eached them even in the warmth of the old wolf-skins and the
great stove. It was the door which had opened and let in the
cold; it was their father who had come home.

The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the
one wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to
set the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay
pipe; for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised
his voice in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they
had loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.

To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat
down heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.

"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.

"I am well enough," he answered, dully, and sat there with his
head bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with
labor.

"Take the children to bed," he said, suddenly, at last, and
Dorothea obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove;
at nine years old, and when one earns money in the summer from
the farmers, one is not altogether a child any more, at least in
one's own estimation.

August did not heed his father's silence: he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his
beer and sleep. August lay on the wolf-skin, dreamy and
comfortable, looking up through his drooping eyelids at the
golden coronets on the crest of the great stove, and wondering
for the millionth time whom it had been made for, and what grand
places and scenes it had known.

Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds;
the cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her
father and the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning,
saying nothing. She thought he had been drinking in some tavern;
it had been often so with him of late.

There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice;
August dropped asleep, his curls falling over his face;
Dorothea's wheel hummed like a cat.

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the
pipe on the ground.

"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
ashamed in his throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang
erect out of his sleep.

"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their fath