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 Nürnberg, 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 crimson¹ stockings of cardinals² and the gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers and lent its carbon to help kindle³ 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 desolate⁴ room, sending down heat and comfort into the troop of children tumbled together on a wolf-skin at its feet, who received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.

 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!” said August, kissing its gilded⁵ 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[13] had had many cares laid on her shoulders, even whilst still a mere⁶ baby. She was the eldest⁷ 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 Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies, others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen

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