At his knock and call the
solid oak door, four centuries old if one, flew open, and the boy
darted in with his beer, and shouted, with all the force of
mirthful lungs, "Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the thought of you
I should have died!"

It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much
pleasure, and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a
walnut-wood press, handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and
several wooden stools for all its furniture; but at the top of
the chamber, sending out warmth and color together as the lamp
shed its rays upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished with
all the hues of a king's peacock and a queen's jewels, and
surmounted with armed figures, and shields, and flowers of
heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest summit of
all.

II

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H. R. H., for
it was in every portion the handwork of the great potter of
Nuernberg, Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the
world knows.

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for
princes, had warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the
gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers
and lent its carbon to help kindle sharp brains in anxious
councils of state; no one knew what it had seen or done or been
fashioned for; but it was a right royal thing. Yet perhaps it had
never been more useful than it was now in this poor desolate
room, sending down heat and comfort into the troop of children
tumbled together on a wolf-skin at its feet, who received frozen
August among them with loud shouts of joy.

"Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August,
kissing its gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"

"No, dear. He is late."

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and
with a sweet sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her
shoulders, even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of
the Strehla family, and there were ten of them in all. Next to
her there came Jan and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little
for their own living; and then came August, who went up in the
summer to the high Alps with the farmers' cattle, but in winter
could do nothing to fill his own little platter and pot; and then
all the little ones, who could only open their mouths to be fed
like young birds,--Albrecht and Hilda, and Waldo and Christof,
and