“tell us a story, august,” they cried, in chorus, when they had seen charcoal pictures till they were tired; and august did as he did every night pretty nearly,—looked up at the stove and told them what he imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows of the human being who figured on the panels from his cradle to his grave.

to the children the stove was a household god. in summer they laid a mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the tyrol country. in winter all their joys centred in it, and scampering home from school over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its noble tower, which rose eight feet high above them with all its spires and pinnacles and crowns.

once a travelling peddler had told them that the letters on it meant augustin hirschvogel, and that hirschvogel had been a great german potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-sanctified city of nürnberg, and had made many such stoves, that were all miracles[20] of beauty and of workmanship, 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 in nürnberg to this day; of old veit, the first of them, who painted the gothic windows of st. sebald with the marriage of the margravine; of his sons and of his grandsons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of them great augustin, the luca della robbia of the north. and august’s imagination, always quick, had made a living 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[21] 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[22] 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,[23] 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 sat serious, with his hands clasped on his knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove.[24]

“it is only a week to christmas,” he said, suddenly.

“grandmother’s big cakes!” chuckled little christof, who was five years old, and thought christmas meant a big cake and nothing else.

“what will santa claus find for ’gilda if she be good?” murmured dorothea over the child’s sunny head; for, however hard poverty might pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that dorothea would not find some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little sister’s socks.

“father max has promised me a big goose, because i saved the calf’s life in june,” said august; it was the twentieth time he had told them so that month, he was so proud of it.

“and aunt maïla will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of flour; she always does,” said albrecht. their aunt maïla had a chalet and a little farm over on the green slopes towards dorp ampas.

“i 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-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[25] to cross themselves in church and raise their voices in the “o salutaris hostia.”

and they fell chatting of all they would do on the christ-night, and one little voice piped loud against another’s, and they were as happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses and jewelled toys, and the big goose in the soup-pot seemed to them such a meal as kings would envy.