varia. And here the Nuernberg stove, with August inside it, was
lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was lifted
out, the boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to
and fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of
his beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though they
swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that a
living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the platform
and set it down under the roof of the goods-shed. There it passed the
rest of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the
while within it.

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the
vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had not been
whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron rails of the
snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily for August, the
thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped and the stoutness of
its own make screened him from the cold, of which, else, he must have
died--frozen. He had still some of his loaf, and a little--a very
little--of his sausage. What he did begin to suffer from was thirst;
and this frightened him almost more than anything else, for Dorothea
had read aloud to them one night a story of the tortures some wrecked
men had endured because they could not find any water but the salt
sea. It was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the
wooden spout of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling,
ice-cold water of the hills.

But, fortunately for him, the stove having been marked and registered
as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like a mere bale of
goods, and the Rosenheim stationmaster, who knew its consignees,
resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that would leave there at
daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage
belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg,
was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the
winter under the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made
the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get
used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always
accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so mightily
clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he
kept feeling the ea