“TELL us a story, August,” they cried, in chorus, when they had seen charcoal¹ 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 moss² all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs³ and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country. In winter all their joys centred in it, and scampering⁴ home from school over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts⁵ in the broad ardent⁶ glow of its noble tower, which rose eight feet high above them with all its spires⁷ and pinnacles⁸ 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 labors⁹, 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.

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