THE 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 enveloped¹ and the stoutness² 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—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 wrecked³ 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 spout⁴ 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 mere⁵ bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew its consignees, resolved to send it on by a[52] passenger-train that would leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pesth, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole⁶ in the winter under the grass. Those 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 incessant⁷ pounding and jumbling⁸ and rattling⁹ and shaking with which modern travel is always accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so

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