THE LITTLE LIBRARY’ For 4-6 year olds A Child’s Garden of Verse Little Jack Rabbit A Visit from St. Nicholas : Dame Wiggins of Lee and Her Seven Wonderful Cats Sing-Song and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti The Little Wooden Doll A Baby’s Life of Jesus Christ Charlie and His Kitten Topsy For 6-8 year olds Thumbelina The Cat and the Captain The Little Children’s Bible The Light Princess The King of the Golden River Silver Pennies A Dog of Flanders The Pope’s Mule Memoirs of a Donkey The Peep-Show Man The Peter Pan Picture Book Memoirs of a London Doll The Little Lame Prince The Adventures of a Brownie Goody Two Shoes The Magic Forest Susanna’s Auction For 8-10 year olds Little Dog Toby The Niirnberg Stove The Good-Natured Beat The Merry Pilgrimage The Sons of Kai The Rose and the Ring King Penguin—A Legend of the South Seas ONE DOLLAR EACH THE MACMILLAN COMPANY i Come THE NURNBERG STOVE Oy laos. 193 y. or Mobil . THE LITTLE LIBRARY For 4-6 YEAR Ops A CuHILp’s GARDEN OF VERSES LittLe JAcK RABBIT A VisiT From St. NicHOLAsS Dame Wiccins oF LEE anp HER SEVEN WoNDERFUL Cats Sinc-SonG AND OTHER PoEmMs By CHRISTINA ROSsETTI Tue LirtteE Woopen Dori A Basy’s Lire or Jesus CHRIST CHARLIE AND His Kitten Topsy For 6-8 Year OLps THUMBELINA Tue Cat aND THE CAPTAIN CHARLIE AND His FRIENDS Tue LitrLe CHILDREN’S BIBLE Tue Licut PRINcEsS Ture Kinc oF THE GOLDEN RIVER SILVER PENNIES A Doc or FLANDERS Tue Pore’s MULE Memorrs oF A DONKEY Tue Prer-SHow Man Tue Peter Pan Picture Boox Memoirs oF A Lonpon DoLi Tue LittLeE Lame PrINcE Tue ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE Goopy Two SHOES THe Macic Forest Susanna’s AUCTION For 8-10 Yrear Ops LittLtE Doc Tosy THe NURNBERG STOVE THE Goopv-NaturED BEaR THE MERRY PILGRIMAGE Tue Sons or Kar Tue RosE AND THE RING cape Pencuin—A LEGEND OF THE SOUTH EAS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY “AND YOU SHALL LIGHT A FIRE EVERY MORNING IN HIRSCHVOGEL. Che Niirnberg Stove By OUIDA (Louise De La Rame) PICTURES BY FRANK BOYD THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK MCMXXVIII All rights reserved CopyricuT, 1928, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1928. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY STRATFORD PRESS, INC. 3 . Pe F { ; ILLUSTRATIONS “AND YOU SHALL LIGHT A FIRE EVERY MORN- ING IN HIRSCHVOGEL.” . j Frontispiece PAGE THE BOY DARTED IN WITH THE BEER ., : cf AUGUST WAS THE ARTIST OF THE FAMILY ° 17 THE MEN FROM MUNICH BORE THE STOVE AWAY . : 4 - 4 : g 51 “GO AFTER IT WHEN YOU ARE BIGGER,’ SAID THE NEIGHBOR ; ; > - ; 55 “GRANDER THAN THE STOVE OF HOHEN- SALZBURG!” ., ; ; cs é ; 81 A VENETIAN RAPIER CAME TO BLOWS WITH A FERRARA SABER . 2 s : ‘ 93 “‘T AM THE PRINCESS OF SAXE-ROYALE.”’ . 97 ie a THE NURNBERG STOVE oil ue he Vil ay) THE NURNBERG STOVE I Aveust lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite name for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one special little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming Old- World places that I know, and August for his part did not know any other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it, and the gray- green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved streets and enchanting little 1 2 THE NURNBERG STOVE shops that have all latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, which has the noblest blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of in- finite strength and repose as a church should have. ‘Then there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery and looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and there is an old schloss which has been made into a guardhouse, 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. rysT ; 7 Mill flee (inasanestennae ft Sadan ae THE lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold be- came intense 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 house- hold treasure, which henceforth was to be cold forevermore, an exiled thing in a foreign city in a far-off land. While it was yet dark his three elder brothers came down the stairs and let 46 THE NURNBERG STOVE 47 themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going to his work in stoneyard and timberyard and at the salt works. They did not notice him; they did not know what had happened. A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make ready the house ere morning should break. She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly. “Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!” August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that she had never seen there. His face was ashen white; his lips were like fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless _trances, which had alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible hours. “Tt will never be warm again,” he muttered, “never again!” 48 THE NURNBERG STOVE Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands. “August! do you not know me?” she cried, in an agony. “I am Dorothea. Wake up, dear—wake up! It is morning, only so dark!” August shuddered all over. “The morning?’ he echoed. He slowly rose to his feet. “TI will go to grandfather,” he said, very low. “He is always good: perhaps he could save it.”’ 3 Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house door drowned his words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole: “Let mein! Quick—there is no time to lose! More snow like this, and the roads will all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear? I have come to take the great stove.” August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing. THE NURNBERG STOVE 49 “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. “1! 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 a little mad dog here: muzzle him.” One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the Bavarian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men, and his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of the back entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful stove set to work to pack it carefully 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, 50 THE NURNBERG STOVE and sobbed over the child, while the others stood looking on, dimly understanding that with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of their bodies, all the hight of their hearth. Even their father now was sorry and ashamed; but two hundred florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron stove in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now or not, the work of the 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 oxcart stood in waiting for it. In another moment Hirschvogel was gone—gone forever. August had stood still for a time, lean- ing, sick and faint from the violence that had been done him, against the back wall of the house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of other THE NURNBERG STOVE 53 houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the peaks of the mountains. Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for water, and, seeing the boy, said to him: “Child, is it true that your father is selling the big painted stove?’ August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears. “Well, he surely is a fool,’ said the neighbor. “Heaven forgiveme for calling him that before his own child! but the stove was worth a mint of money. I re- member in my young days, in old Anton’s time (that was your great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw it, and said it was worth its weight in gold.” August’s sobs went on their broken, im- petuous course. “I loved it! I loved it!’ he moaned. “T don’t care what its value was. I loved it! I loved it!” “You little simpleton!” said the old man, kindly. “But you are wiser than 54 THE NURNBERG STOVE your father, when all’s said. If sell it he ‘must, he should have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spriiz, who would have given him honest value. But no doubt they took him over his beer—aye, aye! but if I were you I would do better than cry. I would go after it.” August raised his head, the tears rain- ing 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 traveling 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 cotton wool by everybody. Aye, aye, don’t cry so much; you will see your stove again some day.” Then the old man hobbled away to draw his wooden pail full of water at the well. August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing and his heart THE NEIGHBOR. % hot a wal’, THE NURNBERG STOVE 57 fluttering with the new idea that had presented itself to his mind. “Go after it,” had said the old man. He thought, “Why not go with it?’ He loved it better than anyone else, even better than Doro- thea; and he shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel. He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the courtyard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his father’s house door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery. He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed through to go to mass or compline within, and 58 THE NURNBERG STOVE presently his heart gave a great leap, for he saw the straw-inwrapped stove brought out and laid with infinite care on the bull- ock dray. ‘Two of the Bavarian men mounted beside it, and the sleigh wagon slowly crept over the snow of the place— snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble old minster looked its grandest and most solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its vast archways, and its porch that was it- self 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 enough figure, 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 fol- lowed 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 THE NURNBERG STOVE 59 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. VI Aveust had often hung about the little station, watching the trains come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and vanish. No one said anything to him for idling about; people are kind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleasant land, and children and dogs are both happy there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and vociferating a great deal, and learned that they meant to go too and wanted to go with the great stove itself. But this they could not do, for neither could the stove go by a passenger train nor could they them- 60 THE NURNBERG STOVE 61 selves go in a goods train. So at length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and consented to send it by a luggage train which was to pass through Hall in half an hour. The swift trains sel- dom deign to notice the existence of Hall at all. August heard, and a desperate resolve formed itself in his little mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible thought to Dorothea—poor, gentle Dorothea!—sitting in the cold at home, then set to work to execute his project. How he managed it he never knew very clearly himself, but certain it is that when the goods train from the north, which had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, moved out of Hall, August was hidden behind the stove in the great covered truck, and wedged, un- seen and undreamt of by any human creature, amidst the cases of wood-carv- ing, of clocks and clockwork, of Vienna toys, of Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, 62 THE NURNBERG STOVE 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 init. But August was not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be closer still; for he meant to do nothing less than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being — a shrewd little boy, and having had by great luck two silver groschen in his breeches-pocket, which he had earned the day before by chopping wood, he had bought some bread and sausage at the station of a woman there who knew him, and who thought he was going out to his Uncle Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. THE NURNBERG STOVE 63 This he had with him, and this he ate in the darkness and amid the lumbering, pounding, thundering noise which made him giddy, as he had never been in a train of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast, and being a child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how or when he ever would eat again. When he had eaten, not so much as he wanted, but as much as he thought was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to buy anything more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a hole in the withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If it had been put into a packing case he would have been defeated at the outset. 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 64 THE NURNBERG STOVE and on, and he saw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining waters, and great forests through which he was being carried. He was hard at work getting through the straw and hay and twisted ropes; and get through them at last he did, and found the door of the stove, which he knew so well, and which was quite large enough for a child of his age to slip through, and it was this which he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done at home for fun, and curled himself up to see whether he could remain there many hours. He found that he could; air came in through the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no one could ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. ‘Then he curled himself up again, this time more like a dormouse than anything else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he THE NURNBERG STOVE 65 went fast asleep as if he were in his own bed at home with Albrecht and Christof on either side of him. The train lumbered on, stopping often and long, as is the habit of goods trains, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher, and rumbling through the deep heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow like the eyes of a dog in a night of frost. The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child slept soundly for a long while. When he did wake, 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, heartbroken fashion, thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! How anxious she would be! How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather’s at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for 66 THE NURNBERG STOVE the sorrow he must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but it never occurred to him to try to go back. If he once were to lose sight of Hirschvogel, how could he ever hope to find it again? How could he ever know whither it had gone— north, south, east, or west? The old neigh- bor 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 schoolhouse walls. Almost any other little boy would, I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position in which he found him- self; but August was brave, and he had a firm belief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. The master potter of Nurnberg was always present to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porce- lain 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 was this one of August’s. a i alt cacti THE NURNBERG STOVE 67 So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through the fretwork running round the top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at all tell the hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the banging, stamp- ing, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on, his heart seemed to Jump up into his mouth. If they should find him out! Sometimes 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 68 THE NURNBERG STOVE the dark hours, which seemed without end. The goods trains are usually very slow, and are many days doing what a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker than most, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still, it took all the short winter’s day and the long winter’s night and half another day to go over ground that the mail trains cover in a forenoon. It passed great armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out- of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of Bavaria. And here the Niirnberg stove, with August inside it, was carefully lifted out 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 earthen- ware walls of his beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though ae ee oe THE NURNBERG STOVE 69 they swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that a living child was inside it, and they carried it out onto the platform and set it down under the roof of the goods shed. There it passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the while within it. (ANG caM au peas nore h ull ‘ Neal aunt dl ws all Hie ah rine. = a} i (pas clr 4 ! Vil Tue winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was envel- oped and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of which, else, he must have died—frozen. He had still some of his loaf, and a little—a very little 70 THE NURNBERG STOVE 71 —of his sausage. What he did begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured because they could not find any water but the salt sea. It was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water of the hills. But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and registered as “fragile and valuable,” was not treated quite like a mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station master, who knew its consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger train that would leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travelers, to Vienna, Prague, BudaPest, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under the grass. Those 72 THE NURNBERG STOVE words, “fragile and valuable,” had made the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always accompanied, though modern in- vention does deem itself so mightily clever. Allin the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthen- ware sides of the Nurnberg giant and say- ing, softly, “Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!” He did not say, “Take me back’; for, now that he was fairly out in the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that they must have been all over the world in all this time that the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and_ subterranean THE NURNBERG STOVE 73 terrors, and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and—and—and he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no one, had there been anyone nigh, would have heard him; and in another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, “Munchen! Munchen!” Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunt- ing a black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier. That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name of Bavaria a terror to August. “It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!’ he sobbed to the stove; but the stove said TA THE NURNBERG STOVE nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak without fire than a man can see without light. Give it fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in return all the sympathy you ask. “It is Bavaria!” sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread augury to the Tyrolese, by reason of those bitter strug- gles and midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of hunters in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped; Munich was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shak- ing 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 | ; THE NURNBERG STOVE 75 station to a shop in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set up- right 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 con- cluded he was alone, and ventured to peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-d-brac dealer’s. It seemed a won- derful 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 76 THE NURNBERG STOVE dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered with snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his hid- ing place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the hay and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and shut the brass door down on himself. He had brought some big icicles in with him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only temporarily, quenched. ‘Then he sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening in- tently, wide-awake, and once more re- covering his natural boldness. The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience with a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, “If I can take her back 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- THE NURNBERG STOVE fia § 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 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 pane that was be- tween him and it, but still distinct and ex- quisitely 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 bread on the snow before the church. ‘What use is it going there,” she said, “if we forget the sweetest crea- tures God has made?” Poor Dorothea! 78 THE NURNBERG STOVE Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran like rain. Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home. Hirschvogel was here. bee " i oe ie ee oe VIIt PRESENTLY the key turned in the lock of the door; he heard heavy footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father, “You have a little mad dog: muzzle him.” The voice said, “Aye, aye, you have called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I have got for two hundred dirty florins. Potztawsend! never did you do such a stroke of work.” Then the other voice grumbled and 79 80 THE NURNBERG STOVE swore, and the steps of the two men ap- proached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse’s does when it is on the top of a cheese and hears a housemaid’s broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not seen it before. “A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivaled thing! Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime! magnificent! matchless!” So the epithets ran on in thick, guttural voices, diffusing a smell of lager beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door of the stove! That was his frantic fear. If they should open it, it would be all over with him. = Ca ao ‘ } NS (ea \(f bY lon Aes) 1% —]\ 44) NV \ x NK M7 \ Y { SS “GRANDER THAN THE STOVE OF HOHEN- SALZBURG!’ THE NURNBERG STOVE 83 They would drag him out; most likely they would kill him, he thought, as his mother’s young brother had been killed in the Wald. The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by the Niirnberg master’s work for nigh an hour, praising, marveling, expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved off 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 up very often in their arguments. He fancied at times that they quarreled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and agree on 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: 84 THE NURNBERG STOVE “Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you were smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker’s kitchen all these years!” Then inside the stove August Jumped up, with flaming cheeks and clenched hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him for- ever from Hirschvogel. So he kept 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 niove. Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets below—the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church bells, and bursts of that military music THE NURNBERG STOVE 85 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 cheer- ful, Old-World little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the ramparts of the mountains all around. Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two dealers’ voices murmuring unctuous words, in which “honor,” “gratitude,” and many fine, long, noble titles played the chief parts. The voice of another person, more clear and refined than theirs, answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nurn- berg stove and the boy’s ear, ejaculated a single “Wunderschon!” August almost lost his terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great city. He thought the master potter must be glad too. 86 THE NURNBERG STOVE “Wunderschon!” ejaculated the stran- ger 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 brasswork of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching August passed unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The gentleman shut 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 dif- ferent 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 THE NURNBERG STOVE 87 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 fretwork had seen the lines of light. He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and Huirschvogel 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 reading 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 88 THE NURNBERG STOVE she doing without the dear Hirschvogel?” he thought. Poor little "Gilda! she had now only the black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father! August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell Hirschvogel. ‘The mere memory of all those long winter evenings, when they had all closed round it, and roasted chest- nuts or crab apples in it, and listened to the howling of the wind and the deep sound of the church bells, and tried very much to make each other believe that the wolves still came down from the moun- tains 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 knowl- edge that night drew near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and his fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth time since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he THE NURNBERG STOVE 89 would starve to death, and wondered dreamily whether Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with Alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had he ever for- gotten when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all around? “Oh, shelter me! save me! take care of me!” he prayed to the old fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel! After a time he dropped off to sleep, as children can do when they weep, and robust little hill-born boys must 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 hot pipes of an adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. Moreover, August’s clothes were 90 THE NURNBERG STOVE warm ones, and his blood was young. So he was not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in the nights of December; and he slept on and on—which was a comfort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils, and his hunger, for a time. MIDNIGHT was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to put his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a strange bright light was round him. It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, 91 92 THE NURNBERG STOVE nor did what he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done so to you or me. For.what he saw was nothing less than all the bric-d-brac in motion. A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Krues- sen, was solemnly dancing a minuet with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in terre cute of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a queer little shrill, plaintive music that thought itself merry came from a painted spinet covered with faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on the wall and laughed; a Dres- den mirror was tripping about, crowned with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a stout Ferrara saber, all over a pale-faced little chit of a damsel in white Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher A VENETIAN RAPIER CAME TO BLOWS WITH A FERRARA SABER. THE NURNBERG STOVE 95 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 run- ning from one to another, while a yellow cat of Cornelis Lachtleven’s rode about on a Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the scene came from three silver candelabra, though they had no candles set up in them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, August looked on at these mad freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He only, as he heard the violin and the spinet playing, felt an irresistible desire to dance too. No doubt his face said what he wished; for a lovely little lady, all in pink and 96 THE NURNBERG STOVE gold and white, with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes, and all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he danced it perfectly—poor little August in his thick, clumsy. shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolese hat! He must have danced it perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were duly honored, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately measures the spinet was playing that August could not take his eyes off her till, their minuet ended, she sat down on her own white-and- gold bracket. “I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” she said to him, with a benignant smile; “and you have got through that minuet very fairly.” Then he ventured to say to her:— fees s\ yV rs RPE BN Sit eae pee igengenite Fi islet lan Wr VY We y— | Me SYOMGY Fa oe y = >——_ (Z| 4 (y ——— ~Ll ae Ss 9 or — S Soa. “ae THE NURNBERG STOVE 99 “Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the figures and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner like lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?” For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the bric-a-brac was all full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a single thrill in it. “My dear child,” said the powdered lady, “is it possible that you do not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are imitation!” This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered it a condensed but complete answer. “Imitation?” repeated August, timidly, not understanding. “Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica- tions!’ said the princess in pink shoes, very vivaciously. “They only pretend to be what we are! They never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any soul in it yet.” 100 THE NURNBERG STOVE “Oh!” said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood entirely yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul within it: would it not wake up and speak? Oh, dear! how he longed to hear the voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he stood by a lady who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen mark. “What will you be when you are a man?” said the little lady, sharply, for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were smiling. ‘Will you work for the Kdénigliche Porcellan-Manufactur, like my great dead Kandler?” “I have never thought,” said August, stammering; “at least—that is—I do wish —TI do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin Hirschvogel at Nurnberg.” “Bravo!” said all the real bric-a-brac in one breath, and the two Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, “Benone!” For — there is not a bit of true bric-d-brac in all — a ai THE NURNBERG STOVE 101 Europe that does not know the names of the mighty masters. August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as red as the lady’s shoes with bashful contentment. “IT knew all the Hirschvoégel, from old Veit downwards,” said a fat grés de Flandre beer jug; “I myself was made at Nurnberg.” 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 heartbreak as a suspicion of what we love?) came through the mind of August: Was Hirschvogel only imitation? “No, no, no, no!” he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it! After all their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had 102 THE NURNBERG STOVE 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’ for- ever. They can never look like us! They imitate even our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they chasser de race.” “How should they?’ said a bronze statuette 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 ~ colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of a hostelry’s signboard!” 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 4 4 THE NURNBERG STOVE 103 prone on its side in a corner. “He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. He might almost be mistaken for me. But yet what a dif- ference there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently doné 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 de- formity !” “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! J am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cor- dova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. His gilding is one part gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with 104 THE NURNBERG STOVE 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 Cor- dova 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 T'rawerkrug of Regens- burg in black and white. “And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!” sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg. ‘“‘And they sell hundreds and thousands i THE NURNBERG STOVE 105 of common china plates, calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!” said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio. “That is what is so terrible in these bric-a-brac places,” said the princess of Meissen. “It brings one in contact with such low, imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at the Louvre or South Kensing- ton.” “And they get even there,” sighed the grées de Flandre. “A terrible thing hap- pened to a dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Blasius (you know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with a grin? ‘Old Pipeclay’—that 106 THE NURNBERG STOVE is what he called my friend—‘the fellow that bought me got just as much commis- sion on me as the fellow that bought you, and that was all that he thought about. You know it is only the public money that goes!’ And the horrid creature grinned again till he actually cracked himself. - There is a Providence above all things, even museums.” “Providence might have interfered be- fore, and saved the public money,” said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes. “After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch jar of Haarlem. “AI the sham- ming 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 Haarlem jar, proudly. “The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries ago, and now I am thought * Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610, master potter of Delft and Haarlem. ee ee ea a ne. THE NURNBERG STOVE 107 worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at home; yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine.” “Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!’ sighed the Gubbio plate, think- ing of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the Renaissance; and somehow the words touched the frolicsome soul of the dancing jars, the spinning tea- pots, the chairs that were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the spinet sighed, thinking of dead hands. Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and only the swords went on 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. 108 THE NURNBERG STOVE 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 Nurnberg faience, “I have listened to all you have said. There is too much talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called the Windbags. Let us not be like them. I hear among men so much vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his undertakings. For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we all might but go back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were i THE NURNBERG STOVE 109 made in days when even men were true creatures, and so we, the work of their hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, derive all the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us with zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith—not to win fortunes or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create for the honor of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human thing who loves me, and in his own igno- rant, childish way loves Art. Now, I want him forever to remember this night and these words; to remember that we are what we are, and precious in the eyes of the world, because centuries ago those who were of single mind and of pure hand so created us, scorning sham and haste ‘and counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless life, and wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time beauti- ful thereby, like one of his own rich, many-colored church casements, which 110 THE NURNBERG STOVE 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 cold, hungry little children. When I warmed them they forgot that they were hungry; they laughed and told tales, and slept at last about my feet. Then I knew that, humble as had become my lot, it was one that my master would have wished for me, and I was content. Sometimes a tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because she was near me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby in her arms. That was better than to stand in a great hall of a great city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I ae ae THE NURNBERG STOVE 111 go now I know not; but since I go from that humble house where they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. ‘They pass so soon—those fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure—we, the things that the human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they glide by; if we have done that, we have done what our masters wished. Soin us our masters, being dead, yet may speak and live.” Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light that had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light died down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through the room. It came from the old, old spinet that was covered with the faded roses. Then that sad, sighing music of a 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 112 THE NURNBERG STOVE chamber, and all the bric-a-brac was lying quite still all around. The pretty Lady of Meissen was motionless on her porce- lain bracket, and the little Saxe poodle was quiet at her side. He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not sensible of it, nor of the hunger that was gnawing at his empty little stomach. He was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that he had seen and heard. —— | ws. le «TLL 4 — (ay = | Ne Aut was dark around him. Was it still 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 dan- ger more than he was of cold or hunger. 113 114 THE NURNBERG STOVE A marvelous sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding him and lhift- ing him upwards—upwards—upwards! ~ Hirschvogel would defend him. The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the redbreast away, and then tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered in contented voices, and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw and hay and cordage. It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they look inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell again for all its glorious beauty of exterior? The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come over him: he was like one lifted up by his angels. Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove, carefully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some sick prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of oe THE NURNBERG STOVE 115 six stout Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the Marienplatz. Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy bite of the intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter’s day in Munich. The men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so that he had often been far more roughly shaken in his big brothers’ arms than he was in his journey now; and though both hunger and thirst made themselves felt, being foes that will take no denial, he was still in that state of nervous exaltation which deadens all physical suffering and is at once a cordial and an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel speak; that was enough. The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the Nirnberg fire castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right across Munich to the railway station, and August in the dark recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing railway noises, and thought, despite his courage and excitement, “Will it be a 116 THE NURNBERG STOVE very long journey?” For his stomach had at times an odd sinking sensation, and his head, sadly, often felt light and swim- ming. If it was a very, very long journey, he felt half afraid that he would be dead or something bad before the end, and Hirschvogel would be so lonely—that was what he thought most about; not much about himself, and not much about Dorothea and the house at home. He was “high-strung to high emprise,” and could not look behind him. Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe, the stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up into a great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two dealers as well as the six porters were all with it. He in his darkness knew that, for he heard their voices. The train glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the men say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was a Pad % — SS —— ee a ” ce ge ee ee ee ee ee THE NURNBERG STOVE 117 strange to him, and he could not make out what these names meant. The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of steam, and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on account of the snow which was falling, and which had fallen all night. “He might have waited till he came to the city,” grumbled one man to another. “What weather to stay on at Berg!” But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out at all. Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the season, they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed often, and, when they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised their porters fine presents at New-Year; and August, like the shrewd little boy 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: 118 THE NURNBERG STOVE “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 will die,” thought he; “and Hirschvogel will know it.” Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not. It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end. It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to pass from Munich to the Wurm-See, or Lake of Starnberg; but this morning the journey was much slower, because the way was encumbered with snow. When it did reach Possen- hofen and stop, and the Nurnberg stove was lifted out once more, August could see through the fretwork of the brass door, 0 OO ee ee THE NURNBERG STOVE 119 as the stove stood upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See was a calm and noble piece of water, of great width, with low wooded banks and distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest. It was now near ten o’clock. The sun had come forth; there was a clear gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay white and smooth 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 on a large boat that was in waiting—one of those very long and huge boats which the women in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber rafts. The stove, with much labor and much expenditure of time and care, was hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and giddy with the heaving and falling if his big brothers had not long accustomed him to 120 THE NURNBERG STOVE such tossing about, so that he was as much at ease head, as feet, downward. ‘The stove once in it safely with its guardians, the big boat moved across the lake to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat was a long time crossing: the lake here is about three miles wide, and these heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though they are towed and tugged at from the shore. “If we should be too late!’ the two dealers muttered to each other, in agita- tion 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 121 were going up and down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market people, cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was now set, he could see only the old worm-eaten wood of the huge barge. Presently they touched the pier at Leoni. ““Now, men, for a stout mile and a half! You shall drink your reward at Christmas time,” said one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout, strong men though 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 dream- ing that they carried within it a small, panting, trembling boy; for August began 122 THE NURNBERG STOVE to tremble, now that he was about to see the future owner of Hirschvogel. “If he looks like a good, kind man,” he thought, “I will beg him to let me stay with it.” XI 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 cre- vasses, and, moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of 123 | 124 THE NURNBERG STOVE the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of position to which he had been subjected. The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still. The dealers cheered them on, swore at them, and praised them in one breath; besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for a clock was striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach their destination at that hour, and, though the air was so cold, the heat- drops rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they were so frightened at being late. But the porters would not budge a foot quicker than they chose, and as they were not poor four-footed carriers their employers dared not thrash them, though most willingly would they have done so. The road seemed exceedingly long to THE NURNBERG STOVE 125 the anxious tradesmen, to the plodding 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 brasswork 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 be- ing said. He felt that his bearers paused some time, then moved on and on again. Their feet went so softly that he thought they must be moving on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come to him he concluded that he was in some heated chambers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could put two and two together, though he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty stomach felt so strange. They must have gone, he thought, through some very great number of rooms, for they walked so long 126 THE NURNBERG STOVE on and on, on and on. At last the stove was set down again, and, happily for him, set so that his feet were downward. What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he had seen in the city of Innspruck. The voices he heard were very low, and the steps seemed to go away, far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out, but he peeped through the brasswork, and all he could see was a big carved lion’s head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a velvet fautewl, but he could not see the chair, only the ivory lion. There was a delicious fragrance in the air, a fragrance as of flowers. “Only how can it be flowers?” thought August. “It is December!’ From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spinet’s had been, but so much fuller, so much richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all to- THE NURNBERG STOVE 137 gether. August ceased to think of the museum: he thought of heaven. “Are we gone to the Master?” he thought, remem- bering the words of Hirschvogel. All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except the sound of the far-off choral music. He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and the music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant room some of the motifs of “Parsifal.” Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice say, close behind him, “So!” An exclamation, no doubt, he thought, of admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel. Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which, no doubt, as August thought, this newcomer was examining all the details of the wondrous fire tower, “It was well bought; it is exceedingly beau- tiful! It is undoubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel.” 128 THE NURNBERG STOVE Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within grew sick with fear. The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, someone bent down and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise of its beauty called aloud, in surprise, “What is this in it? A live child!’ Then August, terrified beyond all self- control, and dominated by one master passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell at the feet of the speaker. “Oh, let me stay! Pray, mein Herr, 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 THE NURNBERG STOVE 129 venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the voice he had heard speak of the stove said, in kindly accents, “Poor little child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to me.” The word of a king is law to his courtiers; so, sorely against their wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide out of their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough sheepskin coat and his thick mud-covered boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle, in the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes full of dreams and fire; and the young man said to him: “My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid: tell me the truth. I am the king.” August, in an instinct of homage, cast his great battered black hat with the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded his little brown 130 THE NURNBERG STOVE hands in supplication. He was too intensely in earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too much lifted out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly majesty. He was only so glad—so glad it was the king. Kings were always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords. “Oh, dear king!” he said, with trem- bling entreaty in his faint little voice, ““Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. And I do pray you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. No one ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves me—it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it THE NURNBERG STOVE 131 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 rolling down his cheeks. Now, the king liked all poetic and un- common 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. “IT am August Strehla. My father is Karl Strehla. We live in Hall, in the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long—so long!’ His lips quivered with a broken sob. “And have you truly traveled 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. 132 THE NURNBERG STOVE “Who bought the stove of yea father ?”’ he inquired. “Traders of Munich,” said August, who did not know that he ought not to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea. “What sum did they pay your father, do you know?” asked the sovereign. “Two hundred florins,” said August, with a great sigh of shame. “It was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.” The king turned to his gentlemen in waiting. “Did these dealers of Munich come with the stove?” He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought for and brought before him. As one of his cham- berlains hastened on the errand, the mon- arch looked at August with compassion. “You are very pale, little fellow. When did you eat last?” THE NURNBERG STOVE 133 “I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I finished it.” “You would like to eat now?” “If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very dry.” The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but August, though he drank eagerly, could not eat anything.. His mind was in too great a tumult. “May I stay with Hirschvogel?—may I stay?” he said, with feverish agitation. “Wait a little,’ said the king, and asked, abruptly, “What do you wish to be when you are a man?” “A painter. I wish to be what Hirsch- vogel was—I mean the master that made my Hairschvogel.” “T understand,” said the king. Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign’s presence. ‘They were so terribly alarmed, not being either so in- nocent or so ignorant as August was, that they were trembling as though they were 134 THE NURNBERG STOVE being led to the slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished too at a child’s hav- ing 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 Ntirnberg 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 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 oieseee he was a trusted counselor in art matters of the king’s, and often made purchases for him. THE NURNBERG STOVE 135 The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made out the price to him as eleven thousand ducats. “You will give at once to this’ boy’s father the two thousand gold ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that you paid him,” said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects. “You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more greatly punished.” He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these entrusted the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten gains. August heard, and felt dazzled, yet miserable. Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need to go any more to the salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats or for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let him stay with it?—would he? 136 THE NURNBERG STOVE “Oh, do! oh, please do!’ he murmured, joining his little brown weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who himself stood ab- sorbed in painful thought, for the decep- tion so basely practiced on him for the greedy sake of gain by a trusted counselor 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 Hirsch- vogel? 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 Nurnberg stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who reign after me shall do so. And now go away with this gentleman, and be not THE NURNBERG STOVE 137 afraid, and you shall light a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and cut the wood.” Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy. He threw his two arms about the king’s knees, and kissed his feet pas- sionately; then he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger, and weariness, and emotion, and wondrous joy. As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy the voice from Hirschvogel saying: “Let us be worthy of our maker!” He is only a student yet, but he is a happy student, 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 138 THE NURNBERG STOVE room of the house is a large white porce- lain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to Dorothea and ’Gilda. And August never goes home without going into the great church and giving his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey in the Nurnberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers’ room that night, he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who shall say that he did not? For what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights that others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear? La 4 as) ?.+ ae * 4 + | p in’ ‘ ~ GETTY CENTER LIBRARY i roel \Q qd Send for complete illus- trated catalogue with ages 4 and full descriptions; ask for special circulars on The Children’s Classics and The Little Library. HE NURNBER STOVES cool © bg is PICTURES BY FRANK BOYD UGUST and his brothers and sisters had been kept watm through the long winters in the Tyrol by a great stove. Made by a famous craftsman and artist, this stove had been in August’s family for many years and the little boy loved it. When his father decides to sell the stove August is broken-hearted and decides to follow it wherever it goes. Through many hard days and nights August travels curled up inside the stove. es The accounts of his adventures make a charming story. — i The colorful background of the Austrian Tyrol gives | a chance for interesting illustration. Frank Boyd's pic. — tures of the life of these simple country people are excel- lently suited to the charming style of Ouida.