om 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 Nuernberg, and had made many such stoves,
that were all miracles 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 Nuernberg 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 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