hem one
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured
because they could not find any water but the salt sea. It was
many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout
of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold
water of the hills.

But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and
registered as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like
a mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew
its consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that
would leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in
it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to
Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pesth, Salzburg, was August, still
undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under
the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made the men
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get used
to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is
always accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so
mightily clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly
thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthenware sides of the
Nuernberg giant and saying, softly, "Take care of me; oh, take
care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"

He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out
in the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think
that they must have been all over the world in all this time that
the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about
his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales
that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's
good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors,
and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and--and--and
he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream
outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no
one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in
another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "Muenchen! Muenchen!"

Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart
of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a
black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young cha