The Nürnberg Stove | Page 5

and of his grandsons, potters, painters,
engravers all, and chief of them great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia
of the North. And August's imagination, always quick, had made a
living personage out of these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as
though he were in the flesh walking up and down the
Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Innspruck, and maturing beautiful
things in his brain as he stood on the bridge and gazed on the
emerald-green flood of the Inn.
So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if it were
a living creature, and little August was very proud because he had been
named after that famous old dead German who had had the genius to
make so glorious a thing. All the children loved the stove, but with
August the love of it was a passion; and in his secret heart he used to
say to himself, "When I am a man, I will make just such things too, and
then I will set Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will
build myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts are,
by the river: that is what I will do when I am a man."
For August, a salt-baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was
anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high

Alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him, was
quite certain that he would live for greater things than driving the herds
up when the 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, 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, stumbling cattle, ringing their
throat-bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the sudden sunlight, and
lived up with them in the heights among the Alpine roses, with only the
clouds and the snow-summits near. But he was always thinking,
thinking, thinking, for all that; and under his little sheepskin winter coat
and his rough hempen summer shirt his heart had and much courage in
it as Hofer's ever had,--great Hofer, who is a household word in all the
Innthal, and whom August always reverently remembered when he
went to the city of Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water-mill and
under the wooded height of Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children stories,
his own little brown face growing red with excitement as his
imagination glowed to fever-heat. That human being on the panels,
who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing among
flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in the midst of
strife, as a father with children round him, as a weary, old, blind man
on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels, had
always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made, not
one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale
twice. He had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him
Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many

things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing, and
then she is of no use at all.
"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea, looking up
from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you must not sit up for
him."
"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little rosy
and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel is so
warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us another tale,
August?"
"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his story had
come to an end, and who