n the highest
summit of all.

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 been 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 wolfskin at its feet, who
received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.

"O, 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 last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda,
with eyes like forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of
their mother.

They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so common
in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies,
others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The father
was a good man, but weak and weary with so many to find for and so
little to do it with. He worked at the salt-furnaces, and by that
gained a few florins; people said he would have worked better and kept
his family more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a draught of
ale too well; but this had only been said of him after his wife's
death, when trouble and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As
i