Master Augustin
Hirschvogel at Nuernberg."

"Bravo!" said all the real _bric-a-brac_ in one breath, and the
two Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "_Benone!_" For
there is not a bit of true _bric-a-brac_ in all Europe that does
not know the names of the mighty masters.

August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew
as red as the lady's shoes with bashful contentment.

"I knew all the Hirschvoegel, from old Veit downwards," said a fat
_gres de Flandre_ beer-jug: "I myself was made at Nuernberg." And
he bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own
silver hat--I mean lid--with a courtly sweep that he could
scarcely have learned from burgomasters. The stove, however, was
silent, and a sickening suspicion (for what is such heart-break
as a suspicion of what we love?) came through the mind of August:
_Was Hirschvogel only imitation_?

"No, no, no, no!" he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel
never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it!
After all their happy years together, after all the nights of
warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and
hero, whose gilt lion's feet he had kissed in his babyhood? "No,
no, no, no!" he said, again, with so much emphasis that the Lady
of Meissen looked sharply again at him.

"No," she said, with pretty disdain; "no, believe me, they may
'pretend' forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even
our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can
they _chassent de race_."

"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's. "They
daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to
get rusted; but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages
can give that!"

"And _my_ imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors,
hot as the colors of a hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.

"Well, there is a _gres de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to
be a Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat,
pointing with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a
corner. "He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to
copy us. Almost he might be mistaken for me. But yet what a
difference there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done
over the glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give
himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that
playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actu