bricks with a force that shivered it to
atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his
son a blow that felled him to the floor. It
was the first time in all his life that he had








38 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

ever raised his hand against any one of his
children.

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at
his elbow and stumbled off to his own
chamber with a cloud before his eyes.

‘What has happened?” said August, a
little while later, as he opened his eyes and
saw Dorothea weeping
» above him on the wolf-
| skin before the stove.
He had been struck
backward, and his head
had fallen on the hard
== bricks where the wolf-
skin 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



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 39
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 ques-
tioned.

“Are you hurt by the fall, dear Au-—
gust?” she murmured, at length, for he
looked to her so pale and strange.

“Ves—no. Idonot know. What does
it matter?”

He sat up upon the wolf-skin with pas-
sionate pain upon his face; all his soul was
in rebellion, and he was only a child and
was powerless.

“Itis a sin; it is a theft; it is an in-
famy,” he said slowly, his eyes fastened on
the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.

“Oh, August, do not say such things



40 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

of father!” sobbed his sister. ‘‘ Whatever
he does, we ought to think it right.”

August laughed aloud.

“Js it right that he should spend his
money in drink?—that he should let orders
lie unexecuted?—that he should do his
work so ill that no one cares to employ
him ?—that he should live on grandfather's
charity, and then dare sell a thing that is
ours every whit as much as it is his? To
sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would
sooner sell my soul!”

“ August!” cried Dorothea, with piteous
entreaty. He terrified her, she could not
recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in
those fierce and blasphemous words.

August laughed aloud again ; then all at
once his laughter broke down into bitterest
weeping. He threw himself forward on
the stove, covering it with kisses, and
sobbing as though his heart would burst
from his bosom.

What could he do? Nothing, nothing,
nothing !

“August, dear August,” whispered



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 41

Dorothea piteously, and trembling all
over, — for she was a very gentle girl, and
fierce feeling terrified her, — “ August, do
notliethere. Come to bed: it is quite late.
In the morning you will be calmer. It is
horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold,
at least the little ones; but if it be father’s
will z

“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.”

“T shall stay here.”

“Here! all night!”

“They might take it in the night. Be-
sides, to leave it zow /”

“ But it is cold! the fire is out.”

“Tt will never be warm any more, nor
shall we.”

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





42 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily,
choking down the great sobs in his chest.
To him it was as if the end of the world
had come.
His sister lingered by him while striving
to persuade him to go to his place in the
little crowded bed-
chamber with Al-
brecht and Waldo and
Christof. But it was
in vain. ‘I shall stay
here,” was all he an-
swered her. And he
stayed,—all the night



long.
The lamps went
Symon © 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 ever-



THE NURNBERG STOVE. Ag

more, an exiled thing in a foreign city in
a far-off land.

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder
brothers came down the stairs and let
themselves out, each bearing his lantern
and going to his work
in stone-yard and tim-
ber-yard and at the salt-
works. They did not
notice him ; they did not
know what had _ hap-
pened.

A little later his sis-
ter came down with a
light in her hand to
make ready the house
ere morning © should
break.

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

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

August raised his eyes with a wild, fe-
verish, sullen look in them that she had







































44 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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.

“Tt will never be warm again,” he mut-
tered, “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! Itis morning,
only so dark!”

August shuddered all over.

“The morning !” he echoed.

He slowly rose up on to his feet.

“T 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,—



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 45

“Let me in! Quick! —there is no time
to lose! More snow like this, and the
roads will beall blocked. Letmein! Do
-you hear? I am come to take the great
stove.”

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

‘You shall never touch it!” he screamed ;
“you shall never touch it!”

‘“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big
man, who was a Bavarian, amused at the
fierce little figure fronting him.

“JT!” said August. ‘You shall never
have it! you shall kill me first!”

‘‘Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s
father entered the room, “you have got a
little mad dog here: muzzle him.”

One way and another they did muzzle
him. He fought like a little demon, and
hit out right and left, and one of his blows
gave the Bavarian a black eye. But he
was soon mastered by four grown men,
and his father flung him with no light hand
out from the door of the back entrance,
and the buyers of the stately and beautiful



46 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

stove set to work to pack it heedfully and
carry it away. |
When Dorothea stole out to look for
August, he was nowhere in sight. She
went back to little ’Gilda, who was ailing,
and sobbed over the child, whilst the others
stood looking on, dimly understanding that
with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth
of their bodies, all the light of their hearth.
Even their father now was very sorry
and ashamed; but two hundred florins
seemed a big sum to him, and, after all,
he thought the children could warm them-
selves quite as well at the black iron stove
in the kitchen. Besides, whether he re-
greted 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 stood still for a time, leaning,
sick and faint from the violence that had



. THE NURNBERG STOVE. 47

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 moun-
tains.

Into the court an old neighbor 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
neighbor. ‘‘ Heaven forgive me for calling
him so before his own child! but the stove
was wortha mint of money. I do remem-_
ber in my young days, in old Anton’s time
(that was your great-grandfather, my lad),
a stranger from Vienna saw it, and_ said
that it was worth its weight in gold.”

August's sobs went on their broken, im-
petuous course.

“T loved it! I loved it!” he moaned.
“TI do not care what its value was. I
loved it! J loved zt /”



48 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“You little simpleton !” said the old
man, kindly. ‘But you are wiser than
your father, when all’s said. If sell it he














am a) thou

2 geal tag AS
S io ae q
fi oe Hy



i
i : te (ane WW, ie i. | y A
«@ eg Ney



must, he should have taken it to good
Herr Steiner over at Spriiz, who would
have given him honest value. But no



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 49

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 neighbor, 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 who-
“ever gets it; anything that can be sold for
a round sum is always wrapped up in cot-
~ ton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don’t cry
so much; you will see your stove’ again
some day.”

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

August remained leaning against the
wall; his head was buzzing and his heart
fluttering with the new idea which had pre-
sented 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



50 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

he shrank from the thought of meeting his
father again, his father who had sold Hirsch-
vogel. :

He was by this time in that state o
exaltation in which the impossible looks
quite natural and common-place. His
tears were still wet on his pale cheeks,
but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of
the court-yard by a little gate, and across
to the huge Gothic porch of the church.
From there he could watch unseen his
father’s house-door, at which were always
hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such
as are common and so picturesque in
. Austria, for a part of the house was let to
a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico,
which he had so often passed through to
go to mass or complin within, and pres-
ently his heart gave a great leap, for he
saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought
out and laid with infinite care on the bul-
lock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon
slowly crept over the snow of the place, —



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 51

snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble
old minster looked its grandest and most
solemn, with its dark-gray stone and _ its
vast archways, and its porch that was itself
as big as many a church, and its strange
gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the
snow on its roof and on the pavement; but
for once August had no eyes for it; he
only watched for his old friend. Then he,
a little unnoticeable figure enough, like a
score of other boys in’ Hall, crept, unseen
by any. of his brothers or sisters, out of the
porch and over the shelving uneven
square, and followed in the wake of the
dray.

Its course lay 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 damage. From Hall the iron
road runs northward through glorious
country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Buda,
and southward over the Brenner into Italy.
Was Hirschvogel going north or south?
This at least he would soon know.



52 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

August had often hung about the little
station, watching the trains come and go
and dive into the heart of the hills and
vanish. No one said anything to him for
idling about; people are kind-hearted and
easy of temper in this- pleasant land, and
children and dogs are both happy there.
He heard the Bavarians arguing and vo-
ciferating 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 them-
selves go in a goods-train. So at length
they insured their precious burden for a
large sum, and consented to send it bya
luggage-train which was to pass through
Hall in half an hour. The swift trains
seldom deign to notice the existence of
Hall at all.

August heard, and a desperate resolve
made itself up in his little mind. Where
Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave
one terrible thought to Dorothea— poor,
gentle Dorothea !— sitting in the cold at



THE NURNBERG STOVE 53

home, then set to work to execute his pro-
ject. How he managed it he never knew
very clearly himself, but certain it is that
when the goods-train from the north, that
had come all the way from Linz on the
Danube, moved out of Hall, August was
hidden behind the stove in the great cov-
ered truck, and wedged, unseen and
undreamt of by any human creature,
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks
and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of Turkish
carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian
wines, which shared the same abode as
did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel.
No doubt he was very naughty, but ‘it never
occurred to him that he was so: his whole
mind-and soul were absorbed in the one
entrancing idea, to follow his beloved friend °
and fire-king. — }

It was very dark in the closed truck,
which had only a little window above the
door; and it was. crowded, and had a
strong smell in it from the Russian hides
and the hams that were in it. But August
was not frightened; he was close to



54 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be
closer still; for he meant to do nothing
less than get inside Hirschvogel itself.
Being a shrewd little boy,and having had
by great luck two silver groschen in his
breeches-pocket, which he had earned the



day before by chopping wood, he had
bought some bread and sausage at the sta-
tion of a woman there who knew him, and
who thought he was going out to his uncle
Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. This he
had with him, and this he ate in the dark-
ness and the lumbering, pounding, thun-
dering noise which made him giddy, as



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 55

never had he been in-a train of any kind
before. Still he ate, having had no break-
fast, and being a child, and half a German,
and not knowing at all how or when he’
ever would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he

wanted, but as much as he thought was
prudent (for who could say when he would
be able to buy anything more ?), he set to
work like a little mouse to make a hole in
the withes of straw and hay which en-
veloped the stove. If it had been put ina
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



56 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and hay and twisted ropes; and get
through them at last he did, and found the
door of the stove, which he knew so well,
and which was quite large enough for a
child of his age to slip through, and it was
this which he had counted upon doing.
Slip through he did, as he had often done
at home for fun, and curled himself up
there to see if he could anyhow remain
during many hours. He found that he
could; air came in through the brass fret-
work of the stove; and with admirable
caution in such a little fellow he leaned out,
_ drew the hay and straw together, re-
arranged the ropes, so that no one could
ever have dreamed a little mouse had been
at them. Then he curled himself up again,
this time more like a dormouse than any-
thing 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 Jumbered on,
stopped often and long, as the habit of
goods-trains ‘is, sweeping the snow away



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 57

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 grand-
father’s at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even
send over to Jenbach, thinking he had
taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His
conscience smote him for the sorrow he
must be even then causing to his gentle
sister; but it never occurred to him to try
and go back. If he once were to lose
sight of Hirschvogel how could he ever
hope to find it again? how could he ever
know whither it had gone,— north, south,



58 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

east or west? The old neighbor had said
that the world was small; but August
knew at least that it must have a great
many places in it: that he had seen himself
on the maps on his school-house walls.
Almost any other little boy would, I think,
have been frightened out of his wits at the
position in which he found himself; but
August was brave, and he had a firm belief
that God and Hirschvogel would take care
. of him. The master-potter of Nirnberg
was always present to his mind, a kindly,
benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling man-
ifestly 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 sob-
bing both, though he was so utterly in the
dark. He did not feel cramped at all,
because the stove was so large, and air he
had in plenty, as it came through the fret-
work running round the top. He was
hungry again, and again nibbled with pru-



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 59

dence at his loaf and his sausage. He
~ could not at all tell the hour. Every time
the train stopped and he heard the bang-
ing, stamping, shouting, and jangling of
chains that went on, his heart seemed to
jump up into his mouth. If they should
find him out! Sometimes porters came
and took away this case and the other, a
sack here, a bale there, now a big bag,
now a dead chamois. Every time the men
trampled near him, and swore at each
other, and banged this and that to and fro,
he was so frightened that his very breath
seemed. to stop. When they came to lift
the stove out, would they find him? and if
they did find him, would they kill him?
That was what he kept thinking of all the
way, all through the dark hours, which
seemed without end. The goods-trains
are usually very slow, and are many
days doing what a quick train does in a
few hours. This one was quicker than
most, because it was bearing goods to the
King of Bavaria; still, it took all the. short
winter's day and the long winter’s night



60 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and half another day to go over ground
that the mail-trains cover in a forenoon.
It passed great armored Kuffstein standing
across the beautiful and solemn gorge,
denying the right of way to all the foes of
Austria. It passed twelve hours later,







“) i ’
NNROr Nee
i st Ka Ng
‘ty ok it is a \

‘ i AN
CUA




Ms Ge

after lying by in out-of-the-way stations,
pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border
of Bavaria. And here the Niirnberg stove,
with August inside it, was lifted out heed-
fully 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 NURNBERG STOVE. 61

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





tent;

Fs Sp Ne o's
Gz oS ry

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. Ifthere

had not been whole armies of men at work



62 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

always clearing the iron rails of the snow,
no trains could ever have runatall. Hap-
pily for August, the thick wrappings in
which the stove was enveloped and the
stoutness of its own make screened him
from the cold, of which, else, he must have -
died,— frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a litthe—a very little—of his
sausage. What he did begin to suffer
from was thirst; and this frightened him
almost more than anything else, for Doro-
thea 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 -



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 63

passenger-train that would leave there at
daybreak. And when this train went out,
in it, among piles of luggage belonging to
other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-
Pest, Salzburg, was August, still undis-
covered, still doubled up’ like a mole in the
winter under the grass. Those words,
‘fragile and valuable,” had made the men
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He
had begun to get used to his prison, and a
little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with
which modern travel is always accom-
panied, though modern invention does
deem itself so mightily clever. All in the
_ dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty ;
but he kept feeling the earthenware sides
of the Niirnberg giant and saying, softly,
“Take care of me; oh, take care of me,
dear Hirschvogel !”

He did not say, ‘‘Take me back;” for,
now that he was fairly out in the world, he
wished to see a little of it. He began to
think that they must have been all over
the world in all this time that the rolling



64 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and roaring and hissing and jangling had
been about his ears; shut up in the dark,
he began to remember all the tales that
had been told in Yule round the fire at his
grandfather's good house at Dorf, of
gnomes and elves and subterranean ter-
rors, and the Erl King riding on the black
horse of night, and — and — and he began
to sob and to tremble again, and this time
did scream outright. But the steam was
screaming itself so loudly that no one,
had there been 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 Bayeris-
chenwald by the Bavarian forest guards,
when in the excitement of hunting a black
bear he had overpassed the limits of the
Tyrol frontier.

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

w



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 65

handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made
the very name of Bavaria a terror to
August.

“It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!” he sob-

bed to the stove; but the stove said noth-
ing 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.

“Tt is Bavaria!”
sobbed August; for it
is always a name of
dread augury to the
Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter strug-
gles and midnight shots and untimely deaths
which come from those meetings of jager
and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But
the train stopped; Munich was reached, and

a
Xi
Lp oN, Get



t y LY /’ fe. fi
Po Maps



66 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking
like a little aspen-leaf, felt himself once
more carried out on the shoulders of men,
rolled along on a truck, and finally set
down, where he knew not, only he knew he
was thirsty,—so thirsty! If only he could
have reached his hand out and scooped up
a little snow!

He thought he had been moved on this
truck many miles, but in truth the stove
had been only taken from the railway-
station to a shop in the Marienplatz. Fort-
unately, the stove was always set upright
on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that
effect having been affixed to its written
label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in
the small dark curiosity-shop of one Hans ~
Rhilfer.

“T 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



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 67

pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue
jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers,
Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs,
and all the art lumber and fabricated rub-
bish of a dvzc-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a



wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there
one drop of water in it all? That was his
single thought ; for his tongue was _ parch-
ing, 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



68 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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, cram-
med the snow into his mouth again and
again, and then flew back into the stove,
drew the hay and straw over the place he
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the
brass door down on himself. He had -
brought some big icicles in with him, and
by them his thirst was finally, if only tem-
porarily, quenched. Then he sat still in.
the bottom of the stove, listening intently,
wide awake, and once more recovering his
natural boldness.

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping
his heart and his conscience with a hard
squeeze now and then; but he thought to
himself, “If I can take her back Hirsch-
vogel, then how pleased she will be, and
how little Gilda will clap her hands!” He
was not at all selfish in his love for Hirsch-
vogel: 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



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 69

shame that his father — his own father —
should have stripped their hearth and sold
their honor thus.

A robin had been perched upon a stone
griffin sculptured on a house-eave near.
August had felt for the crumbs of his
loaf in his pocket, and had thrown them to
the little bird sitting so easily on the frozen
snow.

In the darkness where he was he now
heard a little song, made faint by the stove-
wall and the window-glass that was between
him and it, but still distinct and exquisitely
sweet. It was the robin, singing after
feeding on the crumbs. August, as he
heard, burst into tears. He thought of
Dorothea, who every morning threw out
some grain or some bread on the snow be-
fore the church. ‘What use is it going
there,’ she said, ‘‘if we forget the sweetest
creatures God has made?” Poor Doro-
thea! 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



70 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 alittle mad dog; muzzle him!”
The voice said, ‘Ay, ay, you have called
mea fool many times. Now you shall see —
what I have gotten for two hundred dirty
florins. Potztausend/ never did you do
such a stroke of work.”

Then the other voice grumbled and
swore, and the steps of the two men ap-
proached more closely, and the heart of the
child went pit-a-pat, pit-d-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 wrap-
pings: that he could tell by the noise they
made with the hay andthe straw. Soon they
had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew
by the oaths and exclamations of wonder
and surprise and rapture which broke from
the man who had not seen it before.

“A right royal thing! A wonderful and



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 71

never-to-be-rivalled thing! Grander than
the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sub-
lime! magnificent! matchless!”

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural
voices, diffusing a smell of lager-beer so
strong as they spoke
that it reached August
crouching in his
stronghold: If they
should open the door
of the stove! That
was his frantic fear.
If they should open
it, it would be all over
withy-him: -Phey
would drag him out;
most likely they
would kill him, he
thought, as his moth-
ers 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 stand-
ing by the Niirnberg master’s work for





72 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

nigh an hour, praising, marvelling, expati-
ating in the lengthy German tongue, the
men moved to a little distance and began
talking of sums of money and divided
profits, of which discourse he could. make.
out no meaning. All he could make out
was that the name of the king -— the king
—the king came over very often in their
arguments.. He fancied at times they
quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their
voices rose hoarse and high; but after a
while they seemed to pacify each other and
agree to something, and were in great glee,
and so in these merry spirits came and
slapped the luminous sides of stately
Hirschvogel, and shouted to it, —

‘Old Mumchance, you have brought us
rare good luck! To think you were smok-
ing 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,



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 73

when he remembered, just in time, that to
breathe a word or make a sound was to
bring ruin on himself and sever him forever
from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still,
and the men barred the shutters of the little _
lattice and went out by the door, double-
locking it after them. He had made out
from their talk that they were going to
show Hirschvogel to some great person:
therefore he kept quite still and dared not
move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the
shutters from the streets below,—the roll- .
ing of wheels, the clanging of church-bells,
and bursts of that military music which is
so seldom silent in the streets of Munich.
An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of:
steps on the stairs kept him in perpetual
apprehension. In the intensity of his
anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and
many miles away from cheerful, Old World
little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-
water, with the ramparts of the mountains
all around.

Presently the door opened again sharply.



74 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

He could hear the two dealers’ voices mur-
muring unctuous words, in which “honor,”
“gratitude,” and many fine long noble titles
played the chief parts. The voice of an-
other person, more clear and refined than
theirs, answered 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 Hirsch-
vogel 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 Em-
peror Maximilian,” he said at last; and the
poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was
‘hugged up into nothing,” as you children
say, dreading that every moment he would
open the stove. And open it truly he did,
and examined the brass-work of the door;
but inside it was so dark that crouching



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 75

August passed unnoticed, screwed up into
a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The
gentleman shut to the door at length, with-
out 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 ac-
company 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



76 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

were locked in, but at least they were to-
gether. If only he could have had some-
thing to eat! He thought with a pang of
how at this hour at home they ate the
sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it
from Aunt Maila’s farm orchard, and sang
together, and listened to Dorothea’s read-
_ ing of little 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 deal-
ers 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 howl-
ing of the wind and the deep sound of the
church-bells, and tried very much to make
each other believe that the wolves still



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 77

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 over-
came him that he burst out crying for the
fiftieth time since he had been inside the
stove, and felt that he would starve to
death, and wondered dreamily if Hirsch-
vogel would care. Yes, he was sure
Hirschvogel would care. Had he not
decked it all summer long with alpine roses
and edelweiss and heaths and made it
sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and
great garden-lilies? Had he ever forgotten
when Santa Claus came to make it its
crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all
around? —

‘‘Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of
me!” he prayed to the old fire-king, and
forgot, poor little man, that he had come
on this wild-goose chase northward to save
and take care of Hirschvogel!



78 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

After atime he dropped asleep, as chil-
dren can do when they weep, and little
robust hill-born boys most surely do, be
they where they may. It was not very
cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly
shut up, and very full of things, and at the
back of it were the hot pipes of an adjacent
house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt.
Moreover, August’s clothes were warm
ones, and his blood was young. So he
was not cold, though Munich is terribly
cold in the nights of December; and he
slept on and on,— which was a comfort to
him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils,
and his hunger for a time. ;

Midnight was once more chiming from all
the brazen tongues of the city when he
awoke, and, all being still around him,
ventured to put his head out of the brass
door of the stove to see why sucha strange
bright light was round him.

It was a very strange and brilliant light
indeed; and yet, what is perhaps | still
stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him,
nor did what he saw alarm him either, and



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 79

yet I think it would have done you or me.
For what he saw was nothing less than all
the érvzc-d-brac in motion.
A big jug, an Apos-
: se tel-Krug, of Kruessen,
RA J was solemnly dancing a
of, minuet with a plump
» Faenza jar; a tall Dutch
clock was going through
a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient
chair ;.a very droll porcelain figure of Zitz-
enhausen was bowing to a very stiff
soldier in derre cuzte of Ulm ; =
an old violin of Cremona was
_ playing itself, and a queer
little shrill plaintive music
that thought itself merry
came from a painted spinnet
covered with faded roses;
some gilt Spanish leather
had got up on the wall and
laughed; a Dresden mirror
was tripping about, crowned with flowers,
and a Japanese bonze was riding along
on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier had









80 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre,
all about a little pale-faced chit of a
damsel in white Nymphenburg china;
and a portly Franconian pitcher in
grés gris was calling aloud, “Oh,
these Italians! always at feud!” But
nobody listened to him at all. A
great number of little Dresden cups
and saucers were all skipping and
waltzing; the teapots, with their
broad round faces, were spinning their
own lids like teetotums; the high-
backed gilded chairs were having a
game of cards together; and a little
Saxe poodle, with a
blue ribbon at its ,

throat, was running from Si a

one to another, whilst ~“2#=77e*

a yellow cat of Cornelis Zachtleven’s
i rode about on a Delft horse in blue
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the
brilliant light shed on the scene
came from three silver candelabra,
en they had no candles set up in
them ; and, what is the greatest miracle of







THE NURNBERG STOVE. 81

all, August looked on at these mad freaks
and felt no sensation of wonder! He only,
as he heard the violin and the spinnet play-
ing, felt an irresistible desire to dance
too.

No doubt his face said what he wished;
for ‘a lovely little lady, all in pink and gold
and white, with powdered hair, and high-
heeled shoes, and all made of the very
finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped
up to him, and smiled, and
gave him her hand, and led fr
him out to a minuet. And he ald (ase
danced it perfectly,—poor lit- %& 4
tle August in his thick, clumsy :
shoes, and his thick, clumsy
sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun
linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He
must have danced it perfectly, this dance
of kings and queens in days when crowns
were duly honored, for the lovely lady al-
ways 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





~





ssaslh > Goo wD
sae: g
Ri



82 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

eyes off her till, the minuet ended, she sat
down on her own white-and-gold bracket.

‘“‘T am the Princess of Saxe-Royal,” she
said to him, with a benignant smile; ‘‘and
you have got through that minuet very
fairly.” :
Then he ventured to say to her, —

‘‘Madame my princess, could you tell
me kindly why some ofthe 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
il some of the drzc-d-brac was all full of life
‘and motion, some was quite still and

had not a single thrill in it.

“My dear child,” said the powdered
lady, “‘is it possible that you do not know
the reason? Why, those silent, dull things
are zmutation /”

This she said with so much decision that
she evidently considered it a condensed
but complete answer.

“Imitation?” repeated August, timidly,
not understanding.







THE NURNBERG STOVE. 83

“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica-
tions!” said the princess in pink shoes,
very vivaciously. ‘They only pretend to
be what we ave/ 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, andthe
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?”

“TJ have never thought,” said August,
stammering; “at least—that is—I do
wish—I do hope to be a painter, as was



84 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

Master Augustin Hirschvogel at Niirn-
berg.” /

“Bravo!” said all the real d72c-a-brac in
one breath, and the two Italian rapiers left
off fighting to cry, ‘‘ Bexone/” For there
is not a bit of true érvzc-d-bvac in all Eu-
rope 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.

“T knew all the Hirschvoégel,
~ from old Veit downwards,” said
= a fat grés de Flandre beer-
=== jug: “I myself was made at
Nirnberg.” And he bowed. to the great
stove very: politely, taking off his own.
silver hat—I mean lid—with a courtly
sweep that he could scarcely have learned
from burgomasters. The stove, however,
was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for
what is such heart-break as a suspicion of
what we love?) came through the mind of
August: Was Hirschvogel only imitation?





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 85

«No, no, no, no!” he said to himself,
stoutly: though Hirschvogel never stirred,
never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in
it! After all their happy years together,
after all the nights of warmth and joy he
owed it, should he doubt his own friend
and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had
kissed in his babyhood? ‘No, no, no,
no!” he said, again, with so much
emphasis that the Lady of Meissen
looked sharply again at him.

“No,” she said, with pretty disdain;
“no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’
forever. . They can never look like us!
They imitate even our marks, but
never can they look like the real
thing, never can they chassent de
race.”

‘How should they?” said a bronze stat-
uette of Vischer’s. “They daub them-
selves 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





86 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of
a hostelry’s sign-board!” said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.

“Well, there is a grés 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 differ-
ence there is! How crude are his blues!
how evidently done over the glaze are his _
black letters! He has tried to give him-
self my very twist; but what a lamentable
exaggeration of that playful deviation in
my lines which in his becomes actual
deformity !”

“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordo-
van leather, with a contemptuous glance at
a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
onatable. ‘They will sell him cheek by
jowl with me, and give him my name; but
look! Jam overlaid with pure gold beaten
thin as a film and laid on me in absolute



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 87

honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias,
worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the
blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Chris-
tian. A/zs gilding is one part gold to
eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and
it has been laid on him with a brush—a
brush! —pah! of course he will be as black
as a crock in a few years’ time, whilst I am
as bright as when I first was made, and,
unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt
its heretics, I shall shine on forever.”
‘They carve pear-wood because it is so
soft, and dye it brown, and call it me/”
said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
“That is not so painful; it does not
vulgarize you so much as the cups they
paint to-day and christen after me/” said
a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet
gorgeous as a jewel.
‘Nothing can be so annoying as to see
common gimcracks aping me /” interposed
the princess in the pink shoes.
‘They even steal my motto, though it is
Scripture,” said a Zrauerkrug of Regens-
burg in black-and-white.



88 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“And my own dots they put on plain
English china creatures!” sighed the little
white maid of Nymphenburg. 2

“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 blas-
phemy!” said a stout plate se ,
of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had
seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
“That is what is so
terrible in these drzc-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 hap-







THE NURNBERG STOVE. 89

pened to a dear friend of mine, a serve
curte of Blasius (you know the éerres cuttes
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 yester-
day at Frankfort, and what think you the
miserable creature said to him, with a
grin? ‘Old Pipeclay,—that
is what he called my friend,
—‘the fellow that bought me
got just as much commission
on me as.the fellow that , ly
bought you, and that was all
that Ze thought about. You
know it is only the public
money that goes!’ And
the horrid creature grinned again till he
actually cracked himself. ‘There isa Prov-
dence above all things, even museums.”

“Providence might have interfered be-
fore, and saved the public money,” said
the little Meissen lady with the pink
shoes.

“After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch





go _ THE NURNBERG STOVE.

jar of Haarlem. “All the shamming in
the world will not make them us!”

“One does not like to be vulgarized,”
said the Lady of Meissen, angrily.

“My maker, the Krabbetje,’ did not
trouble his head about that,” said the Haar-
lem jar, proudly. ‘The Krabbetje made
me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-
white Dutch kitchen, wellnigh three
centuries ago, and now! am thought
worthy the palace; yet I wish I were
at home; yes, I wish I could see the
good Dutch vrouw, and the shin-
ing 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 gra-
cious days of the Renaissance: and some-
how the words touched the frolicsome
souls of the dancing jars, the spinning tea-
pots, the chairs that were playing cards;
and the violin stopped its merry music



1Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610,
master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.

”



THE NURNBERG STOVE. gI

with a sob, and the spinnet sighed,—think-
ing of dead hands.

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for
a master forever lost; and only the swords
went on quarreling, and made such a
clattering noise that the Japanese bonze
rode at them on his monster and knocked
them both right over, and they lay straight ,
and still, looking foolish, and the little .
Nymphenburg maid, though she was cry-
ing, smiled and almost laughed.

Then from where the, great stove stood
there came a solemn voice.

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and
the heart of its little human comrade gave
a great jump of joy.

‘‘My friends,” said that clear voice from
the turret of 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 Wind-
bags. Let not us be like them. I hear
among men so much vain speech, so much
precious breath and precious time wasted
in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless



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The Baldwin Library
University

RMB vie


THE NURNBERG STOVE.

THE NURNBERG STOVE

BY

LOUISA DE LA RAME

(*OUIDA””)

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY

1893
Copyright, 1892, by
Joseph Knicut Company.

Illustrated and Printed by The Art Publishing Co.
es

“< a



The Niirnberg Stove... . . . . «© «Frontispiece.

Headpiece to List of Illustrations

Tailpiece to List of Illustrations

Initial, The Muntze Tower 3 eh oe

“Tt has paved streets and enchanting little shops *’

The Valley ofthe Inn . .....

ss A few good souls wending home from vespers ’’

‘¢ Past the stone man-at-arms of the guard-house’’

‘« The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice ”’

“* At his knock and call the heavy oaken door flew open ”’

‘* He loved his pipe and a draught of ale too well’’

‘Dorothea drew her spinning wheel by the stove and set
it whirring ”’

‘* A travelling peddler ’’ sau G aie

‘* A little cow-keeper when he was anything ’’

‘¢ Lived up with the cattle in the heights among the Alpine
roses °’ Taimefem st uiaueston seit teresa Wat he

‘¢ Their Aunt Maila had a chalet and a little farm ’”’

‘*T have sold Hirschvogel’’ .

‘©¢Qh, father, father!’ he cried’’ .

“«*T remember now,’ he said, very low, under his

breath’’

PAGE

rary

on DAM PN

12

14
20
22

24
27
31
35-

38
vi . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

i PAGE
“He lay with his face downward on the pedestal of the :

: household treasure ”’ ibs COE ae ye eae ee Deets ae AS
‘* His sister came down with a lightin herhand” . . 43
“« «Go after it when you are bigger,’ said the neighbor *” 48
‘* His Grandfather’s at Jenbach”?. . . . . . . .) 54
The boundary between Austria and Bavaria. . . . . 60
‘* All the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of

snow ” Riistumeae es : . 61
“A gallant young chamois-hunter who had eee him to

handle a trigger and loada muzzle”. . . » 65
‘* The small, dark curiosity shop of one Hans Rhilfer.’ 67
‘CA right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-

tivalledsthing!e? oe wee seen to Sera ay
An Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen . . . . . . «O79
‘© A very.droll figure of Zitzenhausen was bowing to a

: very stiff soldier in serve cuzte’’ eRaro dps toad eae sag pate O
‘¢ A slim Venetian rapier and a stout Ferrara sabre’’. . 80
‘¢ Little Dresden cups andsaucers’”? . . . . . . . 80
‘« The tea-pots with their broad, round faces*’> . . . . 80
‘* A Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489”. : eseteh
“‘T am the Princess of Saxe-Royal’”?. . . - . . . 82
“A fat grés de Flandre beer-jug ”’ es aod
‘A bronze statuette of Vischer’s”* . ©. © 1... 85
‘‘ Little white maid of Nymphenburg’”’ . . . . . . 88
‘© A stout plate of Gubbio ’’ Se et nk to aes cee Rs OS
‘‘And what do you think the miserable creature said to

himsawithiarerinse ee pln) aoa y pea ae eae 8g

‘©A Dutch jarof Haarlem’ « . . . 2... . . 90
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. vil

PAGE
“« ‘My friends,’ said that clear voice from the turret of

Niirnberg faience ”’ Liner une pag Nanna, One eek EO &
The Marienplatz . . . PES) Fa tik Gouaue cesueere ee OP)
The castle Berg, on Lake Santen SP Panesar aan to LOO.
The Wurm-See, or Lake of Starnberg . - - . + 102
‘The big boat moved across the lake to Leoni ’’ . 104
‘« The porters began their toilsome journey”? . . . + 106
‘ The most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of” 112

“ Inthe presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face ’’ 113
‘- Helifted his face to the young king ”’ ase wise severe eek.
‘¢ ©Ves, your Majesty,’ murmured the trembling traders *’ 118

Mailpiecem co amin ee ey eerie pasa hae


THE NURNBERG STOVE.

called Hall. Hall is a favorite
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 Au-
gust for his part did not know
any other. It has the green meadows and
the great mountains all about it, and the
gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it.
It has paved streets and enchanting little
shops that have all latticed panes and
iron gratings to them; it has a very grand
old Gothic church, that has the noblest
blendings of light and shadow, and marble:

I


2 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. B

made into a guard-house, with battlements
and frescoes and heraldic devices in gold
and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in
stone standing life-size in his niche and
bearing his date 1530. A little farther on,
but close at hand, is a cloister with beauti-
ful 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 color, 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
4 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

the stone-paved irregular square where
the grand church stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at
that time, —a chubby-faced little man with
rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters
of curls the brown of ripe nuts.. His
mother was dead, his father was poor, and
there were many mouths at home to feed.



In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped
in snow for many months, and this night
that he was trotting home, with a jug of
‘beer in his numb red hands, was terribly
cold and dreary. The good burghers of
Hall had shut their double shutters, and
the few lamps there were flickered dully.
behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron cas-
THE NURNBERG STOVE. . 5

ings. The mountains indeed were beauti-
ful, 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 tasseled
horn as he pulled up
his sledge before a
hostelry, and __ little
August hugging his
jug of beer to his rag-
ged 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, or
he would have spilled the beer; he was
half frozen and a little frightened, but he
kept up his courage by saying over and
over again to himself, “TI shall soon be at
home with dear Hirschvogel.”

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


6° THE NURNBERG STOVE.”

and so into the place where the great
church was, and where near it stood his
father Karl Strehla’s house, with a sculp-

CLL \
ZN Wg,
wi Wes Q



tured Bethlehem over the door-way, and
the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings painted
on its wall. He had been sent ona long
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 7

errand outside the gates in the afternoon,
over the frozen fields and broad white
snow, and had been belated, and had
thought he had heard the wolves behind
him at every step, and had reached the
town in a great state of terror, thankful
with all his little panting

burning under the fer SN
ee ae a wf : s



not forgotten to call for —.
the beer, and he carried it #Z7lu! Za









carefully now, though his fT —— .
hands were so numb that - ECA \
he was afraid they would ay I \ N
let the jug down every aru aS



-moment. "Le

The snow outlined with
white every gable and cornice of the beau-
tiful 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; cov-
ered lamps burned before the Nativities
and Crucifixions painted on the walls or
8 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

let into the wood-work; here and there,
where a shutter had not been closed, a
ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior,
with the noisy band of children clustering
round the house-mother and a big brown
loaf, or some gossips spinning and listening
to the cobbler’s or the barber’s story of a
neighbor, while the oil-wicks glimmered,
and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chest-
nuts sputtered in their iron roasting-pot.
Little August saw all these things, as he
saw everything with his two big bright
eyes that had such curious lights and
shadows in them; but he went heedfully
on his way for the sake of the beer which a
single slip of the foot would. make him
spill. At his knock and call the solid oak
door, four centuries old if one, flew open,
and the boy darted in with his beer, and
shouted, with all the force of mirthful
lungs, “Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the
thought of you I should have died!”

It was a large barren room into which
he rushed with so much pleasure, and the
bricks were bare and uneven. It had a
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 9

walnut-wood press, handsome and very
old, a broad deal table, and several wooden
stools for all its furniture ; but at the top of







—



—

the chamber, sending out warmth and
color together as the lamp sheds its rays
upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished
IO THE NURNBERG STOVE.

with all the hues of a king’s peacock and a
queen’s jewels, and surmounted with
armed figures, and shields, and flowers of
heraldry, and a great golden crown upon
the highest summit of all.

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were
the letters H.R. H., for it was in every
portion the handwork of the great potter
of 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-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 ona
wolfskin at its feet, who received frozen Au-
gust among them with loud shouts of joy.
THE NURNBERG STOVE. II

‘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 shoulders, even whilst still a mere
‘baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla
family; and there were ten of them in all.
Next to her there came Jan and Karl and
Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their
own living; and then came August, who
went up in the summer to the high Alps
with the farmers’ cattle, but in winter could
do nothing to fill his own little platter and
pot; and then all the little ones, who could
only open their mouths to be fed like
young birds,— Albrecht and Hilda, and
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little
three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them
the life of their mother.

They were of that mixed race, half
Austrian, half Italian, so common in the
12 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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
anda draught of ale
too well; but this had
only been said of him
after his wife’s death,
when trouble and per-
plexity had begun to dull a brain never too
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a charac-
ter already too yielding. As it was, the
wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla
household, without a wolf from the moun-
tains coming down. Dorothea was one of


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 13

those maidens who almost work miracles,
so far can their industry and care and
intelligence make a home sweet. and whole-
some and a single loaf seem to swell into
twenty. .The children were always clean
and happy, and the table was seldom
without its big pot of soup once a day.
Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea’s
heart ached with shame,.for she knew that
their father’s debts were many for flour
and meat and clothing. 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
Ida THE NURNBERG STOVE.

speak a little sometimes, because he was
so thoughtful and so tender of her always,
and knew as well as she did that there
were troubles about money,—though these
troubles were vague to them both, and the
debtors were patient and kindly, being

neighbors 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 bob-

; \ bing up and down: the
€\ bow! was soon emptied by
_ ten wooden spoons, ‘and
then the three eldest boys slipped off to
bed, being tired with their rough bodily
labor in the snow all day, and Dorothea
drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and
set it whirring, and the little ones got
August down upon the old worn wolf-skin
and clamored to him for a picture or a story.
For August was the artist of the family.


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 15

He had a piece of planed deal that his
father had given him, and some sticks of
charcoal, and he would draw a. hundred
things he had seen in the day, sweeping
each out with his elbow when the children
had seen enough of it and sketching
another in its stead,—faces and dogs’
heads, and men in sledges, and old women
in their furs, and pine-trees, and cocks and
hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and
then — very reverently —a Madonna and

Child. It was all very rough, for there
“was no one to teach him anything. But it
was all life-like, and kept the whole troop
of children shrieking with laughter, or
watching breathless, with wide open, won-
dering, 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 shoul-
der, glowing after his frozen afternoon,
16 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

cried out loud, smiling, as he looked 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 nobody knows where all these
long, dark, cold hours, and does not care
how people die for want. of him; but
you—you are always ready: just a
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will
make a summer for us all the winter
through! ”

The grand old stove seemed to smile
through all its iridescent surface at the
praises of the child. No doubt the stove,
though it had known three centuries and
more, had known but very little gratitude.

It was one of those magnificent stoves
in enamelled faience which so excited the
jealousy of the other potters of Niirnberg
that in a body they demanded of the
magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel
should be forbidden to make any more of ©
them,—the magistracy, happily, proving
THE NURNBERG STOVE. | 17

of a broader mind, and having no sym-
pathy with the wish of the artisans to
cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with
all the majolica lustre which Hirschvogel
learned to give to his enamels when he
was making love to the young Venetian
girl whom he afterwards married. There
was the statue of a king at each corner,
modelled with as much force and splendor
as his friend Albrecht Diirer could have
given unto them on copperplate or canvas.
The. body of the stove itself was divided
into panels, which had the Ages of Man
painted on them in polychrome; the bor-
ders of the panels had roses and holly and
laurel and other foliage, and German
mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World
moralizing, 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 coloring of which the Hirschvogel
18 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

family, painters on glass and great in
chemistry as they were, were all masters.
_ The stove was a very grand thing, as I
say: possibly Hirschvogel had made it for
some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time
when he was an imperial guest at Inn-
spruck and fashioned so many things for
the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine
Welser, the Burgher’s daughter, who
gained an Archduke’s heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her
wit. Nothing was known of the stove at
this latter day in Hall. The grandfather
Strehla, who had been a master-mason,
had dug it up out of some ruins where he _
was building, and, finding’it without a flaw, -
had taken it home, and only thought it
worth finding because it was such a good
one to burn. That was now sixty years
past, and ever since then the stove had
stood in the big desolate empty room,
warming three generations of the Strehla.
family, and having seen nothing prettier
perhaps in all its many years than the
children tumbled now in a cluster like
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 19

gathered flowers at its feet. For the

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

they were equally lovely to look upon, and

when they went into the church to mass,

with their curling locks and their clasped

hands, they stood under the grim statues

like cherubs flown down off some fresco.

“Tell us a story, August,” they cried, in
chorus, when they had seen charcoal pic-
tures 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 nom his cradle to
his grave.

To the children the stove was a house-
hold god. In summer they laid a mat of
fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up
with green boughs and the numberless
beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country.
In winter all their joys centered in it, and
scampering home from school over the ice
and snow they were happy, knowing that
20 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

\

they would soon be cracking nuts or roast-
ing 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
_onit meant Augustin Hirsch-
vogel, 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 workman-
ship, putting all his heart
and his soul and his faith
into his labors, as the men
of those earlier ages did, and
thinking but little of gold or praise.

- An old trader, too, who sold curiosities
not far from the church, had told August
a little more about the brave family of
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 21

in Niirnberg to this day; of old Veit, the
first of them, who painted the Gothic win-
dows of St. Sebald with the marriage of
the Margravine; of his sons and of his
grandsons, potters, painters, engravers all,
and chief of them great Augustin, the
Luca della Robbia of the North. And
August’s imagination, always quick, had,
made a living personage out of these few
records, and saw Hirschvogel as though
he were in the flesh walking up and down

_ the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Inn-

spruck, and maturing beautiful things in
his brain as he stood on the bridge and
gazed on the emerald-green flood of the
Inn.

So the stove had got to be called Hirsch-
vogel in the family, as if it were a living
creature, and little August was very proud
because he had been named after that
famous old dead German who had had the
genius to make so glorious a thing. All
the children loved the stove, but with
August the love of it was a passion; and
in his secret heart he used to say to him-
22 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

self, ‘When I am aman, I will make just
such things too, and then I will set
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house
that I will build myself in Innspruck just
outside the gates, where the chestnuts are,
by the river: that is what I will do when I
am a man.”
For August, a salt-baker’s
son and a little cow-keeper
when he was anything, was
. a dreamer of dreams, and
zz, when he was upon the high




around him, was quite cer-
tain 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 town with
wood and with timber as his father and
grandfather did every day of their lives.
He was a strong and healthy little fellow,
fed on the free mountain-air, and he was
very happy, and loved his family devotedly,
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 23

and was as active as a squirrel and as
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts
' to himself, and some of them went a very
long way for a little boy who was only one
among many, and to whom nobody had
ever paid any attention except to teach
him his letters and tell him to fear God.
August in winter was only a little, hungry
school-boy, trotting to be catechised by
the priest, or to bring the loaves from the
bake-house, or to carry his father’s boots
to the cobbler; and in summer he was
only one of hundreds of cow-boys, who
drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumb-
ling cattle, ringing their throat-bells, out
into the sweet intoxication of the sudden
sunlight, and lived up with them .in the ©
heights among the Alpine roses, with only
the clouds and the snow-summits near.
But he was always thinking, thinking,
thinking, for all that; and under his little
sheep-skin 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
24 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

all the Innthal, and whom August always
reverently remembered when he went to
the city of Innspruck and ran out by the






sam
ws





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 excite-
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 25

ment 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 ran-
somed soul raised up by angels, had always .
had the most intense interest for August,
and he had made, not one history for him,
but a thousand; he seldom told them the
same tale twice. He had never seen a
story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had.
But nature had given him Fancy, and she
is a good fairy that makes up for the want
of very many things! only, alas! her wings
are so véry soon broken, poor thing, and
then she is of no use at all.

“Tt is time for you all to go to bed,
children,” said Dorothea, looking up from
her spinning. “Father is very late
to-night; you must not sit up for
him.”
26 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“Oh, five minutes more, dear Doro-
thea!” they pleaded; and little rosy and
golden Ermengilda climbed up into her
lap. ‘‘ Hirschvogel is so warm, the beds
are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell
us another tale, August?”

‘“No,” cried August, whose face had
lost its light, now that his story had come
to an end, and who sat serious, with his
hands clasped on his knees, gazing on to
the luminous arabesques of the stove.

“Tt 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
a

THE NURNBERG STOVE. 27

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;



1 ee
zs ww eg:

nee PATA 2
_~

= Roe

she always does,” said Albrecht. Their
aunt Maila had a chalet and a little farm
over on the green slopes toward Dorf
Ampas.

“T shall go up into the woods and get
Hirschvogel’s crown,” said August; they
always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas
with pine boughs and ivy and mountain-
28 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 jew-
elled 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 joyous to
meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove,
and August flew to set the jug of beer on
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 29

a little round table, and fill a long clay
pipe; for their father was good to them
all, and seldom raised his voice in anger,
and they had been trained by the mother
they had loved to dutifulness and obedience
and a watchful affection.

To-night Karl Strehla responded very
wearily to the young ones’ welcome, and
came to the wooden chair with a tired step
and sat down heavily, not noticing either
pipe or beer.

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

- “Tam well enough,” he answered, dully
and sat there with his head bent, letting
the lighted pipe grow cold.

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

“Take the children to bed,” he said,
suddenly, at last, and Dorothea obeyed.
August stayed behind, curled before the
stove; at nine years old, and when one
earns money in the summer from the
farmers, one is not altogether a child any
more, at least in one’s own estimation.
30 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 wolf-skin,
dreamy and comfortable, looking up
through his drooping eyelids at the golden
coronets on the crest of the great stove,
and wondering for the millionth time
whom it had been made for, and what
grand places and scenes it had known.

Dorothea came down from putting the
little ones in their beds; the cuckoo-clock
. in the corner struck eight; she looked to
her father and the untouched pipe, then
sat down to her spinning, saying nothing.
She thought he had been drinking in some
tavern; it had been often so with him of late.

There was a long silence; the cuckoo
called the quarter twice; August dropped
asleep, his curls falling over his face;
Dorothea’s wheel hummed like a cat.

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on

the table, sending the pipe on the ground.
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 31

“JT have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and
his voice was husky and ashamed in his
throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. -
August sprang erect out of his sleep.

“Sold Hirschvogel!” If their father

had dashed the holy
crucifix on the floor
at their feet and spat

on it, they could not |
have shuddered under \

the horror of a greater
blasphemy.













“Thavesold Hirsch- ‘i

vogel!” said Karl
Strehla, in the same
husky, doggéd voice.
“T have sold it to a
travelling trader in
such things for two
hundred florins. What

would you?—I owe double that. He saw
it this morning when you were all out.
He will pack it and take it to Munich to-

morrow.”

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:
32 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“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.

“lt1s. not’ true! ltas: not trie! he
muttered. ‘You are jesting, father?”

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.

“Tt is true. Would you like to know
what is true too?—that the bread you eat,
and the meat you put in this pot, and the
roof you have over your heads, are none
of them paid for, have been none of them
paid for, for months and months: if it had
not been for your grandfather I should
have been in prison all summer and
autumn, and he is out of patience and will
do no more now. There is no work to be |
had; the masters go to younger men:
they say I work ill; it may be so. Who
can keep his head above water with ten
hungry children dragging him down?
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 33

When your mother lived it was different.
Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad
dog! You have made a god of yon china
thing. Well—it goes: goes to-morrow.
Two hundred florins, that is something.
It will keep me out of prison for a little,
and with the spring things may turn ae

August stood like a creature paralyzed.
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.

“Tt 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 Hirsch-
vogel. They might as soon talk of tearing
down God’s sun out of the heavens.

“You will find it true,” said his father,
doggedly, and angered because he was in
his own soul bitterly ashamed to have
bartered away the heirloom and treasure
of his race, and the comfort and health-
giver of his young children. “You will
find it true. The dealer has paid me half


34 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

the money to-night, and’ will pay me the
other half to-morrow when he packs it up
and takes it away to Munich. No doubt
it is worth a great deal more,— at least I
suppose so, as he gives that,— but beggars
cannot be choosers. The little black stove
in the kitchen will warm you all just as
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted
thing in a poor house like: this, when one
can make two hundred florins by it?
Dorothea, you never sobbed more when
your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?—a bit of hardware, much too grand-
looking for such a room as this. If all the
Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was
dug up out of the ground. ‘It isa stove
for a museum,’ the trader said when he
saw it. Toa museum let it go.”

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s
when it is caught for its death, and threw
himself on. his knees at his father’s feet.

“Oh, father, father!” he cried, convul-.
sively, his hands closing on Strehla’s
knees, and his uplifted face blanched and
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 35

distorted with terror. ‘‘Oh, father, dear
father, you cannot mean what you say?
Send z¢ 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 Hirsch-
vogel | —it is like sell-
ing the very cross off
the altar! You must
be in jest. You could
not do such a thing
—you could not! —
you who have always
been gentle and good,
and who have sat in
the warmth here year
after year with our
mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as
you say; it is a living thing, for a great
man’s thoughts and fancies have put life
into it, and it loves us though we are only
poor little children, and we love it with all
our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I
am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows!


36 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 neighbors, 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 him-
self for the barter of the heirloom of his
race, and every word of the child stung
him with a stinging sense of shame.

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

‘You are a little fool,” he said, harshly,
THE NURNBERG STOVE. a

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-mor-
row. 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 aman who
had no cares.

August sprang to his feet and threw
his hair back off his face; the blood rushed
into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his
great soft eyes flamed alight with furious
passion.

“You dare not!” he cried, aloud, “you
dare not sell it, I say! It is not yours
alone; it is ours

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the
bricks with a force that shivered it to
atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his
son a blow that felled him to the floor. It
was the first time in all his life that he had





38 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

ever raised his hand against any one of his
children.

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at
his elbow and stumbled off to his own
chamber with a cloud before his eyes.

‘What has happened?” said August, a
little while later, as he opened his eyes and
saw Dorothea weeping
» above him on the wolf-
| skin before the stove.
He had been struck
backward, and his head
had fallen on the hard
== bricks where the wolf-
skin 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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 39
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 ques-
tioned.

“Are you hurt by the fall, dear Au-—
gust?” she murmured, at length, for he
looked to her so pale and strange.

“Ves—no. Idonot know. What does
it matter?”

He sat up upon the wolf-skin with pas-
sionate pain upon his face; all his soul was
in rebellion, and he was only a child and
was powerless.

“Itis a sin; it is a theft; it is an in-
famy,” he said slowly, his eyes fastened on
the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.

“Oh, August, do not say such things
40 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

of father!” sobbed his sister. ‘‘ Whatever
he does, we ought to think it right.”

August laughed aloud.

“Js it right that he should spend his
money in drink?—that he should let orders
lie unexecuted?—that he should do his
work so ill that no one cares to employ
him ?—that he should live on grandfather's
charity, and then dare sell a thing that is
ours every whit as much as it is his? To
sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would
sooner sell my soul!”

“ August!” cried Dorothea, with piteous
entreaty. He terrified her, she could not
recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in
those fierce and blasphemous words.

August laughed aloud again ; then all at
once his laughter broke down into bitterest
weeping. He threw himself forward on
the stove, covering it with kisses, and
sobbing as though his heart would burst
from his bosom.

What could he do? Nothing, nothing,
nothing !

“August, dear August,” whispered
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 41

Dorothea piteously, and trembling all
over, — for she was a very gentle girl, and
fierce feeling terrified her, — “ August, do
notliethere. Come to bed: it is quite late.
In the morning you will be calmer. It is
horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold,
at least the little ones; but if it be father’s
will z

“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.”

“T shall stay here.”

“Here! all night!”

“They might take it in the night. Be-
sides, to leave it zow /”

“ But it is cold! the fire is out.”

“Tt will never be warm any more, nor
shall we.”

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


42 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily,
choking down the great sobs in his chest.
To him it was as if the end of the world
had come.
His sister lingered by him while striving
to persuade him to go to his place in the
little crowded bed-
chamber with Al-
brecht and Waldo and
Christof. But it was
in vain. ‘I shall stay
here,” was all he an-
swered her. And he
stayed,—all the night



long.
The lamps went
Symon © 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 ever-
THE NURNBERG STOVE. Ag

more, an exiled thing in a foreign city in
a far-off land.

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder
brothers came down the stairs and let
themselves out, each bearing his lantern
and going to his work
in stone-yard and tim-
ber-yard and at the salt-
works. They did not
notice him ; they did not
know what had _ hap-
pened.

A little later his sis-
ter came down with a
light in her hand to
make ready the house
ere morning © should
break.

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

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

August raised his eyes with a wild, fe-
verish, sullen look in them that she had




































44 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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.

“Tt will never be warm again,” he mut-
tered, “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! Itis morning,
only so dark!”

August shuddered all over.

“The morning !” he echoed.

He slowly rose up on to his feet.

“T 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,—
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 45

“Let me in! Quick! —there is no time
to lose! More snow like this, and the
roads will beall blocked. Letmein! Do
-you hear? I am come to take the great
stove.”

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

‘You shall never touch it!” he screamed ;
“you shall never touch it!”

‘“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big
man, who was a Bavarian, amused at the
fierce little figure fronting him.

“JT!” said August. ‘You shall never
have it! you shall kill me first!”

‘‘Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s
father entered the room, “you have got a
little mad dog here: muzzle him.”

One way and another they did muzzle
him. He fought like a little demon, and
hit out right and left, and one of his blows
gave the Bavarian a black eye. But he
was soon mastered by four grown men,
and his father flung him with no light hand
out from the door of the back entrance,
and the buyers of the stately and beautiful
46 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

stove set to work to pack it heedfully and
carry it away. |
When Dorothea stole out to look for
August, he was nowhere in sight. She
went back to little ’Gilda, who was ailing,
and sobbed over the child, whilst the others
stood looking on, dimly understanding that
with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth
of their bodies, all the light of their hearth.
Even their father now was very sorry
and ashamed; but two hundred florins
seemed a big sum to him, and, after all,
he thought the children could warm them-
selves quite as well at the black iron stove
in the kitchen. Besides, whether he re-
greted 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 stood still for a time, leaning,
sick and faint from the violence that had
. THE NURNBERG STOVE. 47

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 moun-
tains.

Into the court an old neighbor 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
neighbor. ‘‘ Heaven forgive me for calling
him so before his own child! but the stove
was wortha mint of money. I do remem-_
ber in my young days, in old Anton’s time
(that was your great-grandfather, my lad),
a stranger from Vienna saw it, and_ said
that it was worth its weight in gold.”

August's sobs went on their broken, im-
petuous course.

“T loved it! I loved it!” he moaned.
“TI do not care what its value was. I
loved it! J loved zt /”
48 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“You little simpleton !” said the old
man, kindly. ‘But you are wiser than
your father, when all’s said. If sell it he














am a) thou

2 geal tag AS
S io ae q
fi oe Hy



i
i : te (ane WW, ie i. | y A
«@ eg Ney



must, he should have taken it to good
Herr Steiner over at Spriiz, who would
have given him honest value. But no
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 49

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 neighbor, 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 who-
“ever gets it; anything that can be sold for
a round sum is always wrapped up in cot-
~ ton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don’t cry
so much; you will see your stove’ again
some day.”

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

August remained leaning against the
wall; his head was buzzing and his heart
fluttering with the new idea which had pre-
sented 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
50 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

he shrank from the thought of meeting his
father again, his father who had sold Hirsch-
vogel. :

He was by this time in that state o
exaltation in which the impossible looks
quite natural and common-place. His
tears were still wet on his pale cheeks,
but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of
the court-yard by a little gate, and across
to the huge Gothic porch of the church.
From there he could watch unseen his
father’s house-door, at which were always
hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such
as are common and so picturesque in
. Austria, for a part of the house was let to
a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico,
which he had so often passed through to
go to mass or complin within, and pres-
ently his heart gave a great leap, for he
saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought
out and laid with infinite care on the bul-
lock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon
slowly crept over the snow of the place, —
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 51

snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble
old minster looked its grandest and most
solemn, with its dark-gray stone and _ its
vast archways, and its porch that was itself
as big as many a church, and its strange
gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the
snow on its roof and on the pavement; but
for once August had no eyes for it; he
only watched for his old friend. Then he,
a little unnoticeable figure enough, like a
score of other boys in’ Hall, crept, unseen
by any. of his brothers or sisters, out of the
porch and over the shelving uneven
square, and followed in the wake of the
dray.

Its course lay 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 damage. From Hall the iron
road runs northward through glorious
country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Buda,
and southward over the Brenner into Italy.
Was Hirschvogel going north or south?
This at least he would soon know.
52 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

August had often hung about the little
station, watching the trains come and go
and dive into the heart of the hills and
vanish. No one said anything to him for
idling about; people are kind-hearted and
easy of temper in this- pleasant land, and
children and dogs are both happy there.
He heard the Bavarians arguing and vo-
ciferating 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 them-
selves go in a goods-train. So at length
they insured their precious burden for a
large sum, and consented to send it bya
luggage-train which was to pass through
Hall in half an hour. The swift trains
seldom deign to notice the existence of
Hall at all.

August heard, and a desperate resolve
made itself up in his little mind. Where
Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave
one terrible thought to Dorothea— poor,
gentle Dorothea !— sitting in the cold at
THE NURNBERG STOVE 53

home, then set to work to execute his pro-
ject. How he managed it he never knew
very clearly himself, but certain it is that
when the goods-train from the north, that
had come all the way from Linz on the
Danube, moved out of Hall, August was
hidden behind the stove in the great cov-
ered truck, and wedged, unseen and
undreamt of by any human creature,
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks
and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of Turkish
carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian
wines, which shared the same abode as
did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel.
No doubt he was very naughty, but ‘it never
occurred to him that he was so: his whole
mind-and soul were absorbed in the one
entrancing idea, to follow his beloved friend °
and fire-king. — }

It was very dark in the closed truck,
which had only a little window above the
door; and it was. crowded, and had a
strong smell in it from the Russian hides
and the hams that were in it. But August
was not frightened; he was close to
54 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be
closer still; for he meant to do nothing
less than get inside Hirschvogel itself.
Being a shrewd little boy,and having had
by great luck two silver groschen in his
breeches-pocket, which he had earned the



day before by chopping wood, he had
bought some bread and sausage at the sta-
tion of a woman there who knew him, and
who thought he was going out to his uncle
Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. This he
had with him, and this he ate in the dark-
ness and the lumbering, pounding, thun-
dering noise which made him giddy, as
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 55

never had he been in-a train of any kind
before. Still he ate, having had no break-
fast, and being a child, and half a German,
and not knowing at all how or when he’
ever would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he

wanted, but as much as he thought was
prudent (for who could say when he would
be able to buy anything more ?), he set to
work like a little mouse to make a hole in
the withes of straw and hay which en-
veloped the stove. If it had been put ina
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
56 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and hay and twisted ropes; and get
through them at last he did, and found the
door of the stove, which he knew so well,
and which was quite large enough for a
child of his age to slip through, and it was
this which he had counted upon doing.
Slip through he did, as he had often done
at home for fun, and curled himself up
there to see if he could anyhow remain
during many hours. He found that he
could; air came in through the brass fret-
work of the stove; and with admirable
caution in such a little fellow he leaned out,
_ drew the hay and straw together, re-
arranged the ropes, so that no one could
ever have dreamed a little mouse had been
at them. Then he curled himself up again,
this time more like a dormouse than any-
thing 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 Jumbered on,
stopped often and long, as the habit of
goods-trains ‘is, sweeping the snow away
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 57

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 grand-
father’s at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even
send over to Jenbach, thinking he had
taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His
conscience smote him for the sorrow he
must be even then causing to his gentle
sister; but it never occurred to him to try
and go back. If he once were to lose
sight of Hirschvogel how could he ever
hope to find it again? how could he ever
know whither it had gone,— north, south,
58 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

east or west? The old neighbor had said
that the world was small; but August
knew at least that it must have a great
many places in it: that he had seen himself
on the maps on his school-house walls.
Almost any other little boy would, I think,
have been frightened out of his wits at the
position in which he found himself; but
August was brave, and he had a firm belief
that God and Hirschvogel would take care
. of him. The master-potter of Nirnberg
was always present to his mind, a kindly,
benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling man-
ifestly 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 sob-
bing both, though he was so utterly in the
dark. He did not feel cramped at all,
because the stove was so large, and air he
had in plenty, as it came through the fret-
work running round the top. He was
hungry again, and again nibbled with pru-
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 59

dence at his loaf and his sausage. He
~ could not at all tell the hour. Every time
the train stopped and he heard the bang-
ing, stamping, shouting, and jangling of
chains that went on, his heart seemed to
jump up into his mouth. If they should
find him out! Sometimes porters came
and took away this case and the other, a
sack here, a bale there, now a big bag,
now a dead chamois. Every time the men
trampled near him, and swore at each
other, and banged this and that to and fro,
he was so frightened that his very breath
seemed. to stop. When they came to lift
the stove out, would they find him? and if
they did find him, would they kill him?
That was what he kept thinking of all the
way, all through the dark hours, which
seemed without end. The goods-trains
are usually very slow, and are many
days doing what a quick train does in a
few hours. This one was quicker than
most, because it was bearing goods to the
King of Bavaria; still, it took all the. short
winter's day and the long winter’s night
60 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and half another day to go over ground
that the mail-trains cover in a forenoon.
It passed great armored Kuffstein standing
across the beautiful and solemn gorge,
denying the right of way to all the foes of
Austria. It passed twelve hours later,







“) i ’
NNROr Nee
i st Ka Ng
‘ty ok it is a \

‘ i AN
CUA




Ms Ge

after lying by in out-of-the-way stations,
pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border
of Bavaria. And here the Niirnberg stove,
with August inside it, was lifted out heed-
fully 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 NURNBERG STOVE. 61

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





tent;

Fs Sp Ne o's
Gz oS ry

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. Ifthere

had not been whole armies of men at work
62 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

always clearing the iron rails of the snow,
no trains could ever have runatall. Hap-
pily for August, the thick wrappings in
which the stove was enveloped and the
stoutness of its own make screened him
from the cold, of which, else, he must have -
died,— frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a litthe—a very little—of his
sausage. What he did begin to suffer
from was thirst; and this frightened him
almost more than anything else, for Doro-
thea 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 -
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 63

passenger-train that would leave there at
daybreak. And when this train went out,
in it, among piles of luggage belonging to
other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-
Pest, Salzburg, was August, still undis-
covered, still doubled up’ like a mole in the
winter under the grass. Those words,
‘fragile and valuable,” had made the men
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He
had begun to get used to his prison, and a
little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with
which modern travel is always accom-
panied, though modern invention does
deem itself so mightily clever. All in the
_ dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty ;
but he kept feeling the earthenware sides
of the Niirnberg giant and saying, softly,
“Take care of me; oh, take care of me,
dear Hirschvogel !”

He did not say, ‘‘Take me back;” for,
now that he was fairly out in the world, he
wished to see a little of it. He began to
think that they must have been all over
the world in all this time that the rolling
64 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

and roaring and hissing and jangling had
been about his ears; shut up in the dark,
he began to remember all the tales that
had been told in Yule round the fire at his
grandfather's good house at Dorf, of
gnomes and elves and subterranean ter-
rors, and the Erl King riding on the black
horse of night, and — and — and he began
to sob and to tremble again, and this time
did scream outright. But the steam was
screaming itself so loudly that no one,
had there been 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 Bayeris-
chenwald by the Bavarian forest guards,
when in the excitement of hunting a black
bear he had overpassed the limits of the
Tyrol frontier.

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

w
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 65

handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made
the very name of Bavaria a terror to
August.

“It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!” he sob-

bed to the stove; but the stove said noth-
ing 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.

“Tt is Bavaria!”
sobbed August; for it
is always a name of
dread augury to the
Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter strug-
gles and midnight shots and untimely deaths
which come from those meetings of jager
and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But
the train stopped; Munich was reached, and

a
Xi
Lp oN, Get



t y LY /’ fe. fi
Po Maps
66 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking
like a little aspen-leaf, felt himself once
more carried out on the shoulders of men,
rolled along on a truck, and finally set
down, where he knew not, only he knew he
was thirsty,—so thirsty! If only he could
have reached his hand out and scooped up
a little snow!

He thought he had been moved on this
truck many miles, but in truth the stove
had been only taken from the railway-
station to a shop in the Marienplatz. Fort-
unately, the stove was always set upright
on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that
effect having been affixed to its written
label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in
the small dark curiosity-shop of one Hans ~
Rhilfer.

“T 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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 67

pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue
jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers,
Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs,
and all the art lumber and fabricated rub-
bish of a dvzc-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a



wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there
one drop of water in it all? That was his
single thought ; for his tongue was _ parch-
ing, 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
68 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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, cram-
med the snow into his mouth again and
again, and then flew back into the stove,
drew the hay and straw over the place he
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the
brass door down on himself. He had -
brought some big icicles in with him, and
by them his thirst was finally, if only tem-
porarily, quenched. Then he sat still in.
the bottom of the stove, listening intently,
wide awake, and once more recovering his
natural boldness.

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping
his heart and his conscience with a hard
squeeze now and then; but he thought to
himself, “If I can take her back Hirsch-
vogel, then how pleased she will be, and
how little Gilda will clap her hands!” He
was not at all selfish in his love for Hirsch-
vogel: 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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 69

shame that his father — his own father —
should have stripped their hearth and sold
their honor thus.

A robin had been perched upon a stone
griffin sculptured on a house-eave near.
August had felt for the crumbs of his
loaf in his pocket, and had thrown them to
the little bird sitting so easily on the frozen
snow.

In the darkness where he was he now
heard a little song, made faint by the stove-
wall and the window-glass that was between
him and it, but still distinct and exquisitely
sweet. It was the robin, singing after
feeding on the crumbs. August, as he
heard, burst into tears. He thought of
Dorothea, who every morning threw out
some grain or some bread on the snow be-
fore the church. ‘What use is it going
there,’ she said, ‘‘if we forget the sweetest
creatures God has made?” Poor Doro-
thea! 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
70 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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 alittle mad dog; muzzle him!”
The voice said, ‘Ay, ay, you have called
mea fool many times. Now you shall see —
what I have gotten for two hundred dirty
florins. Potztausend/ never did you do
such a stroke of work.”

Then the other voice grumbled and
swore, and the steps of the two men ap-
proached more closely, and the heart of the
child went pit-a-pat, pit-d-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 wrap-
pings: that he could tell by the noise they
made with the hay andthe straw. Soon they
had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew
by the oaths and exclamations of wonder
and surprise and rapture which broke from
the man who had not seen it before.

“A right royal thing! A wonderful and
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 71

never-to-be-rivalled thing! Grander than
the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sub-
lime! magnificent! matchless!”

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural
voices, diffusing a smell of lager-beer so
strong as they spoke
that it reached August
crouching in his
stronghold: If they
should open the door
of the stove! That
was his frantic fear.
If they should open
it, it would be all over
withy-him: -Phey
would drag him out;
most likely they
would kill him, he
thought, as his moth-
ers 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 stand-
ing by the Niirnberg master’s work for


72 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

nigh an hour, praising, marvelling, expati-
ating in the lengthy German tongue, the
men moved to a little distance and began
talking of sums of money and divided
profits, of which discourse he could. make.
out no meaning. All he could make out
was that the name of the king -— the king
—the king came over very often in their
arguments.. He fancied at times they
quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their
voices rose hoarse and high; but after a
while they seemed to pacify each other and
agree to something, and were in great glee,
and so in these merry spirits came and
slapped the luminous sides of stately
Hirschvogel, and shouted to it, —

‘Old Mumchance, you have brought us
rare good luck! To think you were smok-
ing 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,
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 73

when he remembered, just in time, that to
breathe a word or make a sound was to
bring ruin on himself and sever him forever
from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still,
and the men barred the shutters of the little _
lattice and went out by the door, double-
locking it after them. He had made out
from their talk that they were going to
show Hirschvogel to some great person:
therefore he kept quite still and dared not
move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the
shutters from the streets below,—the roll- .
ing of wheels, the clanging of church-bells,
and bursts of that military music which is
so seldom silent in the streets of Munich.
An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of:
steps on the stairs kept him in perpetual
apprehension. In the intensity of his
anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and
many miles away from cheerful, Old World
little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-
water, with the ramparts of the mountains
all around.

Presently the door opened again sharply.
74 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

He could hear the two dealers’ voices mur-
muring unctuous words, in which “honor,”
“gratitude,” and many fine long noble titles
played the chief parts. The voice of an-
other person, more clear and refined than
theirs, answered 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 Hirsch-
vogel 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 Em-
peror Maximilian,” he said at last; and the
poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was
‘hugged up into nothing,” as you children
say, dreading that every moment he would
open the stove. And open it truly he did,
and examined the brass-work of the door;
but inside it was so dark that crouching
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 75

August passed unnoticed, screwed up into
a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The
gentleman shut to the door at length, with-
out 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 ac-
company 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
76 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

were locked in, but at least they were to-
gether. If only he could have had some-
thing to eat! He thought with a pang of
how at this hour at home they ate the
sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it
from Aunt Maila’s farm orchard, and sang
together, and listened to Dorothea’s read-
_ ing of little 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 deal-
ers 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 howl-
ing of the wind and the deep sound of the
church-bells, and tried very much to make
each other believe that the wolves still
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 77

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 over-
came him that he burst out crying for the
fiftieth time since he had been inside the
stove, and felt that he would starve to
death, and wondered dreamily if Hirsch-
vogel would care. Yes, he was sure
Hirschvogel would care. Had he not
decked it all summer long with alpine roses
and edelweiss and heaths and made it
sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and
great garden-lilies? Had he ever forgotten
when Santa Claus came to make it its
crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all
around? —

‘‘Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of
me!” he prayed to the old fire-king, and
forgot, poor little man, that he had come
on this wild-goose chase northward to save
and take care of Hirschvogel!
78 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

After atime he dropped asleep, as chil-
dren can do when they weep, and little
robust hill-born boys most surely do, be
they where they may. It was not very
cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly
shut up, and very full of things, and at the
back of it were the hot pipes of an adjacent
house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt.
Moreover, August’s clothes were warm
ones, and his blood was young. So he
was not cold, though Munich is terribly
cold in the nights of December; and he
slept on and on,— which was a comfort to
him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils,
and his hunger for a time. ;

Midnight was once more chiming from all
the brazen tongues of the city when he
awoke, and, all being still around him,
ventured to put his head out of the brass
door of the stove to see why sucha strange
bright light was round him.

It was a very strange and brilliant light
indeed; and yet, what is perhaps | still
stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him,
nor did what he saw alarm him either, and
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 79

yet I think it would have done you or me.
For what he saw was nothing less than all
the érvzc-d-brac in motion.
A big jug, an Apos-
: se tel-Krug, of Kruessen,
RA J was solemnly dancing a
of, minuet with a plump
» Faenza jar; a tall Dutch
clock was going through
a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient
chair ;.a very droll porcelain figure of Zitz-
enhausen was bowing to a very stiff
soldier in derre cuzte of Ulm ; =
an old violin of Cremona was
_ playing itself, and a queer
little shrill plaintive music
that thought itself merry
came from a painted spinnet
covered with faded roses;
some gilt Spanish leather
had got up on the wall and
laughed; a Dresden mirror
was tripping about, crowned with flowers,
and a Japanese bonze was riding along
on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier had






80 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre,
all about a little pale-faced chit of a
damsel in white Nymphenburg china;
and a portly Franconian pitcher in
grés gris was calling aloud, “Oh,
these Italians! always at feud!” But
nobody listened to him at all. A
great number of little Dresden cups
and saucers were all skipping and
waltzing; the teapots, with their
broad round faces, were spinning their
own lids like teetotums; the high-
backed gilded chairs were having a
game of cards together; and a little
Saxe poodle, with a
blue ribbon at its ,

throat, was running from Si a

one to another, whilst ~“2#=77e*

a yellow cat of Cornelis Zachtleven’s
i rode about on a Delft horse in blue
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the
brilliant light shed on the scene
came from three silver candelabra,
en they had no candles set up in
them ; and, what is the greatest miracle of




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 81

all, August looked on at these mad freaks
and felt no sensation of wonder! He only,
as he heard the violin and the spinnet play-
ing, felt an irresistible desire to dance
too.

No doubt his face said what he wished;
for ‘a lovely little lady, all in pink and gold
and white, with powdered hair, and high-
heeled shoes, and all made of the very
finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped
up to him, and smiled, and
gave him her hand, and led fr
him out to a minuet. And he ald (ase
danced it perfectly,—poor lit- %& 4
tle August in his thick, clumsy :
shoes, and his thick, clumsy
sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun
linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He
must have danced it perfectly, this dance
of kings and queens in days when crowns
were duly honored, for the lovely lady al-
ways 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





~





ssaslh > Goo wD
sae: g
Ri
82 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

eyes off her till, the minuet ended, she sat
down on her own white-and-gold bracket.

‘“‘T am the Princess of Saxe-Royal,” she
said to him, with a benignant smile; ‘‘and
you have got through that minuet very
fairly.” :
Then he ventured to say to her, —

‘‘Madame my princess, could you tell
me kindly why some ofthe 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
il some of the drzc-d-brac was all full of life
‘and motion, some was quite still and

had not a single thrill in it.

“My dear child,” said the powdered
lady, “‘is it possible that you do not know
the reason? Why, those silent, dull things
are zmutation /”

This she said with so much decision that
she evidently considered it a condensed
but complete answer.

“Imitation?” repeated August, timidly,
not understanding.




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 83

“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica-
tions!” said the princess in pink shoes,
very vivaciously. ‘They only pretend to
be what we ave/ 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, andthe
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?”

“TJ have never thought,” said August,
stammering; “at least—that is—I do
wish—I do hope to be a painter, as was
84 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

Master Augustin Hirschvogel at Niirn-
berg.” /

“Bravo!” said all the real d72c-a-brac in
one breath, and the two Italian rapiers left
off fighting to cry, ‘‘ Bexone/” For there
is not a bit of true érvzc-d-bvac in all Eu-
rope 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.

“T knew all the Hirschvoégel,
~ from old Veit downwards,” said
= a fat grés de Flandre beer-
=== jug: “I myself was made at
Nirnberg.” And he bowed. to the great
stove very: politely, taking off his own.
silver hat—I mean lid—with a courtly
sweep that he could scarcely have learned
from burgomasters. The stove, however,
was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for
what is such heart-break as a suspicion of
what we love?) came through the mind of
August: Was Hirschvogel only imitation?


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 85

«No, no, no, no!” he said to himself,
stoutly: though Hirschvogel never stirred,
never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in
it! After all their happy years together,
after all the nights of warmth and joy he
owed it, should he doubt his own friend
and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had
kissed in his babyhood? ‘No, no, no,
no!” he said, again, with so much
emphasis that the Lady of Meissen
looked sharply again at him.

“No,” she said, with pretty disdain;
“no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’
forever. . They can never look like us!
They imitate even our marks, but
never can they look like the real
thing, never can they chassent de
race.”

‘How should they?” said a bronze stat-
uette of Vischer’s. “They daub them-
selves 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


86 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of
a hostelry’s sign-board!” said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.

“Well, there is a grés 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 differ-
ence there is! How crude are his blues!
how evidently done over the glaze are his _
black letters! He has tried to give him-
self my very twist; but what a lamentable
exaggeration of that playful deviation in
my lines which in his becomes actual
deformity !”

“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordo-
van leather, with a contemptuous glance at
a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
onatable. ‘They will sell him cheek by
jowl with me, and give him my name; but
look! Jam overlaid with pure gold beaten
thin as a film and laid on me in absolute
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 87

honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias,
worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the
blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Chris-
tian. A/zs gilding is one part gold to
eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and
it has been laid on him with a brush—a
brush! —pah! of course he will be as black
as a crock in a few years’ time, whilst I am
as bright as when I first was made, and,
unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt
its heretics, I shall shine on forever.”
‘They carve pear-wood because it is so
soft, and dye it brown, and call it me/”
said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
“That is not so painful; it does not
vulgarize you so much as the cups they
paint to-day and christen after me/” said
a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet
gorgeous as a jewel.
‘Nothing can be so annoying as to see
common gimcracks aping me /” interposed
the princess in the pink shoes.
‘They even steal my motto, though it is
Scripture,” said a Zrauerkrug of Regens-
burg in black-and-white.
88 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“And my own dots they put on plain
English china creatures!” sighed the little
white maid of Nymphenburg. 2

“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 blas-
phemy!” said a stout plate se ,
of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had
seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
“That is what is so
terrible in these drzc-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 hap-




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 89

pened to a dear friend of mine, a serve
curte of Blasius (you know the éerres cuttes
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 yester-
day at Frankfort, and what think you the
miserable creature said to him, with a
grin? ‘Old Pipeclay,—that
is what he called my friend,
—‘the fellow that bought me
got just as much commission
on me as.the fellow that , ly
bought you, and that was all
that Ze thought about. You
know it is only the public
money that goes!’ And
the horrid creature grinned again till he
actually cracked himself. ‘There isa Prov-
dence above all things, even museums.”

“Providence might have interfered be-
fore, and saved the public money,” said
the little Meissen lady with the pink
shoes.

“After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch


go _ THE NURNBERG STOVE.

jar of Haarlem. “All the shamming in
the world will not make them us!”

“One does not like to be vulgarized,”
said the Lady of Meissen, angrily.

“My maker, the Krabbetje,’ did not
trouble his head about that,” said the Haar-
lem jar, proudly. ‘The Krabbetje made
me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-
white Dutch kitchen, wellnigh three
centuries ago, and now! am thought
worthy the palace; yet I wish I were
at home; yes, I wish I could see the
good Dutch vrouw, and the shin-
ing 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 gra-
cious days of the Renaissance: and some-
how the words touched the frolicsome
souls of the dancing jars, the spinning tea-
pots, the chairs that were playing cards;
and the violin stopped its merry music



1Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610,
master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.

”
THE NURNBERG STOVE. gI

with a sob, and the spinnet sighed,—think-
ing of dead hands.

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for
a master forever lost; and only the swords
went on quarreling, and made such a
clattering noise that the Japanese bonze
rode at them on his monster and knocked
them both right over, and they lay straight ,
and still, looking foolish, and the little .
Nymphenburg maid, though she was cry-
ing, smiled and almost laughed.

Then from where the, great stove stood
there came a solemn voice.

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and
the heart of its little human comrade gave
a great jump of joy.

‘‘My friends,” said that clear voice from
the turret of 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 Wind-
bags. Let not us be like them. I hear
among men so much vain speech, so much
precious breath and precious time wasted
in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless
92 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble
mouthings, that I have learned to deem
speech a curse, laid on man to weaken and
envenom all his undertakings. For over
two hundred years I
have never spoken my-
self: you, I hear, are not
so reticent. I only
speak now because one
of you said a beautiful
thing that touched me.
If we all might but go
back to our makers! |
Ah, yes! if we might!
We were made in days
when even men were
true creatures, and so
we, the work of their
hands, were true too.
We, the begotten of ancient days, derive
all the value in us from the fact that our
makers wrought at us with zeal, with
piety, with integrity, with faith,—not to
win fortunes or to glut a market, but to do
nobly an honest thing and create for the


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 93

honor of.the Arts and God. I see amidst
you a little human thing who loves me,
and in his own ignorant childish way loves
Art. Now, I want him forever to remem-
ber this night and these words; to remem-
ber that we are what we are, and precious
in the eyes of the world, because centuries
ago those who were of single mind and of
pure hand so created us, scorning sham and
haste and counterfeit. Well do I recollect
my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He
led a wise and blameless life, and wrought
in loyalty and love, and made his time
beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich,
many-colored church casements, that told
holy tales as the sun streamed through
them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go back to
our masters!—that would be the best that
could befall us. But they are gone, and
even the perishable labors of their lives
outlive them. For many, many years I,
once honored of emperors, dwelt in a
humble house and warmed in successive
winters three generations of little, cold,
hungry children. When I warmed them
94 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

they forgot that they were hungry; they
laughed and told tales, and slept at last
about my feet. Then I knew that hum-
ble 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 flatter-
ing 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 fleet-
ing mortal lives! Only we endure,— we,
the things that the human brain creates.
We can but bless them a little as they glide
by: if- we have done that, we have done
what our masters wished. So in us our
masters, being dead, yet may speak and
live.”
Then the voice sank away in silence, and
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 95

a strange golden light that had shone on
the great stove faded away; so also the
light’ died down in the silver candelabra.
‘A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through
the room. It came from the old, old
spinnet that was covered with the faded
roses.

Then that sad, sighing music of a by-
gone day died too; the clocks of the city
struck six of the morning; day was rising
over the Bayerischenwald. August awoke
with a great start, and found himself lying
on the bare bricks of the floor of the cham-
ber ; and all the 47zc-a-drac was lying quite
still all around. The pretty Lady of
Meissen was motionless on her porcelain
bracket, and the little Saxe poodle was
quiet at her side.

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very
cold, but he was not sensible of it or of the
hunger that was gnawing his little empty
entrails. He was absorbed in the won-
drous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that
he had seen and heard.

All was dark around him. Was it still
96 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

midnight or had morning come? Morn-
ing, surely ; for against the barred shutters
he heard the tiny song of the robin.

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step
up the stair. He had but a moment in
which to scramble back into the interior of
the great stove, when the door opened and
the two dealers entered, bringing burning
candles with them to see their way.

' August was scarcely conscious of danger

more than he was of cold or hunger. A
marvellous sense of courage, of security,
of happiness, was about him, like strong
and gentle arms enfolding him and. lift-
ing him upwards—upwards—upwards!
Hirschvogel would defend him.

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring
the red-breast away; and then tramped
about in their heavy boots and chatted in
contented voices, and began to wrap up
the stove once more in all its straw and
hay and cordage.

It never once occurred to them to glance
inside. Why should they look inside a:
stove that they had bought and were
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 97

about to sell again for all its glorious
beauty of exterior.

The child still did not feel afraid. A



great exaltation had come to him: he was
like one lifted up by his angels.
Presently the two traders called up their
98 THE. NURNBERG STOVE.

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 Ba-
varians down the stairs and out of the
door into the Marienplatz. Even behind
all those wrappings August felt the icy
bite of the intense cold of the outer air at
dawn of a winter's day in Munich. The
men moved the stove with exceeding
gentleness and care, so that he had often
been far more roughly shaken in his big
brothers’ arms than he was in his journey
now; and though both hunger and thirst
made themselves felt, being foes that will
take no denial, he was still in that state of
nervous exaltation which deadens all phys- |
ical 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 recognized all the
THE NURNBERG STOVE. © 99

ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing
railway-noises, and thought, despite his,
courage and excitement, ‘Will it be a very
long journey?” For his stomach had at
times an odd sinking sensation, and his
head sadly often felt light and swimming.
If it was a very, very long journey he felt
half afraid that he would be dead or some-
thing bad before the end, and Hirschvogel
would be so lonely: that was what he
thought most about; not much about him-
self, and not much about Dorothea and
the house at home. He was “high strung
to high emprise,” and could not look be-
hind him.

Whether for a long or a short journey,
whether for weal or woe, the stove with
August still within it was once more
hoisted up into a great van; but this time
it was not all alone, and the two dealers as
well as the six porters were all with it.

He in his darkness knew that; for he
heard their voices. The train glided away
over the Bavarian plain southward ; and he
heard the men say something of Berg and
100 |. THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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



was falling, and which had fallen all night.
‘‘He might have waited till he came to
the city,” grumbled one man to another.
“What weather to stay on at Berg!”
But who he was that stayed on at Berg,
August could not make out at all.
THE NURNBERG STOVE. IOI

Though the men grumbled about the
state of the roads and the season, they
were hilarious and well content, for they
laughed often, and, when they swore, did
so good-humoredly, and promised their
porters fine presents at New-Year; and
August, like a shrewd little boy as he was,
who even in the secluded Innthal had
learned that money is the chief mover of
men’s mirth, thought to himself, with a
terrible pang,—

“They have sold Hirschvogel for some
great sum! They have sold him already!”

Then ‘his heart grew faint and sick with-
in him, for he knew very well that he must
soon die, shut up without food and water
thus; and what new owner of the great |
fire-palace would ever permit him to dwell
in it?

‘Never mind; I wd/ 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.
102 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

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, August could see through the fret-



work of the brass door, as the stove stood
upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-
See was a calm and noble piece of water,
of great width, with low wooded banks and
distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place,
full of rest. .

It was now near ten o'clock. The sun
had come forth; there was a clear gray sky
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 103

hereabouts; the snow’ was not falling,
though it lay white and smooth every-
where, 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 ona
large boat that was in waiting,—one of
those very long and huge boats which the
women in these parts use as laundries, and
the men as timber-rafts. The stove, with
much labor and much expenditure of time
and care, was hoisted into this, and August
would have grown sick and giddy with the
heaving and falling if his big brothers had
not long used him to such tossing about,
so that he was as much at ease head, as
feet, downward. The: stove, once in it
‘safely with its guardians, the big boat
moved across the lake to Leoni. Howa
little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that
Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but
Leoni it is. The big boat was a long time
crossing; the lake here is about three
miles broad, and these heavy barges are
104 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

unwieldy and heavy to move, even though
they are towed and tugged at from the
shore. ;
“Tf we should be too late!” the two
dealers muttered to each other, in agitation
and alarm. ‘He said eleven o'clock.”

“Who was he?” thought August ; “the



buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel.” The
slow passage across the Wurm-See was
accomplished at length: the lake was
placid ; there was a sweet calm in the air
and on the water; there was a great deal
of snow in the sky, though the sun was
shining and gave a solemn hush to the
atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 105,

were going up and down; in the clear
frosty light the distant mountains of Ziller-
thal and the Algau Alps were visible;
market-people, cloaked and furred, went
by on the water or on the banks; the deep
woods of the shores were black and gray
and brown. Poor August could see noth-
ing of a scene that would have delighted
him; as the stove was now set, he could
only see the old worm-eaten wood of the
huge barge.

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.

“Now, men, for a stout mile and half!
You shall drink your reward at Christmas-
time,” said one of the dealers to his
porters, who, stout, strong men as they
were, showed a disposition to grumble at
their task. Encouraged by large promises,
they shouldered sullenly the Nurnberg
stove, grumbling again at its preposterous
weight, but little dreaming that they car-
ried within it a small, panting, trembling
boy; for August began to tremble now
that he was about to see the future owner
of Hirschvogel.
106 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“Tf he look a good, kind man,” he
thought, ‘I will beg him to let me stay
with it.”

The porters began their toilsome jour-
ney, and moved off from the village pier.



He could see nothing, for the brass door
was over his head, and all that gleamed
through it was the clear gray sky. He
had been tilted on to his back, and if he
had not been a little mountaineer, used to
hanging head-downwards over crevasses,
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 107

and, moreover, seasoned to rough treat-
ment by the hunters and guides of the
hills and the salt-workers in the town, he
would have been made ill and sick by the
bruising and shaking and many changes of
position to which he had been subjected.

The way the men took was a mile and
a half in length, but the road was heavy
with snow, and the burden they bore was
heavier still. The dealers cheered them
on, swore at them and praised them in
one breath; besought them and reiterated
their splendid promises, for a clock was
striking eleven, and they had been ordered
to reach their destination at that hour, and,
though the air was so cold, the heat-drops
rolled off their foreheads as they walked,
they were so frightened at being late.
But the porters would not budge a foot
quicker than they chose, and as they were
not poor four-footed carriers their employ-
ers dared not thrash them, though most
willingly would they have done so.

The road seemed terribly long to the
‘anxious tradesmen, to the plodding
108 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

porters, to the poor little man inside the
stove, as he kept sinking and rising, sink-
ing 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 mov-
ing on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come
to himhe concluded that he was in some
heated chambers, for he was a clever little
fellow, and could put two and two together,
though. he was so hungry and so thirsty
and his empty stomach felt so strangely.
They must have gone, he thought, through
some very great number of rooms, for they
walked so long onandon,onandon. Atlast
the stove was set down again, and, happily
for him, set so that his feet were downward.
| THE NURNBERG STOVE. 109

What he fancied was that he was in
some museum, like that which he had seen
in the city of Innspruck.

The voices he heard were very hushed,
and the steps seemed to go away, far —
away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel.
He dared not look out, but he peeped
through the brass-work, and all he could
see was a big carved lion’s head in ivory,
with a gold crown atop. It belonged toa
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.
“Tt is November!”

From afar off, as it seemed, there came
a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the
spinnet’s had been, but so much fuller, so
much richer, seeming as though a chorus
’ of angels were singing all together. Au-
gust ceased to think of the museum; he
thought of heaven. ‘Are we gone to the
Master?” he thought, remembering the
words of Hirschvogel.
110 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

All was so still around him; there was
no sound anywhere except the sound of
the far-off choral music.

He did not know it, but he was in the
royal castle of Berg, and the music he
heard was the music of Wagner, who was
playing in a distant room some of the
motives of ‘ Parsival.”

Presently he heard a fresh step near
him, and he heard a low voice say, close
behind him, “So!” An exclamation no
doubt, he thought, of admiration and won-
der at the beauty of Hirschvogel.

Then the same voice said, after a long
pause, during which no doubt, as August
thought, this new comer was examining all
the details of the wondrous fire-tower, “It
was well bought; it is exceedingly beauti-
ful! It is most undoubtedly the work ot
Augustin Hirschvogel.”

Then the hand of the speaker turned the
round handle of the brass door, and the
fainting soul of the poor little prisoner
within grew sick with fear.

The handle turned, the door was slowly
THE NURNBERG STOVE. Pl

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-
control, and dominated by one master-
passion, sprang out of the body of the
stove and fell at the feet of the speaker.

“Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr let
me stay!” he sobbed. ‘I have come all
the way with Hirschvogel!”

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not
gently by any means, and their lips angrily
muttered in his ear, “ Little knave, peace!
be quiet! hold your tongue! It is the
king!”

They were about to drag him out of the
august atmosphere as if he had been some
venomous, dangerous beast come there to
slay, but the voice he had heard speak of
the stove said, in kind accents,‘ Poor little
child! he is very young. Let him go: let
him speak to me.”

The word of a king is law to his court-
112 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

iers: 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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 113

midst of the most beautiful chamber he had
ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a
young man with a beautiful dark face, and
eyes full of dreams and fire ; and the young
man said to him, — :

‘““My child, how came you here, hidden



in this stove? Be not afraid: tell me the
truth. I am the king.”

August in an instinct of homage cast his
great battered black hat with the tarnished
gold tassels down on the floor of the room,
and folded his little brown hands in suppli-
cation. He was too intensely in earnest to
II4 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

be in any way abashed; he was too lifted
out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel.
to be conscious of any awe before any
earthly majesty. He was only so glad —

so glad it was the king. Kings were al-
> Nis. mat yi A

























ways kind; so the Tyrolese think, ah love
their fords

‘Oh, dear king!” he said, with trembling
entreaty in his faint little voice, ‘‘ Hirsch-
vogel was ours, and we have loved it all
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 115

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 i

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 motioned to his gentlemen to leave the
little boy alone.

“What is your name?” he asked him.

“T am August Strehla. My father is
Hans Strehla. We live in Hall, in the Inn-


116 -THE NURNBERG STOVE.

thal; 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 forins,” 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-i in-
waiting. “Did these dealers of Munich
come with the stove?”
THE NURNBERG STOVE... 117

He was answered in the affirmative.
He desired them to be sought for and
brought before him. As one of his cham-
berlains hastened on the errand, the
monarch looked at August with compas-
sion.

‘You are very pale, little fellow: when
did you eat last?”

“| had some bread ee sausage with
me; yesterday afternoon I finished it.’

“You would like to eat now?”

“Tf 1 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 any-.

‘thing. 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 Hirsch-
vogel was, —I mean the master that made
my Hirschvogel.”
118 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

“7 understand,” said the king.
Then the two dealers were brought into
their sovereign’s presence. They were so

















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terribly alarmed, not being either so inno-
cent or so ignorant as August was, that
they were trembling as though they were
being led to the slaughter, and they were
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 119

so utterly astonished too at a child having
come all the way from Tyrol in the stove,
as a gentleman of the court had just told
them this child had done, that they could
not tell what to say or where to look, and
presented a very foolish aspect indeed.

“Did you buy this 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 addressing the child, but very
stern.

“Yes, your majesty,” murmured the
trembling traders.

“And how much did the gentleman who
purchased it for me give to you ?”

“Two thousand ducats, your majesty,”
muttered the dealers, frightened out of
their wits, and telling the truth in their
fright.

- The gentleman was not present: he was
a trusted counsellor in art matters of the
king’s, and often made purchases for him.

The king smiled a little, and said noth-
120 THE NURNBERG STOVE.

ing. The gentleman had made out the
price to him as eleven thousand ducats. —

“You will give at once to this boy’s
father the two thousand gold ducats that
you received, less the two hundred Austrian
florins that you paid him,” said the king to
his humiliated and abject subjects. ‘You
are great rogues. Be thankful you are
not more greatly punished.”

He dismissed them by a sign to his
courtiers, and to one of these gave the
mission of making the dealers of the Ma-
rienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten gains. -

August heard, and felt dazzled yet mis-
erable. 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
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 121

painful thought, for the deception so basely
practised for the greedy sake of gain on
him bya trusted counsellor was bitter to him.

He looked down on the child, and as he
did so smiled once more.

‘Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a
kind voice; “kneel only to your God.
Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel ?
Yes, I will, you shall stay at my court, and
you shall be taught to be a painter,—in
oils or on porcelain as you will,— and you
must grow up worthily, and win all the
laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when
you are twenty-one years old you have
done well and bravely, then I will give you
your Niirnberg stove, or, if 1am no more
living, then those who reign after me shall
do so. And now go away with this gentle-
man, 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.” bolas

Then he smiled and stretched out his
hand; the courtiers tried to make August
understand that he ought to bow and touch
1225: THE NURNBERG STOVE.

it with his lips, but August could not
understand that anyhow; he was too happy.
He threw his two arms about the king’s ©
knees, and kissed his feet passionately ;
then he lost all sense of where he was, and
_ fainted away from hunger, and tire, and
emotion, and wondrous joy.

As the darkness of his swoon closed in
on him, he heard in his fancy the voice from .
~ Hirschvogel saying,—

“Let us be worthy our maker !”

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a
happy scholar, and promises to be a great
man. Sometimes he goes back for a few
days to Hall, where the gold ducats have
made his father prosperous. In the old
house-room there is a large white porcelain
stove of Munich, the king’s gift to Doro-
thea and ’Gilda.

And August never goes home without
going into the great church and saying his
thanks to God, who blessed his strange
winter's journey in the Niirnberg stove.
As for his dream in the dealers’ room that
night, he will never admit -that he did
THE NURNBERG STOVE. 123

dream it; he still declares that he saw it all
and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And
who shall say that he did not? for what is
the gift of the poet and the artist except to
see the sights which others cannot see and
to hear the sounds thatothers cannot hear?