alf to-morrow when he packs it up and takes it away to
Munich. No doubt it is worth a great deal more,--at least I
suppose so, as he gives that,--but beggars cannot be choosers.
The little black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just as
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house like
this, when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea, you
never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is
said?--a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room
as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the
ground. 'It is a stove for a museum,' the trader said when he saw
it. To a museum let it go."

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for
its death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.

"Oh, father, father!" he cried, convulsively, his hands closing
on Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted
with terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you
say? Send _it_ away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We
shall all die in the dark and cold. Sell _me_ rather. Sell me to
any trade or any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!--it
is like selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in
jest. You could not do such a thing--you could not!--you who have
always been gentle and good, and who have sat in the warmth here
year after year with our mother. It is not a piece of hardware,
as you say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts and
fancies have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only
poor little children, and we love it with all our hearts and
souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh,
listen; I will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them
to let me cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There must
be something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money
to to wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But
sell Hirschvogel!--oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back
to the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the shroud out
of mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's head!
Oh, father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"

Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children,
though he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to
him. But besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the
anger tha