ife-like, and
kept the whole troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching
breathless, with wide open, wondering, awed eyes.

They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside? Their
little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea,
troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and
August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda's
cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried out
loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove that was shedding its head
down on them all:

"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the sun!
No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away nobody
knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not care how
people die for want of him; but you--you are always ready: just a
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make a summer for us all
the winter through!"

The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface
at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known
three centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.

It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faience which so
excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nuernberg that in a body
they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be
forbidden to make any more of them--the magistracy, happily, proving
of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the
artisans to cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre which
Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to
the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the
statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and
splendour as his friend Albrecht Duerer could have given unto them on
copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into
panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the
borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other
foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World
moralising, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to
have on their chimney-places and their drinking cups, their dishes and
flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was
radiant everywhere with that brilliant colouring of which the
Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as they