began
to strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the
noise they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had
stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and
exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which broke from
the man who had not seen it before.

"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime!
magnificent! matchless!"

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a
smell of lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached
August crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door
of the stove! That was his frantic fear. If they should open it,
it would be all over with him. They would drag him out; most
likely they would kill him, he thought, as his mother's young
brother had been killed in the Wald.

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by
the Nuernberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling,
expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a
little distance and began talking of sums of money and divided
profits, of which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he
could make out was that the name of the king--the king--the king
came over very often in their arguments. He fancied at times they
quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse
and high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and
agree to something, and were in great glee, and so in these merry
spirits came and slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel,
and shouted to it,--

"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you
were smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker's kitchen all these
years!"

Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to
them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his
father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word
or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him
forever from Hirschvogel. So he kept still, and the men barred
the shutters of the little lattice and went out by the door,
double-locking it after them. He had made out from their talk
that they were going to show Hirschvogel to some great person:
therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters