ou are
wiser than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, he
should have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spruez, who
would have given him honest value. But no doubt they took him
over his beer,--ay, ay! but if I were you I would do better than
cry. I would go after it."

August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.

"Go after it when you are bigger," said the neighbor, with a
good-natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a small
thing after all: I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time,
and I know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it;
anything that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in
cotton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will see
your stove again some day."

Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of
water at the well.

August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing
and his heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented
itself to his mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. He
thought, "Why not go with it?" He loved it better than any one,
even better than Dorothea; and he shrank from the thought of
meeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel.

He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the
impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were
still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran
out of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge
Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his
father's house-door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray
pitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria, for a
part of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
through to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heart
gave a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought
out and laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the
Bavarian men mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly
crept over the snow of the place,--snow crisp and hard as stone.
The noble old minster looked its grandest and most solemn, with
its dark-gray stone and its vast archways, and its porch that was
itself as big as many a church, and its strange gargoyles and
lamp-irons black against the snow on its roof and on the
pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it: he only watched
for his old friend.