east they were together. If
only he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang
of how at this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes
with apples in it from Aunt Maila's farm orchard, and sang
together, and listened to Dorothea's reading of little tales, and
basked in the glow and delight that had beamed on them from the
great Nuernberg fire-king.

"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the
dear Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only
now the black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how
cruel of father!

August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his
father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell
Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings,
when they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or
crab-apples in it, and listened to the howling of the wind and
the deep sound of the church-bells, and tried very much to make
each other believe that the wolves still came down from the
mountains into the streets of Hall, and were that very minute
growling at the house-door,--all this memory coming on him with
the sound of the city bells, and the knowledge that night drew
near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and his
fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth
time since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he would
starve to death, and wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care.
Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all
summer long with Alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made
it sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had
he ever forgotten when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of
holly and ivy and wreathe it all around?

"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old
fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this
wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!

After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they
weep, and little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they
where they may. It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was
tightly shut up, and very full of things, and at the back of it
were the hot pipes of an adjacent house, where a great deal of
fuel was burnt. Moreover, August's clothes were warm ones, and
his blood was young. So he was not cold, though Munich is
terribly cold in the nights of December; and he slept on and
o