med to jump up into his mouth. If they
should find him out! Sometimes porters came and took away this
case and the other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now
a dead chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and swore
at each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so
frightened that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to
lift the stove out, would they find him? and if they did find
him, would they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all
the way, all through the dark hours, which seemed without end.
The goods-trains are usually very slow, and are many days doing
what a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker than
most, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria;
still, it took all the short winter's day and the long winter's
night and half another day to go over ground that the mail-trains
cover in a forenoon. It passed great armored Kuffstein standing
across the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of way
to all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after
lying by in out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks
the border of Bavaria. And here the Nuernberg stove, with August
inside it, was lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way.
When it was lifted out, the boy had hard work to keep in his
screams; he was tossed to and fro as the men lifted the huge
thing, and the earthenware walls of his beloved fire-king were
not cushions of down. However, though they swore and grumbled at
the weight of it, they never suspected that a living child was
inside it, and they carried it out on to the platform and set it
down under the roof of the goods-shed. There it passed the rest
of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the
while within it.

VII

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of
which, else, he must have died,--frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a little--a very little--of his sausage. What he did
begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost
more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to t