when he was
making love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards
married. There was the statue of a king at each corner, modelled
with as much force and splendor as his friend Albrecht Duerer
could have given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of
the stove itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of
Man painted on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had
roses and holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes
in black letter of odd Old-World moralizing, such as the old
Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their
chimney-places and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flagons.
The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was
radiant everywhere with that brilliant coloring of which the
Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as
they were, were all masters.

The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel
had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when
he was an imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many
things for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla,
who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins
where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken
it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a
good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since
then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room, warming
three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children tumbled
now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with
beauty: white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon,
and when they went into the church to mass, with their curling
locks and their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues
like cherubs flown down off some fresco.

III

"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 fr