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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bimbi, by Louise de la Ramee
+(#4 in our series by Louise de la Ramee)
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Bimbi
+
+Author: Louise de la Ramee
+
+Release Date: June, 2004  [EBook #5834]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, BIMBI ***
+
+
+
+
+Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team.
+
+
+
+Bimbi
+
+Stories for Children
+
+By Louise De La Ramee
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+THE NURNBERG STOVE
+THE AMBITIOUS ROSE TREE
+LAMPBLACK
+THE CHILD OF URBINO
+FINDELKIND
+
+
+
+
+THE NURNBERG STOVE
+
+
+
+
+August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite name
+for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial
+little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming
+Old-World places that I know, and August, for his part, did not
+know any other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains
+all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it.
+It has paved streets and enchanting little shops that have all
+latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old
+Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of light and shadow,
+and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of infinite strength
+and repose as a church should have. Then there is the Muntze
+Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery, and looking down
+on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and there is an
+old schloss which has been made into a guardhouse, with
+battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors,
+and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in his niche
+and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close at hand,
+is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
+colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very
+rich chapel; indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed
+past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle
+Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and
+it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its
+monuments and its historic color, that I marvel much no one has
+ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious, heroic life of an
+age at once more restful and more brave than ours still leaves its
+spirit there, and then there is the girdle of the mountains all
+around, and that alone means strength, peace, majesty.
+
+In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
+people in the stone-paved, irregular square where the grand church
+stands.
+
+He was a small boy of nine years at that time,--a chubby-faced
+little man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls
+the brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor,
+and there were many mouths at home to feed. In this country the
+winters are long and very cold; the whole land lies wrapped in
+snow for many months; and this night that he was trotting home,
+with a jug of beer in his numb red hands, was terribly cold and
+dreary. The good burghers of Hall had shut their double shutters,
+and the few lamps there were flickered dully behind their quaint,
+old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains indeed were beautiful,
+all snow-white under the stars that are so big in frost. Hardly
+any one was astir; a few good souls wending home from vespers, a
+tired post-boy, who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled horn as
+he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
+hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
+were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall
+go early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled
+the beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept
+up his courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall
+soon be at home with dear Hirschvogel."
+
+He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
+guardhouse, and so into the place where the great church was, and
+where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a
+sculptured Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the
+Three Kings painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand
+outside the gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and the
+broad white snow, and had been belated, and had thought he had
+heard the wolves behind him at every step, and had reached the
+town in a great state of terror, thankful with all his little
+panting heart to see the oil lamp burning under the first house
+shrine. But he had not forgotten to call for the beer, and he
+carried it carefully now, though his hands were so numb that he
+was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.
+
+The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the
+beautiful old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded
+signs, the lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint
+devices that hung before the doors; covered lamps burned before
+the Nativities and Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into
+the woodwork; here and there, where a shutter had not been closed,
+a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, with a noisy band of
+children clustering round the house-mother and a big brown loaf,
+or some gossips spinning and listening to the cobbler's or the
+barber's story of a neighbor, while the oil wicks glimmered, and
+the hearth logs blazed, and the chestnuts sputtered in their iron
+roasting pot. Little August saw all these things, as he saw
+everything with his two big bright eyes, that had such curious
+lights and shadows in them; but he went needfully on his way for
+the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make
+him spill. 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.
+
+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
+Nurnberg, 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 wolfskin 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 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 it was, the wolf often bayed at
+the door of the Strehla household, without a wolf from the
+mountains coming down.
+
+Dorothea was one of those maidens who almost work miracles, so far
+can their industry and care and intelligence make a home sweet and
+wholesome and a single loaf seem to swell into twenty. The
+children were always clean and happy, and the table was seldom
+without its big pot of soup once a day. Still, very poor they
+were, and Dorothea's heart ached with shame, for she knew that
+their father's debts were many for flour and meat and clothing. Of
+fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without cost,
+for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones
+and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren, though he
+grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways.
+
+"Father says we are never to wait for him; we will have supper,
+now you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she
+might fret her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended
+their shirts, never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the
+children; only to August she did speak a little sometimes, because
+he was so thoughtful and so tender of her always, and knew as well
+as she did that there were troubles about money,--though these
+troubles were vague to them both, and the debtors were patient and
+kindly, being neighbors all in the old twisting streets between
+the guardhouse and the river.
+
+Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread
+swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down; the bowl was
+soon emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys
+slipped off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labor in
+the snow all day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the
+stove and set it whirring, and the little ones got August down
+upon the old worn wolfskin and clamored to him for a picture or a
+story. For August was the artist of the family.
+
+He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and
+some sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had
+seen in the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the
+children had seen enough of it, and sketching another in its
+stead,--faces and dogs' heads, and men in sledges, and old women
+in their furs, and pine trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts
+of animals, and now and then--very reverently--a Madonna and
+Child. It was all very rough, for there was no one to teach him
+anything. But it was all lifelike, 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 heat 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 enameled faience which
+so excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nurnberg 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 luster
+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, modeled with as
+much force and splendor as his friend Albrecht Durer 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 moralizing, 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 coloring of which the Hirschvogel family,
+painters on glass and great in chemistry, as they were, were all
+masters.
+
+The stove was a very grand thing, as I say; possibly Hirschvogel
+had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he
+was an imperial guest at Innspruck, and fashioned so many things
+for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
+burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
+and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
+the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who
+had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he
+was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home,
+and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one
+to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the
+stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three
+generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
+prettier, perhaps, in all its many years than the children tumbled
+now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
+Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with beauty;
+white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when
+they went into the church to Mass, with their curling locks and
+their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like
+cherubs flown down off some fresco.
+
+"Tell us a story, August," they cried in chorus, when they had
+seen charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he
+did every night pretty nearly--looked up at the stove and told
+them what he imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows
+of the human being who figured on the panels from his cradle to
+his grave.
+
+To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid
+a mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green
+boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol
+country. In winter all their joys centered in it, and scampering
+home from school over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing
+that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the
+broad ardent glow of its noble tower, which rose eight feet high
+above them with all its spires and pinnacles and crowns.
+
+Once a traveling peddler had told them that the letters on it
+meant Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great
+German potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-
+sanctified city of Nurnberg, and had made many such stoves, that
+were all miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his
+heart and his soul and his faith into his labors, as the men of
+those earlier ages did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.
+
+An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church,
+had told August a little more about the brave family of
+Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen in Nuremberg to this day; of
+old Veit, the first of them, who painted the Gothic windows of St.
+Sebald with the marriage of the margravine; of his sons and of his
+grand-sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of them
+great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of the North. And August's
+imagination, always quick, had made a living personage out of
+these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he were in the
+flesh walking up and down the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to
+Innspruck, and maturing beautiful things in his brain as he stood
+on the bridge and gazed on the emerald green flood of the Inn.
+
+So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if
+it were a living creature, and little August was very proud
+because he had been named after that famous old dead German who
+had had the genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children
+loved the stove, but with August the love of it was a passion;
+and in his secret heart he used to say to himself, "When I am a
+man, I will make just such things too, and then I will set
+Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will build
+myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts
+are, by the river; that is what I will do when I am a man."
+
+For August, a salt baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was
+anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high
+alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him,
+was quite certain that he would live for greater things than
+driving the herds up when the springtide came among the blue sea
+of gentians, or toiling down in the town with wood and with timber
+as his father and grandfather did every day of their lives. He was
+a strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free mountain air,
+and he was very happy, and loved his family devotedly, and was as
+active as a squirrel and as playful as a hare; but he kept his
+thoughts to himself, and some of them went a very long way for a
+little boy who was only one among many, and to whom nobody had
+ever paid any attention except to teach him his letters and tell
+him to fear God. August in winter was only a little, hungry
+schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or to bring
+the loaves from the bakehouse, or to carry his father's boots to
+the cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of cowboys,
+who drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle,
+ringing their throat bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the
+sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in the heights among the
+Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the snow summits near. But
+he was always thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; and
+under his little sheepskin winter coat and his rough hempen summer
+shirt his heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's ever had,--
+great Hofer, who is a household word in all the Innthal, and whom
+August always reverently remembered when he went to the city of
+Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water mill and under the
+wooded height of Berg Isel.
+
+August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
+stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as
+his imagination glowed to fever heat. That human being on the
+panels, who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy
+playing among flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a
+soldier in the midst of strife, as a father with children round
+him, as a weary, old, blind man on crutches, and, lastly, as a
+ransomed soul raised up by angels, had always had the most intense
+interest for August, and he had made, not one history for him, but
+a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale twice. He had never
+seen a storybook in his life; his primer and his Mass book were
+all the volumes he had. But nature had given him Fancy, and she is
+a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many things!
+only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing! and
+then she is of no use at all.
+
+"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea,
+looking up from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you
+must not sit up for him."
+
+"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little
+rosy and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel
+is so warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us
+another tale, August?"
+
+"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his
+story had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands
+clasped on his knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the
+stove.
+
+"It is only a week to Christmas," he said suddenly.
+
+"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five
+years old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing
+else.
+
+"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured
+Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty
+might pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would
+not find some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little
+sister's socks.
+
+"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the
+calf's life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he
+had told them so that month, he was so proud of it.
+
+"And Aunt Maila will be sure to send us wine and honey and a
+barrel of flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their Aunt Maila
+had a chalet and a little farm over on the green slopes towards
+Dorp Ampas.
+
+"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said
+August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine
+boughs and ivy and mountain berries. The heat soon withered the
+crown; but it was part of the religion of the day to them, as much
+so as it was to cross themselves in church and raise their voices
+in the "O Salutaris Hostia."
+
+And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christ-night,
+and one little voice piped loud against another's, and they were
+as happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses
+and jeweled toys, and the big goose in the soup pot seemed to them
+such a meal as kings would envy.
+
+In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air
+and a spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and
+reached them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins and the great
+stove. It was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it
+was their father who had come home.
+
+The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the
+one wooden armchair of the room to the stove, and August flew to
+set the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay
+pipe; for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his
+voice in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had
+loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
+
+To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
+welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat
+down heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
+
+"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.
+
+"I am well enough," he answered dully, and sat there with his head
+bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
+
+He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with
+labor.
+
+"Take the children to bed," he said suddenly, at last, and
+Dorothea obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at
+nine years old, and when one earns money in the summer from the
+farmers, one is not altogether a child any more, at least in one's
+own estimation.
+
+August did not heed his father's silence; he was used to it. Karl
+Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
+usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his
+beer and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin, dreamy and comfortable,
+looking up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on
+the crest of the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time
+whom it had been made for, and what grand places and scenes it had
+known.
+
+Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the
+cuckoo clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father
+and the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying
+nothing. She thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had
+been often so with him of late.
+
+There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice;
+August dropped to sleep, his curls falling over his face;
+Dorothea's wheel hummed like a cat.
+
+Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the
+pipe on the ground.
+
+"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
+ashamed in his throat. The spinning wheel stopped. August sprang
+erect out of his sleep.
+
+"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix
+on the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have
+shuddered under the horror of a greater blasphemy.
+
+"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla in the same husky,
+dogged voice. "I have sold it to a traveling trader in such things
+for two hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double that. He
+saw it this morning when you were all out. He will pack it and
+take it to Munich to-morrow."
+
+Dorothea gave a low, shrill cry:--
+
+"Oh, father!--the children--in midwinter!"
+
+She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her
+throat.
+
+August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as
+his cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their
+winter's prison.
+
+"It is not true! It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting,
+father?"
+
+Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.
+
+"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too?--that the
+bread you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you
+have over your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of
+them paid for for months and months; if it had not been for your
+grandfather, I should have been in prison all summer and autumn;
+and he is out of patience and will do no more now. There is no
+work to be had; the masters go to younger men; they say I work
+ill; it may be so. Who can keep his head above water with ten
+hungry children dragging him down? When your mother lived it was
+different. Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad dog! You have
+made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes; goes to-morrow. Two
+hundred florins, that is something. It will keep me out of prison
+for a little, and with the spring things may turn--"
+
+August stood like a creature paralyzed. His eyes were wide open,
+fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his
+face had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with
+tearless sobs.
+
+"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to
+him that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they
+could take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing
+down God's sun out of the heavens.
+
+"You will find it true," said his father doggedly, and angered
+because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered
+away the heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort and
+health-giver of his young children." You will find it true. The
+dealer has paid me half the money to-night, and will pay me the
+other half to-morrow, when he packs it up and takes it away to
+Munich. No doubt it is worth a great deal more,--at least I
+suppose so, as he gives that,--but beggars cannot be choosers. The
+little black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just as well.
+Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house like this,
+when one can make two hundred florins by it? Dorothea, you never
+sobbed more when your mother died. What is it, when all is said?--
+a bit of hardware much too grand-looking for such a room as this.
+If all the Strehlas had not been born fools, it would have been
+sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground. It is a
+stove for a museum, the trader said when he saw it. To a museum
+let it go."
+
+August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for
+its death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.
+
+"Oh, father, father!" he cried convulsively, his hands closing on
+Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with
+terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say?
+Send IT away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? We shall
+all die in the dark and the cold. Sell ME rather. Sell me to any
+trade or any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel!--it
+is like selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in jest.
+You could not do such a thing--you could not!--you who have always
+been gentle and good, and who have sat in the warmth here year
+after year with our mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as you
+say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts and fancies
+have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only poor
+little children, and we love it with all our hearts and souls, and
+up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I
+will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them to let me
+cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There must be
+something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money to to
+wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But sell
+Hirschvogel!--oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back to
+the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the shroud out of
+mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's head! Oh,
+father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"
+
+Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children,
+though he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to him.
+But besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that
+August roused in him; he hated and despised himself for the barter
+of the heirloom of his race, and every word of the child stung him
+with a stinging sense of shame.
+
+And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.
+
+"You are a little fool," he said harshly, as they had never heard
+him speak. "You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The
+stove is sold. There is no more to be said. Children like you have
+nothing to do with such matters. The stove is sold, and goes to
+Munich to-morrow. What is it to you? Be thankful I can get bread
+for you. Get on your legs I say, and go to bed."
+
+Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it slowly
+as a man who had no cares.
+
+August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face;
+the blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his great
+soft eyes flamed alight with furious passion.
+
+"You DARE not!" he cried aloud, "you dare not sell it, I say! It
+is not yours alone; it is ours--"
+
+Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that
+shivered it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a
+blow that felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all
+his life that he had ever raised his hand against any one of his
+children.
+
+Then he took the oil lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off
+to his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.
+
+"What has happened?" said August a little while later, as he
+opened his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the wolfskin
+before the stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had
+fallen on the hard bricks where the wolfskin did not reach. He sat
+up a moment, with his face bent upon his hands.
+
+"I remember now," he said, very low, under his breath.
+
+Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.
+
+"But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?" she murmured.
+"It was very wrong."
+
+"No, I was right," said August; and his little mouth, that
+hitherto had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a fixed
+and bitter seriousness. "How dare he? How dare he?" he muttered,
+with his head sunk in his hands. "It is not his alone. It belongs
+to us all. It is as much yours and mine as it is his."
+
+Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was too frightened to
+speak. The authority of their parents in the house had never in
+her remembrance been questioned.
+
+"Are you hurt by the fall, dear August?" she murmured at length,
+for he looked to her so pale and strange.
+
+"Yes--no. I do not know. What does it matter?"
+
+He sat up upon the wolfskin with passionate pain upon his face;
+all his soul was in rebellion, and he was only a child and was
+powerless.
+
+"It is a sin; it is a theft; it is an infamy," he said slowly, his
+eyes fastened on the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.
+
+"Oh, August, do not say such things of father!" sobbed his sister.
+"Whatever he does, WE ought to think it right."
+
+August laughed aloud.
+
+"Is it right that he should spend his money in drink?--that he
+should let orders lie unexecuted?--that he should do his work so
+ill that no one cares to employ him?--that he should live on
+grandfather's charity, and then dare sell a thing that is ours
+every whit as much as it is his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear
+God! I would sooner sell my soul!"
+
+"August!" cried Dorothea with piteous entreaty. He terrified her;
+she could not recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in those
+fierce and blasphemous words.
+
+August laughed aloud again; then all at once his laughter broke
+down into bitterest weeping. He threw himself forward on the
+stove, covering it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart
+would burst from his bosom.
+
+What could he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing!
+
+"August, dear August," whispered Dorothea piteously, and trembling
+all over,--for she was a very gentle girl, and fierce feeling
+terrified her,--"August, do not lie there. Come to bed; it is
+quite late. In the morning you will be calmer. It is horrible
+indeed, and we shall die of cold, at least the little ones; but if
+it be father's will--"
+
+"Let me alone," said August through his teeth, striving to still
+the storm of sobs that shook him from head to foot. "Let me alone.
+In the morning!--how can you speak of the morning"
+
+"Come to bed, dear," sighed his sister. "Oh, August, do not lie
+and look like that! you frighten me. Do come to bed."
+
+"I shall stay here."
+
+"Here! all night!"
+
+"They might take it in the night. Besides, to leave it NOW!"
+
+"But it is cold! the fire is out."
+
+"It will never be warm any more, nor shall we."
+
+All his childhood had gone out of him, all his gleeful, careless,
+sunny temper had gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily,
+choking down the great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the
+end of the world had come.
+
+His sister lingered by him while striving to persuade him to go to
+his place in the little crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo
+and Christof. But it was in vain. "I shall stay here," was all he
+answered her. And he stayed--all the night long.
+
+The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the
+hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified and
+the air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he lay
+with his face downward on the golden and rainbow-hued pedestal of
+the household treasure, which henceforth was to be cold
+forevermore, an exiled thing in a foreign city, in a far-off land.
+
+Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the
+stairs and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going
+to his work in stone yard and timber yard and at the salt works.
+They did not notice him; they did not know what had happened.
+
+A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to
+make ready the house ere morning should break.
+
+She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.
+
+"Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!"
+
+August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them
+that she had never seen there. His face was ashen white; his lips
+were like fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate
+sobs had given way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless
+trances, which had alternated one on another all through the
+freezing, lonely, horrible hours.
+
+"It will never be warm again," he muttered, "never again!"
+
+Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands. "August! do you not
+know me?" she cried in an agony. "I am Dorothea. Wake up, dear--
+wake up! It is morning, only so dark!"
+
+August shuddered all over.
+
+"The morning!" he echoed.
+
+He slowly rose up on to his feet.
+
+"I will go to grandfather," he said very low. "He is always good;
+perhaps he could save it."
+
+Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned
+his words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole:--
+
+"Let me in! Quick!--there is no time to lose! More snow like
+this, and the roads will all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear? I
+am come to take the great stove."
+
+August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.
+
+"You shall never touch it!" he screamed; "you shall never touch
+it!"
+
+"Who shall prevent us?" laughed a big man who was a Bavarian,
+amused at the fierce little figure fronting him.
+
+"I!" said August. "You shall never have it! you shall kill me
+first!"
+
+"Strehla," said the big man as August's father entered the room,
+"you have got a little mad dog here; muzzle him."
+
+One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little
+demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the
+Bavarian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men,
+and his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of
+the back entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful
+stove set to work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.
+
+When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in
+sight. She went back to little 'Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed
+over the child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly
+understanding that with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of
+their bodies, all the light of their hearth.
+
+Even their father now was sorry and ashamed; but two hundred
+florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the
+children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron
+stove in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now or not,
+the work of the Nurnberg potter was sold irrevocably, and he had
+to stand still and see the men from Munich wrap it in manifold
+wrappings and bear it out into the snowy air to where an ox cart
+stood in waiting for it.
+
+In another moment Hirschvogel was gone--gone forever and aye.
+
+August had stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from
+the violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of
+the house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the
+backs of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze
+Tower and the peaks of the mountains.
+
+Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for water, and, seeing the
+boy, said to him:--
+
+"Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?"
+
+August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.
+
+"Well, for sure he is a fool," said the neighbor. "Heaven forgive
+me for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was
+worth a mint of money. I do remember in my young days, in old
+Anton's time (that was your great-grand-father, my lad), a
+stranger from Vienna saw it, and said that it was worth its weight
+in gold."
+
+August's sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.
+
+"I loved it! I loved it!" he moaned. "I do not care what its value
+was. I loved it! I LOVED IT!"
+
+"You little simpleton!" said the old man, kindly. "But you are
+wiser than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, he
+should have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spritz, who
+would have given him honest value. But no doubt they took him over
+his beer--ay, ay! but if I were you I would do better than cry. I
+would go after it."
+
+August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.
+
+"Go after it when you are bigger," said the neighbor, with a good-
+natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a small thing
+after all: I was a traveling clockmaker once upon a time, and I
+know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it; anything
+that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in cotton
+wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will see your
+stove again some day."
+
+Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of
+water at the well.
+
+August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing,
+and his heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented
+itself to his mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. He
+thought, "Why not go with it?" He loved it better than any one,
+even better than Dorothea; and he shrank from the thought of
+meeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel.
+
+He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the
+impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were
+still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran
+out of the courtyard by a little gate, and across to the huge
+Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his
+father's house door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-
+gray pitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria,
+for a part of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery.
+
+He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
+through to go to mass or complin within, and presently his heart
+gave a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought
+out and laid with infinite care on the bullock dray. Two of the
+Bavarian men mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept
+over the snow of the place--snow crisp and hard as stone. The
+noble old minister looked its grandest and most solemn, with its
+dark gray stone and its vast archways, and its porch that was
+itself as big as many a church, and its strange gargoyles and
+lamp-irons black against the snow on its roof and on the pavement;
+but for once August had no eyes for it: he only watched for his
+old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure enough, like a
+score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of his brothers
+or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving uneven square,
+and followed in the wake of the dray.
+
+Its course lay towards the station of the railway, which is close
+to the salt works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of clean
+little Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From Hall the
+iron road runs northward through glorious country to Salzburg,
+Vienna, Prague, Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy.
+Was Hirschvogel going north or south? This at least he would soon
+know.
+
+August had often hung about the little station, watching the
+trains come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and
+vanish. No one said anything to him for idling about; people are
+kind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleasant land, and
+children and dogs are both happy there. He heard the Bavarians
+arguing and vociferating a great deal, and learned that they meant
+to go too and wanted to go with the great stove itself. But this
+they could not do, for neither could the stove go by a passenger
+train nor they themselves go in a goods train. So at length they
+insured their precious burden for a large sum, and consented to
+send it by a luggage train which was to pass through Hall in half
+an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the existence of
+Hall at all.
+
+August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his little
+mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible
+thought to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting in the cold
+at home, then set to work to execute his project. How he managed
+it he never knew very clearly himself; but certain it is that when
+the goods train from the north, that had come all the way from
+Linz on the Danube, moved out of Hall, August was hidden behind
+the stove in the great covered truck, and wedged, unseen and
+undreamt of by any human creature, amidst the cases of wood-
+carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of Turkish
+carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which shared the
+same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No doubt he
+was very naughty, but it never occurred to him that he was so: his
+whole mind and soul were absorbed in the one entrancing idea, to
+follow his beloved friend and fire-king.
+
+It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little
+window above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell
+in it from the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But
+August was not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and
+presently he meant to be closer still; for he meant to do nothing
+less than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little
+boy, and having had, by great luck, two silver groschen in his
+breeches pocket, which he had earned the day before by chopping
+wood, he had bought some bread and sausage at the station of a
+woman there who knew him, and who thought he was going out to his
+Uncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had with him, and
+this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
+thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a
+train of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast,
+and being a child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how
+or when he ever would eat again.
+
+When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he
+thought was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to
+buy anything more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a
+hole in the withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If
+it had been put in a packing-case, he would have been defeated at
+the onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and
+pushed, just as a mouse would have done, making his hole where he
+guessed that the opening of the stove was--the opening through
+which he had so often thrust the big oak logs to feed it. No one
+disturbed him; the heavy train went lumbering on and on, and he
+saw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining waters,
+and great forests through which he was being carried. He was hard
+at work getting through the straw and hay and twisted ropes; and
+get through them at last he did, and found the door of the stove,
+which he knew so well, and which was quite large enough for a
+child of his age to slip through, and it was this which he had
+counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done at
+home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if he could
+anyhow remain during many hours. He found that he could; air came
+in through the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable
+caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and
+straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no one could
+ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. Then he curled
+himself up again, this time more like a dormouse than anything
+else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel and intensely
+cold, he went fast asleep, as if he were in his own bed at home
+with Albrecht and Christof on either side of him. The train
+lumbered on, stopping often and long, as the habit of goods trains
+is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher, and rumbling
+through the deep heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow like
+the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.
+
+The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child
+slept soundly for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite
+dark outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was
+in absolute darkness; and for a while he was sorely frightened,
+and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet, heartbroken fashion,
+thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would
+be! How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather's
+at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he
+had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for
+the sorrow he must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but
+it never occurred to him to try and go back. If he once were to
+lose sight of Hirschvogel, how could he ever hope to find it
+again? how could he ever know whither it had gone--north, south,
+east, or west? The old neighbor had said that the world was small;
+but August knew at least that it must have a great many places in
+it: that he had seen himself on the maps on his schoolhouse walls.
+Almost any other little boy would, I think, have been frightened
+out of his wits at the position in which he found himself; but
+August was brave, and he had a firm belief that God and
+Hirschvogel would take care of him. The master-potter of Nurnberg
+was always present to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious
+spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he had
+been the maker.
+
+A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has
+quite as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.
+
+So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so
+utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the
+stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through
+the fretwork running round the top. He was hungry again, and again
+nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at
+all tell the hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the
+banging, stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on,
+his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. If they should find
+him out! Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the
+other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead
+chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and swore at each
+other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so frightened
+that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to lift the
+stove out, would they find him? and if they did find him, would
+they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all the way, all
+through the dark hours, which seemed without end. The goods trains
+are usually very slow, and are many days doing what a quick train
+does in a few hours. This one was quicker than most, because it
+was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still, it took all the
+short winter's day and the long winter's night and half another
+day to go over ground that the mail trains cover in a forenoon. It
+passed great armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful and
+solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes of Austria.
+It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out-of-the-way
+stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of Bavaria. And
+here the Nurnberg 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 station-master, 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 travelers, 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
+earthenware sides of the Nurnberg giant and saying, softly, "Take
+care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"
+
+He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out in
+the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that
+they must have been all over the world in all this time that the
+rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his
+ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that
+had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good
+house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and
+the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and--and--and he
+began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream
+outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no
+one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in
+another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and
+he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "Munchen! Munchen!"
+
+Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart
+of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by
+the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a
+black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
+
+That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois hunter who had
+taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very
+name of Bavaria a terror to August.
+
+"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the
+stove said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no
+more speak without fire than a man can see without light. Give it
+fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in
+return all the sympathy you ask.
+
+"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
+augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
+midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings
+of jager and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped;
+Munich was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking
+like a little aspen leaf, felt himself once more carried out on
+the shoulders of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set
+down, where he knew not, only he knew he was thirsty--so thirsty!
+If only he could have reached his hand out and scooped up a little
+snow!
+
+He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in
+truth the stove had been only taken from the railway station to a
+shop in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set
+upright on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect
+having been affixed to its written label, and on its gilded feet
+it stood now in the small dark curiosity shop of one Hans Rhilfer.
+
+"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice
+say; and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken
+stillness that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to
+peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square
+room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs,
+old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china,
+Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a
+bric-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh!
+was there one drop of water in it all? That was his single
+thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat felt on fire,
+and his chest began to be dry and choked as with dust.
+
+There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice window
+grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered with
+snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his
+hiding-place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his
+mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the
+hay and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and
+shut the brass door down on himself. He had brought some big
+icicles in with him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only
+temporarily, quenched. Then he sat still in the bottom of the
+stove, listening intently, wide awake, and once more recovering
+his natural boldness.
+
+The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience
+with a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If I
+can take her back Hirschvogel, then how pleased she will be, and
+how little 'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all selfish
+in his love for Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at home
+quite as much as for himself. There was at the bottom of his mind
+a kind of ache of shame that his father--his own father--should
+have stripped their hearth and sold their honor thus.
+
+A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
+house eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his
+pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so easily
+on the frozen snow.
+
+In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made
+faint by the stove-wall and the window glass that was between him
+and it, but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the
+robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard,
+burst into tears. He thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw
+out some grain or some bread on the snow before the church. "What
+use is it going THERE," she said, "if we forget the sweetest
+creatures God has made?" Poor Dorothea! Poor, good, tender, much-
+burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran like
+rain.
+
+Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.
+Hirschvogel was here.
+
+Presently the key turned in the lock of the door, he heard heavy
+footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father,
+"You have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay,
+you have called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I
+have gotten for two hundred dirty florins. Potztausend! never did
+YOU do such a stroke of work."
+
+Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two
+men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-
+a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a
+cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to
+strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise
+they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it
+wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder
+and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not seen
+it before.
+
+"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivaled thing!
+Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime!
+magnificent! matchless!"
+
+So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell
+of lager beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August
+crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door of the
+stove! That was his frantic fear. If they should open it, it would
+be all over with him. They would drag him out; most likely they
+would kill him, he thought, as his mother's young brother had been
+killed in the Wald.
+
+The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
+control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by
+the Nurnberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marveling,
+expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a
+little distance and began talking of sums of money and divided
+profits, of which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he
+could make out was that the name of the king--the king--the king
+came over very often in their arguments. He fancied at times they
+quarreled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and
+high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and agree
+to something, and were in great glee, and so in these merry
+spirits came and slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel,
+and shouted to it:--
+
+"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you
+were smoking in a silly fool of a salt baker's kitchen all these
+years!"
+
+Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
+clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to
+them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his
+father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word
+or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever
+from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still, and the men barred the
+shutters of the little lattice and went out by the door, double-
+locking it after them. He had made out from their talk that they
+were going to show Hirschvogel to some great person: therefore he
+kept quite still and dared not move.
+
+Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets
+below--the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church bells, and
+bursts of that military music which is so seldom silent in the
+streets of Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on
+the stairs kept him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity of
+his anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from
+cheerful, Old World little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-
+water, with the ramparts of the mountains all around.
+
+Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two
+dealers' voices murmuring unctuous words, in which "honor,"
+"gratitude," and many fine long noble titles played the chief
+parts. The voice of another person, more clear and refined than
+theirs, answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nurnberg
+stove and the boy's ear, ejaculated a single "Wunderschon!" August
+almost lost his terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his
+beloved Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great city. He
+thought the master-potter must be glad too.
+
+"Wunderschon!" ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then
+examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed
+long on all its devices.
+
+"It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian," he said at
+last; and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was "hugged up
+into nothing," as you children say, dreading that every moment he
+would open the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the
+brass-work of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching
+August passed unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as
+he was. The gentleman shut to the door at length, without having
+seen anything strange inside it; and then he talked long and low
+with the tradesmen, and, as his accent was different from that
+which August was used to, the child could distinguish little that
+he said, except the name of the king and the word "gulden" again
+and again. After a while he went away, one of the dealers
+accompanying him, one of them lingering behind to bar up the
+shutters. Then this one also withdrew again, double-locking the
+door.
+
+The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe
+aloud.
+
+What time was it?
+
+Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they
+had lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and
+through the brass fretwork had seen the lines of light.
+
+He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and
+Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If
+only he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang of
+how at this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with
+apples in it from Aunt Maila's farm orchard, and sang together,
+and listened to Dorothea's reading of little tales, and basked in
+the glow and delight that had beamed on them from the great
+Nurnberg fire-king.
+
+"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the dear
+Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only now the
+black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of
+father!
+
+August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his
+father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell
+Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings,
+when they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab
+apples in it, and listened to the howling of the wind and the deep
+sound of the church bells, and tried very much to make each other
+believe that the wolves still came down from the mountains into
+the streets of Hall, and were that very minute growling at the
+house door--all this memory coming on him with the sound of the
+city bells, and the knowledge that night drew near upon him so
+completely, being added to his hunger and his fear, so overcame
+him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth time since he had
+been inside the stove, and felt that he would starve to death, and
+wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was sure
+Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with
+alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme
+and honeysuckle and great garden lilies? Had he ever forgotten
+when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and
+wreathe it all around?
+
+"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old
+fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this
+wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!
+
+After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they weep,
+and little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they where
+they may. It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly
+shut up, and very full of things, and at the back of it were the
+hot pipes of an adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel was
+burnt. Moreover, August's clothes were warm ones, and his blood
+was young. So he was not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in
+the nights of December; and he slept on and on--which was a
+comfort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils, and his
+hunger, for a time.
+
+Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the
+city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to
+put his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a
+strange bright light was round him.
+
+It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is
+perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did
+what he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done
+you or me. For what he saw was nothing less than all the bric-a-
+brac in motion.
+
+A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a
+minuet with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going
+through a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very
+droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff
+soldier in terre cuite of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was
+playing itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music that
+thought itself merry came from a painted spinnet covered with
+faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on the wall and
+laughed; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, crowned with
+flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a
+slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre,
+all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in white
+Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in gres gris
+was calling aloud, "Oh, these Italians! always at feud!" But
+nobody listened to him at all. A great number of little Dresden
+cups and saucers were all skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with
+their broad round faces, were spinning their own lids like
+teetotums; the high-backed gilded chairs were having a game of
+cards together; and a little Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at
+its throat, was running from one to another, whilst a yellow cat
+of Cornelis Lachtleven's rode about on a Delft horse in blue
+pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the scene
+came from three silver candelabra, though they had no candles set
+up in them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, August
+looked on at these mad freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He
+only, as he heard the violin and the spinnet playing, felt an
+irresistible desire to dance too. No doubt his face said what he
+wished; for a lovely little lady, all in pink and gold and white,
+with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes, and all made of the
+very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up to him, and
+smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he
+danced it perfectly--poor little August in his thick, clumsy
+shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough
+homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it
+perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were
+duly honored, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never
+scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately
+measures the spinnet was playing that August could not take his
+eyes off her till, their minuet ended, she sat down on her own
+white-and-gold bracket.
+
+"I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale," she said to him, with a
+benignant smile; "and you have got through that minuet very
+fairly."
+
+Then he ventured to say to her:--
+
+"Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the
+figures and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner
+like lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?"
+
+For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the bric-a-brac was
+all full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a
+single thrill in it.
+
+"My dear child," said the powdered lady, "is it possible that you
+do not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are
+IMITATION!"
+
+This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered
+it a condensed but complete answer.
+
+"Imitation?" repeated August, timidly, not understanding.
+
+"Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!" said the princess in
+pink shoes, very vivaciously. "They only PRETEND to be what we
+ARE! They never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any
+soul in it yet."
+
+"Oh!" said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood
+entirely yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul
+within it: would it not wake up and speak? Oh, dear! how he longed
+to hear the voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he
+stood by a lady who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china,
+with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen mark.
+
+"What will you be when you are a man?" said the little lady,
+sharply, for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were
+smiling. "Will you work for the Konigliche Porcellan-Manufactur,
+like my great dead Kandler?"
+
+"I have never thought," said August, stammering; "at least--that
+is--I do wish--I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin
+Hirschvogel at Nurnberg."
+
+"Bravo!" said all the real bric-a-brac in one breath, and the two
+Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "Begone!" 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 Hirschvogels, from old Veit downwards," said a fat
+gres de Flandre beer jug; "I myself was made at Nurnberg." 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 heartbreak 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 signboard!" 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 actual deformity!"
+
+"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
+contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
+on a table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give
+him my name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin
+as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de
+las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed
+reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. HIS gilding is one part
+gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been
+laid on him with a brush--A BRUSH!--pah! of course he will be as
+black as a crock in a few years' time, whilst I am as bright as
+when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt
+its heretics, I shall shine on forever."
+
+"They carve pear wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and
+call it ME!" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
+
+"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarize you so much as the
+cups they paint to-day and christen after ME!" said a Carl Theodor
+cup subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.
+
+"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping ME!"
+interposed the princess in the pink shoes.
+
+"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a
+Trauerkrug of Regensburg in black-and-white.
+
+"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!"
+sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg.
+
+"And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates,
+calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a
+muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio,
+which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
+
+"That is what is so terrible in these bric-a-brac places," said
+the princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low,
+imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless
+under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."
+
+"And they get even there," sighed the gres de Flandre. "A terrible
+thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Blasius
+(you know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he
+was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he
+found himself set next to his own imitation born and baked
+yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature
+said to him, with a grin? 'Old Pipeclay,'--that is what he called
+my friend,--'the fellow that bought ME got just as much commission
+on me as the fellow that bought YOU, and that was all that HE
+thought about. You know it is only the public money that goes!'
+And the horrid creature grinned again till he actually cracked
+himself. There is a Providence above all things, even museums."
+
+"Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public
+money," said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.
+
+"After all, does it matter?" said a Dutch jar of Haarlem. "All the
+shamming in the world will not MAKE them us!"
+
+"One does not like to be vulgarized," said the Lady of Meissen,
+angrily.
+
+"My maker, the Krabbetje,[Footnote: Jan Asselyn. called Krabbetje,
+the Little Crab, born 1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem]
+did not trouble his head about that," said the Haarlem jar,
+proudly. "The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen, the bright,
+clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries ago,
+and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at home;
+yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining
+canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine."
+
+"Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio
+plate, thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days
+of the Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome
+souls of the dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that
+were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a
+sob, and the spinnet sighed, thinking of dead hands.
+
+Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and
+only the swords went on quarreling, and made such a clattering
+noise that the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and
+knocked them both right over, and they lay straight and still,
+looking foolish, and the little Nymphenburg maid, though she was
+crying, smiled and almost laughed.
+
+Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.
+
+All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little
+human comrade gave a great jump of joy.
+
+"My friends," said that clear voice from the turret of Nurnberg
+faience, "I have listened to all you have said. There is too much
+talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called
+the Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much
+vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in
+empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant
+argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a
+curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his under-takings.
+For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I
+hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you
+said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we all might but go
+back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were made in days
+when even men were true creatures, and so we, the work of their
+hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, derive all
+the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us with
+zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith,--not to win fortunes
+or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create
+for the honor of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human
+thing who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves
+Art. Now, I want him forever to remember this night and these
+words; to remember that we are what we are, and precious in the
+eyes of the world, because centuries ago those who were of single
+mind and of pure hand so created us, scorning sham and haste and
+counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel.
+He led a wise and blameless life, and wrought in loyalty and love,
+and made his time beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich,
+many-colored church casements, that told holy tales as the sun
+streamed through them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go back to our
+masters!--that would be the best that could befall us. But they
+are gone, and even the perishable labors of their lives outlive
+them. For many, many years I, once honored of emperors, dwelt in a
+humble house and warmed in successive winters three generations of
+little, cold, hungry children. When I warmed them they forgot that
+they were hungry; they laughed and told tales, and slept at last
+about my feet. Then I knew that humble as had become my lot it was
+one that my master would have wished for me, and I was content.
+Sometimes a tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because
+she was near me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit
+to a baby in her arms. That was better than to stand in a great
+hall of a great city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to
+gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with flattering words.
+Where I go now I know not; but since I go from that humble house
+where they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon--
+those fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure--we, the things that
+the human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they
+glide by: if we have done that, we have done what our masters
+wished. So in us our masters, being dead, yet may speak and live."
+
+Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light
+that had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light
+died down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole
+gently through the room. It came from the old, old spinnet that
+was covered with the faded roses.
+
+Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks
+of the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the
+Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found
+himself lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber, and
+all the bric-a-brac was lying quite still all around. The pretty
+Lady of Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket, and the
+little Saxe poodle was quiet at her side.
+
+He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not
+sensible of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty
+entrails. He was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous
+sounds, that he had seen and heard.
+
+All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning
+come? Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard
+the tiny song of the robin.
+
+Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a
+moment in which to scramble back into the interior of the great
+stove, when the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing
+burning candles with them to see their way.
+
+August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold
+or hunger. A marvelous sense of courage, of security, of
+happiness, was about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding
+him and lifting him upwards--upwards--upwards! Hirschvogel would
+defend him.
+
+The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the redbreast away, and
+then tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered in contented
+voices, and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw
+and hay and cordage.
+
+It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they
+look inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell
+again for all its glorious beauty of exterior?
+
+The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come
+to him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.
+
+Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove,
+heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some
+sick prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six
+stout Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the
+Marienplatz. Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy
+bite of the intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter's
+day in Munich. The men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness
+and care, so that he had often been far more roughly shaken in his
+big brothers' arms than he was in his journey now; and though both
+hunger and thirst made themselves felt, being foes that will take
+no denial, he was still in that state of nervous exaltation which
+deadens all physical suffering and is at once a cordial and an
+opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel speak; that was enough.
+
+The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the
+Nurnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right
+across Munich to the railway station, and August in the dark
+recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing
+railway noises, and thought, despite his courage and excitement,
+"Will it be a VERY long journey?" for his stomach had at times an
+odd sinking sensation, and his head sadly often felt light and
+swimming. If it was a very, very long journey, he felt half afraid
+that he would be dead or something bad before the end, and
+Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what he thought most
+about; not much about himself, and not much about Dorothea and the
+house at home. He was "high strung to high emprise," and could not
+look behind him.
+
+Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe,
+the stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up
+into a great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two
+dealers as well as the six porters were all with it.
+
+He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The train
+glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the
+men say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was
+strange to him, and he could not make out what these names meant.
+
+The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of
+steam, and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly
+and slowly on account of the snow which was falling, and which had
+fallen all night.
+
+"He might have waited till he came to the city," grumbled one man
+to another. "What weather to stay on at Berg!"
+
+But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out
+at all.
+
+Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the
+season, they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed
+often, and, when they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised
+their porters fine presents at New Year; and August, like a shrewd
+little boy as he was, who even in the secluded Innthal had learned
+that money is the chief mover of men's mirth, thought to himself
+with a terrible pang:--
+
+"They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum! They have sold him
+already!"
+
+Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very
+well that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus;
+and what new owner of the great fire-palace would ever permit him
+to dwell in it?
+
+"Never mind; I WILL die," thought he; "and Hirschvogel will know
+it."
+
+Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not.
+
+It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.
+It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to
+pass from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg; but this
+morning the journey was much slower, because the way was
+encumbered by snow. When it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and
+the Nurnberg stove was lifted out once more, August could see
+through the fretwork of the brass door, as the stove stood upright
+facing the lake, that this Wurm-See was a calm and noble piece of
+water, of great width, with low wooded banks and distant
+mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.
+
+It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had come forth; there was a
+clear gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay
+white and smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water, which
+before long would itself be ice.
+
+Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green gliding
+surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a large boat
+that was in waiting--one of those very long and huge boats which
+the women in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber
+rafts. The stove, with much labor and much expenditure of time and
+care, was hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and
+giddy with the heaving and falling if his big brothers had not
+long used him to such tossing about, so that he was as much at
+ease head, as feet, downward. The stove once in it safely with its
+guardians, the big boat moved across the lake to Leoni. How a
+little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that Tuscan-sounding name I
+cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat was a long time
+crossing; the lake here is about three miles broad, and these
+heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though they are
+towed and tugged at from the shore.
+
+"If we should be too late!" the two dealers muttered to each
+other, in agitation and alarm. "He said eleven o'clock."
+
+"Who was he?" thought August; "the buyer, of course, of
+Hirschvogel." The slow passage across the Wurm-See was
+accomplished at length; the lake was placid; there was a sweet
+calm in the air and on the water; there was a great deal of snow
+in the sky, though the sun was shining and gave a solemn hush to
+the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer were going up and
+down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains of
+Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market people, cloaked
+and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods
+of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see
+nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was
+now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten wood of the huge
+barge.
+
+Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.
+
+"Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward
+at Christmas-time," said one of the dealers to his porters, who,
+stout, strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at
+their task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly
+the Nurnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight,
+but little dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting,
+trembling boy; for August began to tremble now that he was about
+to see the future owner of Hirschvogel.
+
+"If he look a good, kind man," he thought, "I will beg him to let
+me stay with it."
+
+The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the
+village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over
+his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky.
+He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little
+mountaineer, used to hanging head downwards over crevasses, and,
+moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of
+the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been
+made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of
+position to which he had been subjected.
+
+The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road
+was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still.
+The dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one
+breath; besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for
+a clock was striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach
+their destination at that hour, and, though the air was so cold,
+the heat-drops rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they
+were so frightened at being late. But the porters would not budge
+a foot quicker than they chose, and as they were not poor
+fourfooted carriers their employers dared not thrash them, though
+most willingly would they have done so.
+
+The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the
+plodding porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he
+kept sinking and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their
+steps.
+
+Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time
+he lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face
+through the brasswork above, and felt by their movements beneath
+him that they were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great
+many different voices, but he could not understand what was being
+said. He felt that his bearers paused some time, then moved on and
+on again. Their feet went so softly he thought they must be moving
+on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come to him he concluded that
+he was in some heated chambers, for he was a clever little fellow,
+and could put two and two together, though he was so hungry and so
+thirsty and his empty stomach felt so strangely. They must have
+gone, he thought, through some very great number of rooms, for
+they walked so long on and on, on and on. At last the stove was
+set down again, and, happily for him, set so that his feet were
+downward.
+
+What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he
+had seen in the city of Innspruck.
+
+The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go
+away, far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not
+look out, but he peeped through the brasswork, and all he could
+see was a big carved lion's head in ivory, with a gold crown atop.
+It belonged to a velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair,
+only the ivory lion.
+
+There was a delicious fragrance in the air--a fragrance as of
+flowers. "Only how can it be flowers?" thought August. "It is
+November!"
+
+From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music,
+as sweet as the spinnet's had been, but so much fuller, so much
+richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all
+together. August ceased to think of the museum: he thought of
+heaven. "Are we gone to the Master?" he thought, remembering the
+words of Hirschvogel.
+
+All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except
+the sound of the far-off choral music.
+
+He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and
+the music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a
+distant room some of the motives of "Parsival."
+
+Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice
+say, close behind him, "So!" An exclamation no doubt, he thought,
+of admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.
+
+Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no
+doubt, as August thought, this newcomer was examining all the
+details of the wondrous fire-tower, "It was well bought; it is
+exceedingly beautiful! It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin
+Hirschvogel."
+
+Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass
+door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within
+grew sick with fear.
+
+The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, some one bent
+down and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise
+of its beauty called aloud, in surprise: "What is this in it? A
+live child!"
+
+Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, and dominated by
+one master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell
+at the feet of the speaker.
+
+"Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!" he sobbed. "I have
+come all the way with Hirschvogel!"
+
+Some gentlemen's hands seized him, not gently by any means, and
+their lips angrily muttered in his ear, "Little knave, peace! be
+quiet! hold your tongue! It is the king!"
+
+They were about to drag him out of the august atmosphere as if he
+had been some venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but
+the voice he had heard speak of the stove said, in kind accents,
+"Poor little child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to
+me."
+
+The word of a king is law to his courtiers: so, sorely against
+their wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide
+out of their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough
+sheepskin coat and his thick, mud-covered boots, with his curling
+hair all in a tangle, in the midst of the most beautiful chamber
+he had ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a young man with a
+beautiful dark face, and eyes full of dreams and fire; and the
+young man said to him:--
+
+"My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid:
+tell me the truth. I am the king."
+
+August, in an instinct of homage, cast his great battered black
+hat with the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room,
+and folded his little brown hands in supplication. He was too
+intensely in earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted
+out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any
+awe before any earthly majesty. He was only so glad--so glad it
+was the king. Kings were always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who
+love their lords.
+
+"Oh, dear king!" he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint
+little voice, "Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our
+lives; and father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go
+from us, then I said to myself I would go with it; and I have come
+all the way inside it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful
+things.
+
+"And I do pray you to let me live with it, and I will go out every
+morning and cut wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay
+beside it. No one ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew
+big enough, and it loves me,--it does indeed; it said so last
+night; and it said that it had been happier with us than if it
+were in any palace--"
+
+And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little,
+eager, pale face to the young king's, great tears were falling
+down his cheeks.
+
+Now, the king liked all poetic and uncommon things, and there was
+that in the child's face which pleased and touched him. He
+motioned to his gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked him.
+
+"I am August Strehla. My father is Hans Strehla. We live in Hall,
+in the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long--so long!"
+
+His lips quivered with a broken sob.
+
+"And have you truly traveled inside this stove all the way from
+Tyrol?"
+
+"Yes," said August; "no one thought to look inside till you did."
+
+The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.
+
+"Who bought the stove of your father?" he inquired.
+
+"Traders of Munich," said August, who did not know that he ought
+not to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose
+little brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one
+central idea.
+
+"What sum did they pay your father, do you know?" asked the
+sovereign.
+
+"Two hundred florins," said August, with a great sigh of shame.
+"It was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of
+us."
+
+The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. "Did these dealers of
+Munich come with the stove?"
+
+He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought
+for and brought before him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on
+the errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.
+
+"You are very pale, little fellow; when did you eat last?"
+
+"I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I
+finished it."
+
+"You would like to eat now?"
+
+"If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very
+dry."
+
+The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but
+August, though he drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. His
+mind was in too great a tumult.
+
+"May I stay with Hirschvogel?--may I stay?" he said, with feverish
+agitation.
+
+"Wait a little," said the king, and asked abruptly, "What do you
+wish to be when you are a man?"
+
+"A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel was--I mean the master
+that made MY Hirschvogel."
+
+"I understand," said the king.
+
+Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign's presence.
+They were so terribly alarmed, not being either so innocent or so
+ignorant as August was, that they were trembling as though they
+were being led to the slaughter, and they were so utterly
+astonished too at a child having come all the way from Tyrol in
+the stove, as a gentleman of the court had just told them this
+child had done, that they could not tell what to say or where to
+look, and presented a very foolish aspect indeed.
+
+"Did you buy this Nurnberg stove of this boy's father for two
+hundred florins?" the king asked them; and his voice was no longer
+soft and kind as it had been when addressing the child, but very
+stern.
+
+"Yes, your majesty," murmured the trembling traders.
+
+"And how much did the gentleman who purchased it for me give to
+you?"
+
+"Two thousand ducats, your majesty," muttered the dealers,
+frightened out of their wits, and telling the truth in their
+fright.
+
+The gentleman was not present: he was a trusted counselor in art
+matters of the king's, and often made purchases for him.
+
+The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made
+out the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.
+
+"You will give at once to this boy's father the two thousand gold
+ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins
+that you paid him," said the king to his humiliated and abject
+subjects. "You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more
+greatly punished."
+
+He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these
+gave the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge
+their ill-gotten gains.
+
+August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. Two thousand gold
+Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need
+to go any more to the salt-baking! And yet whether for ducats or
+for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the
+king let him stay with it?--would he?
+
+"Oh, do! oh, please do!" he murmured, joining his little brown
+weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch,
+who himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception
+so basely practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a
+trusted counselor was bitter to him.
+
+He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.
+
+"Rise up, my little man," he said, in a kind voice; "kneel only to
+your God. Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will;
+you shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a
+painter,--in oils or on porcelain as you will,--and you must grow
+up worthily, and win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if
+when you are twenty-one years old you have done well and bravely,
+then I will give you your Nurnberg stove, or, if I am no more
+living, then those who reign after me shall do so. And now go away
+with this gentleman, and be not afraid, and you shall light a fire
+every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and
+cut the wood."
+
+Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to
+make August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his
+lips, but August could not understand that anyhow; he was too
+happy. He threw his two arms about the king's knees, and kissed
+his feet passionately; then he lost all sense of where he was, and
+fainted away from hunger, and tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.
+
+As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his
+fancy the voice from Hirschvogel saying:--
+
+"Let us be worthy our maker!"
+
+He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises
+to be a great man. Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall,
+where the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. In the old
+house room there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the
+king's gift to Dorothea and 'Gilda.
+
+And August never goes home without going into the great church and
+saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter's journey
+in the Nurnberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers' room that
+night, he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares
+that he saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who
+shall say that he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and
+the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to
+hear the sounds that others cannot hear?
+
+
+
+
+THE AMBITIOUS ROSE TREE
+
+
+
+
+She was a Quatre Saison Rose Tree.
+
+She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias
+for neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because
+they were so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is
+preferable, as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of
+common daylight, and then the beetles went most to the magnolia-
+blossoms, for being so great and grand of course they got very
+much preyed upon, and this was a vast gain for the rose that was
+near them. She herself leaned against the wall of an orange-house,
+in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active, simple-minded thing,
+for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself much better born than
+these climbers, had a natural contempt. Banksiae will flourish and
+be content anywhere, they are such easily pleased creatures; and
+when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows a very plebeian
+and pachydermatous temper; and they laugh all over in the face of
+an April day, shaking their little golden clusters of blossom in
+such a merry way that the Rose Tree, who was herself very reserved
+and thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.
+
+For she was by nature extremely proud,--much prouder than her
+lineage warranted,--and a hard fate had fixed her to the wall of
+an orangery, where hardly anybody ever came, except the gardener
+and his men to carry the oranges in in winter and out in spring,
+or water and tend them while they were housed there.
+
+She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But the garden was so
+crowded--like the world--that she could not get herself noticed in
+it. In vain was she radiant and red close on to Christmas-time as
+in the fullest heats of midsummer. Nobody thought about her or
+praised her. She pined and was very unhappy.
+
+The Banksiae, who are little, frank, honest-hearted creatures, and
+say out what they think, as such plebeian people will, used to
+tell her roundly she was thankless for the supreme excellence of
+her lot.
+
+"You have everything the soul of a rose can wish for: a splendid
+old wall with no nasty chinks in it; a careful gardener, who nips
+all the larvae in the bud before they can do you any damage; sun,
+water, care; above all, nobody ever cuts a single blossom off you!
+What more can you wish for? This orangery is paradise!"
+
+She did not answer.
+
+What wounded her pride so deeply was just this fact, that they
+never DID cut off any of her blossoms. When day after day, year
+after year, she crowned herself with her rich crimson glory and no
+one ever came nigh to behold or to gather it, she could have died
+with vexation and humiliation.
+
+Would nobody see she was worth anything?
+
+The truth was that in this garden there was such an abundance of
+very rare roses that a common though beautiful one like Rosa
+Damascena remained unthought of; she was lovely, but then there
+were so many lovelier still, or, at least, much more a la mode.
+
+In the secluded garden corner she suffered all the agonies of a
+pretty woman in the great world, who is only a pretty woman, and
+no more. It needs so VERY much more to be "somebody." To be
+somebody was what Rosa Damascena sighed for, from rosy dawn to
+rosier sunset.
+
+From her wall she could see across the green lawns, the great
+parterre which spread before the house terrace, and all the great
+roses that bloomed there,--Her Majesty Gloire de Dijon, who was a
+reigning sovereign born, the royally born Niphetos, the Princesse
+Adelaide, the Comtesse Ouvaroff, the Vicomtesse de Cazes all in
+gold, Madame de Sombreuil in snowy white, the beautiful Louise de
+Savoie, the exquisite Duchess of Devoniensis,--all the roses that
+were great ladies in their own right, and as far off her as were
+the stars that hung in heaven. Rosa Damascena would have given all
+her brilliant carnation hues to be pale and yellow like the
+Princesse Adelaide, or delicately colorless like Her Grace of
+Devoniensis.
+
+She tried all she could to lose her own warm blushes, and prayed
+that bees might sting her and so change her hues; but the bees
+were of low taste, and kept their pearl-powder and rouge and other
+pigments for the use of common flowers, like the evening primrose
+or the butter-cup and borage, and never came near to do her any
+good in arts of toilet.
+
+One day the gardener approached and stood and looked at her: then
+all at once she felt a sharp stab in her from his knife, and a
+vivid pain ran downward through her stem.
+
+She did not know it, but gardeners and gods "this way grant
+prayer."
+
+"Has not something happened to me?" she asked of the little
+Banksiae; for she felt very odd all over her; and when you are
+unwell you cannot be very haughty.
+
+The saucy Banksiae laughed, running over their wires that they
+cling to like little children.
+
+"You have got your wish," they said. "You are going to be a great
+lady; they have made you into a Rosa Indica!"
+
+A tea rose! Was it possible?
+
+Was she going to belong at last to that grand and graceful order,
+which she had envied so long and vainly from afar?
+
+Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damascena? She felt so
+happy she could hardly breathe. She thought it was her happiness
+that stifled her; in real matter of fact it was the tight bands in
+which the gardener had bound her.
+
+"Oh, what joy!" she thought, though she still felt very
+uncomfortable, but not for the world would she ever have admitted
+it to the Banksiae.
+
+The gardener had tied a tin tube on to her, and it was heavy and
+cumbersome; but no doubt, she said to herself, the thing was
+fashionable, so she bore the burden of it very cheerfully.
+
+The Banksiae asked her how she felt, but she would not deign even
+to reply; and when a friendly blackbird, who had often picked
+grubs off her leaves, came and sang to her, she kept silent: a
+Rosa Indica was far above a blackbird.
+
+"Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he may eat you for
+ME!" said the blackbird, and flew off in a huff.
+
+She was very ungrateful to hate the black-bird so, for he had been
+most useful to her in doing to death all the larvae of worms and
+beetles and caterpillars and other destroyers which were laid
+treacherously within her leaves. The good blackbird, with many
+another feathered friend, was forever at work in some good deed of
+the kind, and all the good, grateful flowers loved him and his
+race. But to this terribly proud and discontented Rosa Damascena
+he had been a bore, a common creature, a nuisance, a monster--any
+one of these things by turns, and sometimes all of them
+altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.
+
+"You ought to be such a happy rose!" the merle had said to her,
+one day. "There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are,
+except the briers."
+
+And from that day she had hated him. The idea of naming those
+hedgerow brier roses in the same breath with her!
+
+You would have seen in that moment of her rage a very funny sight
+had you been there; nothing less funny than a rose tree trying to
+box a blackbird's ears!
+
+But, to be sure, you would only have thought the wind was blowing
+about the rose, so you would have seen nothing really of the
+drollery of it all, which was not droll at all to Rosa Damascena,
+for a wound in one's vanity is as long healing as a wound from a
+conical bullet in one's body. The blackbird had not gone near her
+after that, nor any of his relations and friends, and she had had
+a great many shooting and flying pains for months together, in
+consequence of aphides' eggs having been laid inside her stem--
+eggs of which the birds would have eased her long before if they
+had not been driven away by her haughty rage.
+
+However, she had been almost glad to have some ailment. She had
+called it aneurism, and believed it made her look refined and
+interesting. If it would only have made her pale! But it had not
+done that: she had remained of the richest rose color.
+
+When the winter had passed and the summer had come round again,
+the grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and
+timidly put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a
+small, rather puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own
+natural red clusters, but she thought it far finer.
+
+Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gardener whipped it
+off with his knife, and bore it away in proof of his success in
+such transmogrifications.
+
+She had never felt the knife before, when she had been only Rosa
+Damascena: it hurt her very much, and her heart bled.
+
+"Il faut souffrir pour etre belle," said the Banksiae in a good-
+natured effort at consolation. She was not going to answer them,
+and she made believe that her tears were only dew, though it was
+high noon and all the dewdrops had been drunk by the sun, who by
+noontime gets tired of climbing and grows thirsty.
+
+Her next essay was much finer, and the knife whipped that off
+also. That summer she bore more and more blossoms, and always the
+knife cut them away, for she had been made one of the great race
+of Rosa Indica.
+
+Now, a rose tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers
+precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the rose
+tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature
+than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has
+a sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of
+these endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think
+this very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than
+that a lizard's tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a
+dog can scent a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief is yet
+miles away. All these things are most wonderful, or not at all so-
+-just as you like.
+
+In a little while she bore another child: this time it was a fine
+fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes. "I never saw
+a prettier!" said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment;
+at that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud's
+stalk.
+
+"The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage: she goes to the
+opera to-night," the man said to another man, as he took the young
+tea rose.
+
+"What is the opera?" asked the mother rose wearily of the
+butterfly. He did not know; but his cousin the death's-head moth,
+asleep under a magnolia leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his
+quaint face.
+
+"It is where everything dies in ten seconds," he answered. "It is
+a circle of fire; many friends of mine have flown in, none ever
+returned: your daughter will shrivel up and perish miserably. One
+pays for glory."
+
+The rose tree shivered through all her stalks; but she was still
+proud, and tried to think that all this was said only out of envy.
+What should an old death's-head moth know, whose eyes were so weak
+that a farthing rushlight blinded them?
+
+So she lifted herself a little higher, and would not even see that
+the Banksiae were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the
+blackbird, how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms
+and woodlice! could anything be more outrageously vulgar than
+that staring yellow beak of his? She twisted herself round not to
+see him, and felt quite annoyed that he went on and sang just the
+same, unconscious of, or indifferent to, her coldness.
+
+With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally
+and absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her
+fashion and fame.
+
+True, people came continually to look at her, and especially in
+Maytime would cry aloud, "What a beautiful Niphetos!" But then she
+was bereaved of all her offspring, for, being of the race of
+Niphetos, they were precious, and one would go to die in an hour
+in a hot ballroom, and another to perish in a Sevres vase, where
+the china indeed was exquisite but the water was foul, and others
+went to be suffocated in the vicious gases of what the mortals
+call an opera box, and others were pressed to death behind hard
+diamonds in a woman's bosom; in one way or another they each and
+all perished miserably. She herself also lost many of her once
+luxuriant leaves, and had a little scanty foliage, red-brown in
+summer, instead of the thick, dark-green clothing that she had
+worn when a rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife stabbed
+her; when the knife had nothing to take she was barren and chilly,
+for she had lost the happy power of looking beautiful all the year
+round, which once she had possessed.
+
+One day came when she was taken up out of the ground and borne
+into a glass house, placed in a large pot, and lifted up on to a
+pedestal, and left in a delicious atmosphere, with patrician
+plants all around her with long Latin names, and strange, rare
+beauties of their own. She bore bud after bud in this crystal
+temple, and became a very crown of blossom; and her spirit grew so
+elated, and her vanity so supreme, that she ceased to remember she
+had ever been a simple Rosa Damascena, except that she was always
+saying to herself, "How great I am! how great I am!" which she
+might have noticed that those born ladies, the Devoniensis and the
+Louise de Savoie, never did. But she noticed nothing except her
+own beauty, which she could see in a mirror that was let into the
+opposite wall of the greenhouse. Her blossoms were many and all
+quite perfect, and no knife touched them; and though to be sure
+she was still very scantily clothed so far as foliage went, yet
+she was all the more fashionable for that, so what did it matter?
+
+One day, when her beauty was at its fullest perfection, she heard
+all the flowers about her bending and whispering with rustling and
+murmuring, saying, "Who will be chosen? who will be chosen?"
+
+Chosen for what? They did not talk much to her, because she was
+but a newcomer and a parvenue, but she gathered from them in a
+little time that there was to be a ball for a marriage festivity
+at the house to which the greenhouse was attached. Each flower
+wondered if it would be chosen to go to it. The azaleas knew they
+would go, because they were in their pink or rose ball-dresses all
+ready; but no one else was sure. The rose tree grew quite sick and
+faint with hope and fear. Unless she went, she felt that life was
+not worth the living. She had no idea what a ball might be, but
+she knew that it was another form of greatness, when she was all
+ready, too, and so beautiful!
+
+The gardener came and sauntered down the glass house, glancing
+from one to another. The hearts of all beat high. The azaleas only
+never changed color: they were quite sure of themselves. Who could
+do without them in February?
+
+"Oh, take me! take me! take me!" prayed the rose tree, in her
+foolish, longing, arrogant heart.
+
+Her wish was given her. The lord of their fates smiled when he
+came to where she stood.
+
+"This shall be for the place of honor," he murmured, as he lifted
+her out of the large vase she lived in on to a trestle and
+summoned his boys to bear her away. The very azaleas themselves
+grew pale with envy.
+
+As for the rose tree herself, she would not look at any one; she
+was carried through the old garden straight past the Banksise, but
+she would make them no sign; and as for the blackbird, she hoped a
+cat had eaten him! Had he not known her as Rosa Damascena?
+
+She was borne bodily, roots and all, carefully wrapped up in soft
+matting, and taken into the great house.
+
+It was a very great house, a very grand house, and there was to be
+a marvelous feast in it, and a prince and princess from over the
+seas were that night to honor the mistress of it by their
+presence. All this Rosa Indica had gathered from the chatter of
+the flowers, and when she came into the big palace she saw many
+signs of excitement and confusion: servants out of livery were
+running up against one another in their hurry-scurry; miles and
+miles, it seemed, of crimson carpeting were being unrolled all
+along the terrace and down the terrace steps, since by some
+peculiar but general impression royal personages are supposed not
+to like to walk upon anything else, though myself I think they
+must get quite sick of red carpet, seeing so very much of it
+spread for them wherever they go. To Rosa Indica, however, the
+bright scarlet carpeting looked very handsome, and seemed, indeed,
+a foretaste of heaven.
+
+Soon she was carried quite inside the house, into an immense room
+with a beautiful dome-shaped ceiling, painted in fresco three
+centuries before, and fresh as though it had been painted
+yesterday. At the end of the room was a great chair, gilded and
+painted, too, three centuries before, and covered with velvet,
+gold-fringed, and powdered with golden grasshoppers. "That common
+insect here!" thought Rosa, in surprise, for she did not know that
+the chief of the house, long, long, long ago, when sleeping in the
+heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade, had been awakened
+by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had been aroused
+in time to put on his armor and do battle with a troop attacking
+Saracen cavalry, and beat them; wherefore, in gratitude, he had
+taken the humble field-creature as his badge for evermore.
+
+They set the roots of Rosa Indica now into a vase--such a vase!
+the royal blue of Sevres, if you please, and with border and
+scroll work and all kinds of wonders and glories painted on it and
+gilded on it, and standing four feet high if it stood one inch! I
+could never tell you the feelings of Rosa if I wrote a thousand
+pages. Her heart thrilled so with ecstasy that she almost dropped
+all her petals, only her vanity came to her aid, and helped her to
+control in a measure her emotions. The gardeners broke off a good
+deal of mould about her roots, and they muttered one to another
+something about her dying of it. But Rosa thought no more of that
+than a pretty lady does when her physician tells her she will die
+of tight lacing; not she! She was going to be put into that Sevres
+vase.
+
+This was enough for her, as it is enough for the lady that she is
+going to be put into a hundred-guinea ball gown.
+
+In she went. It was certainly a tight fit, as the gown often is,
+and Rosa felt nipped, strained, bruised, suffocated. But an old
+proverb has settled long ago that pride feels no pain, and perhaps
+the more foolish the pride the less is the pain that is felt--for
+the moment.
+
+They set her well into the vase, putting green moss over her
+roots, and then they stretched her branches out over a gilded
+trelliswork at the back of the vase. And very beautiful she
+looked; and she was at the head of the room, and a huge mirror
+down at the farther end opposite to her showed her own reflection.
+She was in paradise!
+
+"At last," she thought to herself, "at last they have done me
+justice!"
+
+The azaleas were all crowded round underneath her, like so many
+kneeling courtiers, but they were not taken out of their pots;
+they were only shrouded in moss. They had no Sevres vases. And
+they had always thought so much of themselves and given themselves
+such airs, for there is nothing so vain as an azalea,--except,
+indeed, a camellia, which is the most conceited flower in the
+world, though, to do it justice, it is also the most industrious,
+for it is busy getting ready its next winter buds whilst the
+summer is still hot and broad on the land, which is very wise and
+prudent in it and much to be commended.
+
+Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room in the Sevres
+vase, and very proud and triumphant she felt throned there, and
+the azaleas, of course, were whispering enviously underneath her,
+"Well, after all, she was only Rosa Damascena not so VERY long
+ago."
+
+Yes, THEY KNEW! What a pity it was! They knew she had once been
+Rosa Damascena and never would wash it out of their minds--the
+tiresome, spiteful, malignant creatures!
+
+Even aloft in the vase, in all her glory, the rose could have shed
+tears of mortification, and was ready to cry like Themistocles,
+"Can nobody give us oblivion?"
+
+Nobody could give that, for the azaleas, who were so irritated at
+being below her, were not at all likely to hold their tongues. But
+she had great consolations and triumphs, and began to believe
+that, let them say what they chose, she had never been a common
+garden wall rose. The ladies of the house came in and praised her
+to the skies; the children ran up to her and clapped their hands
+and shouted for joy at her beauty; a wonderful big green bird came
+in and hopped before her, cocked his head on one side, and said to
+her, "Pretty Poll! oh, SUCH a pretty Poll!"
+
+"Even the birds adore me here!" she thought, not dreaming he was
+only talking of himself; for when you are as vain as was this poor
+dear Rosa, creation is pervaded with your own perfections, and
+even when other people say only "Poll!" you feel sure they are
+saying "You!" or they ought to be if they are not.
+
+So there she stood in her grand Sevres pot, and she was ready to
+cry with the poet, "The world may end tonight!" Alas! it was not
+the world which was to end. Let me hasten to close this true
+heart-rending history.
+
+There was a great dinner as the sun began to set, and the mistress
+of the house came in on the arm of the great foreign prince; and
+what did the foreign prince do but look up at Rosa, straight up at
+her, and over the heads of the azaleas, and say to his hostess:
+"What a beautiful rose you have there! A Niphetos, is it not?"
+
+And her mistress, who had known her long as simple Rosa Damascena,
+answered, "Yes, sir; it is a Niphetos."
+
+Oh, to have lived for that hour! The silly thing thought it worth
+all her suffering from the gardener's knife, all the loss of her
+robust health and delightful power of flowering in all four
+seasons. She was a Niphetos, really and truly a Niphetos! and not
+one syllable hinted as to her origin! She began to believe she had
+been BORN a tea rose!
+
+The dinner was long and gorgeous; the guests were dazzling in
+jewels and in decorations; the table was loaded with old plate and
+rare china; the prince made a speech and used her as a simile of
+love and joy and purity and peace. The rose felt giddy with
+triumph and with the fumes of the wines around her. Her vase was
+of purple and gold, and all the voices round her said, "Oh, the
+beautiful rose!" No one noticed the azaleas. How she wished that
+the blackbird could see for a minute, if the cat would gobble him
+up the next!
+
+The day sped on; the chatelaine and her guests went away; the
+table was rearranged; the rose tree was left in its place of
+honor; the lights were lit; there was the sound of music near at
+hand; they were dancing in other chambers.
+
+Above her hung a chandelier--a circle of innumerable little flames
+and drops that looked like dew or diamonds. She thought it was the
+sun come very close. After it had been there a little while it
+grew very hot, and its rays hurt her.
+
+"Can you not go a little farther away, O Sun?" she said to it. It
+was flattered at being taken for the sun, but answered her: "I am
+fixed in my place. Do you not understand astronomy?"
+
+She did not know what astronomy was, so was silent, and the heat
+hurt her. Still, she was in the place of honor: so she was happy.
+
+People came and went; but nobody noticed her. They ate and drank,
+they laughed and made love, and then went away to dance again, and
+the music went on all night long, and all night long the heat of
+the chandelier poured down on her.
+
+"I am in the place of honor," she said to herself a thousand times
+in each hour.
+
+But the heat scorched her, and the fumes of the wines made her
+faint. She thought of the sweet fresh air of the old garden where
+the Banksiae were. The garden was quite near, but the windows were
+closed, and there were the walls now between her and it. She was
+in the place of honor. But she grew sick and waxed faint as the
+burning rays of the artificial light shining above her seemed to
+pierce through and through her like lances of steel. The night
+seemed very long. She was tired.
+
+She was erect there on her Sevres throne, with the light thrilling
+and throbbing upon her in every point. But she thought of the
+sweet, dark, fresh nights in the old home where the blackbird had
+slept, and she longed for them.
+
+The dancers came and went, the music thrummed and screamed, the
+laughter was both near and far; the rose tree was amidst it all.
+Yet she felt alone--all alone! as travelers may feel in a desert.
+Hour succeeded hour; the night wore on apace; the dancers ceased
+to come; the music ceased, too; the light still burned down upon
+her, and the scorching fever of it consumed her like fire.
+
+Then there came silence--entire silence. Servants came round and
+put out all the lights--hundreds and hundreds of lights--quickly,
+one by one. Other servants went to the windows and threw them wide
+open to let out the fumes of wine. Without, the night was changing
+into the gray that tells of earliest dawn. But it was a bitter
+frost; the grass was white with it; the air was ice. In the great
+darkness that had now fallen on all the scene this deadly cold
+came around the rose tree and wrapped her in it as in a shroud.
+
+She shivered from head to foot.
+
+The cruel glacial coldness crept into the hot banqueting chamber,
+and moved round it in white, misty circles, like steam, like
+ghosts of the gay guests that had gone. All was dark and chill--
+dark and chill as any grave!
+
+What worth was the place of honor now?
+
+Was this the place of honor?
+
+The rose tree swooned and drooped! A servant's rough hand shook
+down its worn beauty into a heap of fallen leaves. When they
+carried her out dead in the morning, the little Banksia-buds, safe
+hidden from the frost within their stems, waiting to come forth
+when the summer should come, murmured to one another:--
+
+"She had her wish; she was great. This way the gods grant foolish
+prayers, and punish discontent!"
+
+
+
+
+LAMPBLACK
+
+
+
+
+A poor black paint lay very unhappy in its tube one day alone,
+having tumbled out of an artist's color box and lying quite
+unnoticed for a year. "I am only Lampblack," he said to himself.
+"The master never looks at me: he says I am heavy, dull,
+lustreless, useless. I wish I could cake and dry up and die, as
+poor Flake-white did when he thought she turned yellow and
+deserted her."
+
+But Lampblack could not die; he could only lie in his tin tube and
+pine, like a silly, sorrowful thing as he was, in company with
+some broken bits of charcoal and a rusty palette knife. The master
+never touched him; month after month passed by, and he was never
+thought of; the other paints had all their turn of fair fortune,
+and went out into the world to great academies and mighty palaces,
+transfigured and rejoicing in a thousand beautiful shapes and
+services. But Lampblack was always passed over as dull and coarse,
+which indeed he was, and knew himself to be so, poor fellow, which
+made it all the worse. "You are only a deposit!" said the other
+colors to him; and he felt that it was disgraceful to be a
+deposit, though he was not quite sure what it meant.
+
+"If only I were happy like the others!" thought poor, sooty
+Lampblack, sorrowful in his corner. "There is Bistre, now, he is
+not so very much better-looking than I am, and yet they can do
+nothing without him, whether it is a girl's face or a wimple in a
+river!"
+
+The others were all so happy in this beautiful bright studio,
+whose open casements were hung with myrtle and passion-flower, and
+whose silence was filled with the singing of nightingales. Cobalt,
+with a touch or two, became the loveliness of summer skies at
+morning; the Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a thousand exquisite
+flowers and fancies; the Chromes and Ochres (mere dull earths)
+were allowed to spread themselves in sheets of gold that took the
+shine of the sun into the darkest places; Umber, a sombre and
+gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a child's curls and laugh in a
+child's smiles; whilst all the families of the Vermilions, the
+Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual glory of sunset or
+sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn woods, of kingly pageant or of
+martial pomp.
+
+It was very hard. Poor Lampblack felt as if his very heart would
+break, above all when he thought of pretty little Rose Madder,
+whom he loved dearly, and who never would even look at him,
+because she was so very proud, being herself always placed in
+nothing less than rosy clouds, or the hearts of roses, or
+something as fair and spiritual.
+
+"I am only a wretched deposit!" sighed Lampblack, and the rusty
+palette knife grumbled back, "My own life has been ruined in
+cleaning dirty brushes, and see what the gratitude of men and
+brushes is!"
+
+"But at least you have been of use once; but I never am--never!"
+said Lampblack, wearily; and indeed he had been there so long that
+the spiders had spun their silver fleeces all about him, and he
+was growing as gray as an old bottle does in a dark cellar.
+
+At that moment the door of the studio opened, and there came a
+flood of light, and the step of a man was heard: the hearts of all
+the colors jumped for joy, because the step was that of their
+magician, who out of mere common clays and ground ores could raise
+them at a touch into splendors of the gods and divinities
+immortal.
+
+Only the heart of poor dusty Lampblack could not beat a throb the
+more, because he was always left alone and never was thought
+worthy even of a glance. He could not believe his senses when this
+afternoon--oh, miracle and ecstasy!--the step of the master
+crossed the floor to the obscured corner where he lay under his
+spiders' webs, and the hand of the master touched him. Lampblack
+felt sick and faint with rapture. Had recognition come at last?
+
+The master took him up, "You will do for this work," he said; and
+Lampblack was borne trembling to an easel. The colors, for once in
+their turn neglected, crowded together to watch, looking in their
+bright tin tubes like rows of little soldiers in armor.
+
+"It is the old dull Deposit," they murmured to one another, and
+felt contemptuous, yet were curious, as scornful people often will
+be.
+
+"But I am going to be glorious and great," thought Lampblack, and
+his heart swelled high; for never more would they be able to hurl
+the name of Deposit at him, a name which hurt him none the less,
+but all the more indeed, because it was unintelligible.
+
+"You will do for this work," said the master, and let Lampblack
+out of his metal prison house into the light and touched him with
+the brush that was the wand of magic.
+
+"What am I going to be?" wondered Lampblack, as he felt himself
+taken on to a large piece of deal board, so large that he felt he
+must be going to make the outline of an athlete or the shadows of
+a tempest at the least.
+
+Himself he could not tell what he was becoming: he was happy
+enough and grand enough only to be employed, and, as he was being
+used, began to dream a thousand things of all the scenes he would
+be in, and all the hues that he would wear, and all the praise
+that he would hear when he went out into that wonderful great
+world of which his master was an idol. From his secret dreams he
+was harshly roused; all the colors were laughing and tittering
+round him till the little tin helmets they wore shook with their
+merriment.
+
+"Old Deposit is going to be a signpost," they cried to one another
+so merrily that the spiders, who are not companionable creatures,
+felt themselves compelled to come to the doors of their dens and
+chuckle too. A signpost! Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy
+upon the board, roused himself shivering from his dreams, and
+gazed at his own metamorphosis. He had been made into seven
+letters, thus:--
+
+                          BANDITA
+
+This word in the Italian country, where the English painter's
+studio was, means, Do not trespass, do not shoot, do not show
+yourself here: anything, indeed, that is peremptory and uncivil to
+all trespassers. In these seven letters, outspread upon the board,
+was Lampblack crucified!
+
+Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy dreams! He had been employed
+to paint a signboard, a thing stoned by the boys, blown on by the
+winds, gnawed by the rats, and drenched with the winter's rains.
+Better the dust and the cobwebs of his old corner than such shame
+as this!
+
+But help was there none. His fate was fixed. He was dried with a
+drench of turpentine, hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and here
+he yet was fully aware of all his misery, was being borne away
+upon the great board out of doors and handed to the gardener. For
+the master was a hasty and ardent man, and had been stung into
+impatience by the slaughter of some favorite blue thrushes in his
+ilex trees that day, and so in his haste had chosen to do
+journeyman's work himself. Lampblack was carried out of the studio
+for the last time, and as the door closed on him he heard all the
+colors laughing, and the laugh of little Rose Madder was highest
+of all as she cried to Naples Yellow, who was a dandy and made
+court to her: "Poor old ugly Deposit! He will grumble to the owls
+and the bats now!"
+
+The door shut, shutting him out forever from all that joyous
+company and palace of fair visions, and the rough hands of the
+gardener grasped him and carried him to the edge of the great
+garden, where the wall overlooked the public road, and there
+fastened him on high with a band of iron round the trunk of a
+tree.
+
+That night it rained heavily, and the north wind blew, and there
+was thunder also. Lampblack, out in the storm without his tin
+house to shelter him, felt that of all creatures wretched on the
+face of the earth there was not one so miserable as he.
+
+A signboard! Nothing but a signboard!
+
+The degradation of a color, created for art and artists, could not
+be deeper or more grievous anywhere. Oh, how he sighed for his tin
+tube and the quiet nook with the charcoal and the palette knife!
+
+He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had always some
+sort of hope to solace him--some chance still remaining that one
+day fortune might smile and he be allowed to be at least the
+lowest stratum of some immortal work.
+
+But now hope was there none. His doom, his end, were fixed and
+changeless. Never more could he be anything but what he was; and
+change there could be none till weather and time should have done
+their work on him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a shattered
+and worm-eaten wreck.
+
+Day broke--a gloomy, misty morning.
+
+From where he was crucified upon the tree-trunk he could no longer
+even see his beloved home, the studio; he could only see a dusky,
+intricate tangle of branches all about him, and below the wall of
+flint, with the Banksia that grew on it, and the hard muddy
+highway, drenched from the storm of the night.
+
+A man passed in a miller's cart, and stood up and swore at him,
+because the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds
+of the master's wooded gardens, and knew that they must not do it
+now.
+
+A slug crawled over him, and a snail also. A woodpecker hammered
+at him with its strong beak. A boy went by under the wall and
+threw stones at him, and called him names. The rain poured down
+again heavily. He thought of the happy painting room, where it had
+seemed always summer and always sunshine, and where now in the
+forenoon all the colors were marshaling in the pageantry of the
+Arts, as he had seen them do hundreds of times from his lone
+corner. All the misery of the past looked happiness now.
+
+"If I were only dead, like Flakewhite," he thought; but the stones
+only bruised, they did not kill him; and the iron band only hurt,
+it did not stifle him. For whatever suffers very much has always
+so much strength to continue to exist. And almost his loyal heart
+blasphemed and cursed the master who had brought him to such a
+fate as this.
+
+The day grew apace, and noon went by, and with it the rain passed.
+The sun shone out once more, and Lampblack, even imprisoned and
+wretched as he was, could not but see how beautiful the wet leaves
+looked, and the gossamers all hung with raindrops, and the blue
+sky that shone through the boughs; for he had not lived with a
+great artist all his days to be blind, even in pain, to the
+loveliness of nature. The sun came out, and with it some little
+brown birds tripped out too--very simple and plain in their
+costumes and ways, but which Lampblack knew were the loves of the
+poets, for he had heard the master call them so many times in
+summer nights. The little brown birds came tripping and pecking
+about on the grass underneath his tree-trunk, and then flew on the
+top of the wall, which was covered with Banksia and many other
+creepers. The brown birds sang a little song, for though they sing
+most in the moonlight, they do sing by day too, and sometimes all
+day long. And what they sung was this:--
+
+"Oh, how happy we are, how happy! No nets dare now be spread for
+us, no cruel boys dare climb, and no cruel shooters fire. We are
+safe, quite safe, and the sweet summer has begun!"
+
+Lampblack listened, and even in his misery was touched and soothed
+by the tender liquid sounds that these little throats poured out
+among the light yellow bloom of the Banksia flowers. And when one
+of the brown birds came and sat on a branch by him, swaying itself
+and drinking the raindrops off a leaf, he ventured to ask, as well
+as he could for the iron that strangled him, why they were so
+safe, and what made them so happy.
+
+The bird looked at him in surprise.
+
+"Do you not know?" he said. "It is YOU!"
+
+"I!" echoed Lampblack, and could say no more, for he feared that
+the bird was mocking him, a poor, silly, rusty black paint, only
+spread out to rot in fair weather and foul. What good could he do
+to any creature?
+
+"You," repeated the nightingale. "Did you not see that man under
+the wall? He had a gun; we should have been dead but for you. We
+will come and sing to you all night long, since you like it; and
+when we go to bed at dawn, I will tell my cousins, the thrushes
+and merles, to take our places, so that you shall hear somebody
+singing near you all the day long."
+
+Lampblack was silent.
+
+His heart was too full to speak.
+
+Was it possible that he was of use, after all?
+
+"Can it be true?" he said timidly.
+
+"Quite true," said the nightingale.
+
+"Then the master knew best," thought Lampblack.
+
+Never would he adorn a palace or be adored upon an altar. His high
+hopes were all dead, like last year's leaves. The colors in the
+studio had all the glories of the world, but he was of use in it,
+after all: he could save these little lives. He was poor and
+despised, bruised by stones and drenched by storms; yet was he
+content, nailed there upon his tree, for he had not been made
+quite in vain.
+
+The sunset poured its red and golden splendors through the
+darkness of the boughs, and the birds sang all together, shouting
+for joy and praising God.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILD OF URBINO
+
+
+
+
+It was in the year of grace 1490, in the reign of Guidobaldo, Lord
+of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino,--the year, by the way, of the
+birth of that most illustrious and gracious lady, Vittoria
+Colonna.
+
+It was in the spring of the year, in that mountain eyrie beloved
+of the Muses and coveted of the Borgia, that a little boy stood
+looking out of a grated casement into the calm, sunshiny day. He
+was a pretty boy, with hazel eyes, and fair hair cut straight
+above his brows; he wore a little blue tunic with some embroidery
+about the throat of it, and had in his hand a little round flat
+cap of the same color. He was sad of heart this merry morning, for
+a dear friend of his, a friend ten years older than himself, had
+gone the night before on a journey over the mountains to Maestro
+Francesco at Bologna, there to be bound apprentice to that gentle
+artist. This friend, Timoteo della Vita, had been very dear to the
+child, had played with him and jested with him, made him toys and
+told him stories, and he was very full of pain at Timoteo's loss.
+Yet he told himself not to mind, for had not Timoteo said to him,
+"I go as goldsmith's 'prentice to the best of men; but I mean to
+become a painter"? And the child understood that to be a painter
+was to be the greatest and wisest the world held; he quite
+understood that, for he was Raffaelle, the seven-year-old son of
+Signor Giovanni Sanzio.
+
+He was a very happy little boy here in this stately, yet homely
+and kindly Urbino, where his people had come for refuge when the
+lances of Malatesta had ravaged and ruined their homestead. He had
+the dearest old grandfather in all the world; he had a loving
+mother, and he had a father who was very tender to him, and
+painted him among the angels of heaven, and was always full of
+pleasant conceits and admirable learning, and such true love of
+art that the child breathed it with every breath, as he could
+breathe the sweetness of a cowslip-bell when he held one in his
+hands up to his nostrils. It was good in those days to live in old
+Urbino. It was not, indeed, so brilliant a place as it became in a
+later day, when Ariosto came there, and Bembo and Castiglione and
+many another witty and learned gentleman, and the Courts of Love
+were held with ingenious rhyme and pretty sentiment, sad only for
+wantonness. But, if not so brilliant, it was homelier, simpler,
+full of virtue, with a wise peace and tranquillity that joined
+hands with a stout courage. The burgher was good friends with his
+prince, and knew that in any trouble or perplexity he could go up
+to the palace, or stop the duke in the market place, and be sure
+of sympathy and good counsel. There were a genuine love of
+beautiful things, a sense of public duty and of public spirit, a
+loyal temper and a sage contentment, among the good people of that
+time, which made them happy and prosperous.
+
+All work was solidly and thoroughly done, living was cheap, and
+food good and plentiful, much better and more plentiful than it is
+now; in the fine old houses every stone was sound, every bit of
+ornament well wrought; men made their nests to live in and to pass
+to their children and children's children after them, and had
+their own fancies and their own traditions recorded in the
+ironwork of their casements and in the woodwork of their doors.
+They had their happy day of honest toil from matins bell to
+evensong, and then walked out or sat about in the calm evening air
+and looked down on the plains below that were rich with grain and
+fruit and woodland, and talked and laughed among each other, and
+were content with their own pleasant, useful lives, not burnt up
+with envy of desire to be some one else, as in our sickly,
+hurrying time most people are.
+
+Yes, life must have been very good in those old days in old
+Urbino, better than it is anywhere in ours.
+
+Can you not picture to yourself good, shrewd, wise Giovanni
+Sanzio, with his old father by his side, and his little son
+running before him, in the holy evening time of a feast day, with
+the deep church bells swaying above-head, and the last sun-rays
+smiting the frescoed walls, the stone bastions, the blazoned
+standard on the castle roof, the steep city rocks shelving down
+into the greenery of cherry orchard and of pear tree? I can,
+whenever I shut my eyes and recall Urbino as it was; and would it
+had been mine to live then in that mountain home, and meet that
+divine child going along his happy smiling way, garnering
+unconsciously in his infant soul all the beautiful sights and
+sounds around him, to give them in his manhood to the world.
+
+"Let him alone: he will paint all this some day," said his wise
+father, who loved to think that his brushes and his colors would
+pass in time to Raffaelle, whose hands would be stronger to hold
+them than his own had been. And, whether he would ever paint it or
+not, the child never tired of thus looking from his eyrie on the
+rocks and counting all that passed below through the blowing corn
+under the leafy orchard boughs.
+
+There were so many things to see in Urbino in that time, looking
+so over the vast green valley below: a clump of spears, most
+likely, as men-at-arms rode through the trees; a string of market
+folk bringing in the produce of the orchards or the fields;
+perchance a red-robed cardinal on a white mule with glittering
+housings, behind him a sumpter train rich with baggage, furniture,
+gold and silver plate; maybe the duke's hunting party going out or
+coming homeward with caracoling steeds, beautiful hounds straining
+at their leash, hunting horns sounding merrily over the green
+country; maybe a band of free lances, with plumes tossing, steel
+glancing, bannerets fluttering against the sky; or maybe a quiet
+gray-robed string of monks or pilgrims singing the hymn sung
+before Jerusalem, treading the long lush grass with sandaled feet,
+coming towards the city, to crowd slowly and gladly up its rocky
+height. Do you not wish with me you could stand in the window with
+Raffaelle to see the earth as it was then?
+
+No doubt the good folks of Urbino laughed at him often for a
+little moonstruck dreamer, so many hours did he stand looking,
+looking,--only looking,--as eyes have a right to do that see well
+and not altogether as others see. Happily for him, the days of his
+childhood were times of peace, and he did not behold, as his
+father had done, the torches light up the street and the flames
+devour the homesteads.
+
+At this time Urbino was growing into fame for its pottery work:
+those big dishes and bowls, those marriage plates and pharmacy
+jars which it made, were beginning to rival the products of its
+neighbor Gubbio, and when its duke wished to send a bridal gift,
+or a present on other festal occasions, he oftenest chose some
+service or some rare platter of his own Urbino ware. Now, pottery
+had not then taken the high place among the arts of Italy that it
+was destined very soon to do. As you will learn when you are
+older, after the Greeks and the Christians had exhausted all that
+was beautiful in shape and substance of clay vases, the art seemed
+to die out, and the potters and the pottery painters died with it,
+or at any rate went to sleep for a great many centuries, whilst
+soldiers and prelates, nobles and mercenaries, were trampling to
+and fro all over the land and disputing it, and carrying fire and
+torch, steel and desolation, with them in their quarrels and
+covetousness. But now, the reign of the late good duke, great
+Federigo, having been favorable to the Marches (as we call his
+province now), the potters and pottery painters, with other gentle
+craftsmen, had begun to look up again, and the beneficent fires of
+their humble ovens had begun to burn in Castel Durante, in Pesaro,
+in Faenza, in Gubbio, and in Urbino itself. The great days had not
+yet come: Maestro Giorgio was but a youngster, and Orazio Fontane
+not born, nor the clever baker Prestino either, nor the famous Fra
+Xanto; but there was a Don Giorgio even then in Gubbio, of whose
+work, alas! one plate now at the Louvre is all we have; and here
+in the ducal city on the hill rich and noble things were already
+being made in the stout and lustrous majolica that was destined to
+acquire later on so wide a ceramic fame. Jars and bowls and
+platters, oval dishes and ewers and basins, and big-bodied, metal-
+welded pharmacy vases were all made and painted at Urbino whilst
+Raffaelle Sanzio was running about on rosy infantine feet. There
+was a master-potter of the Montefeltro at that time, one Maestro
+Benedetto Ronconi, whose name had not become world-renowned as
+Orazio Fontane's and Maestro Giorgio's did in the following
+century, yet who in that day enjoyed the honor of all the duchy,
+and did things very rare and fine in the Urbino ware. He lived
+within a stone's throw of Giovanni Sanzio, and was a gray-haired,
+handsome, somewhat stern and pompous man, now more than middle-
+aged, who had one beauteous daughter, by name Pacifica. He
+cherished Pacifica well, but not so well as he cherished the
+things he wrought--the deep round nuptial plates and oval massive
+dishes that he painted with Scriptural stories and strange
+devices, and landscapes such as those he saw around, and flowing
+scrolls with Latin mottoes in black letters, and which, when thus
+painted, he consigned with an anxiously beating heart to the trial
+of the ovens, and which sometimes came forth from the trial all
+cracked and blurred and marred, and sometimes emerged in triumph
+and came into his trembling hands iridescent and lovely with those
+lustrous and opaline hues which we admire in them to this day as
+the especial glory of majolica.
+
+Maestro Benedetto was an ambitious and vain man, and had had a
+hard, laborious manhood, working at his potter's wheel and
+painter's brush before Urbino ware was prized in Italy or even in
+the duchy. Now, indeed, he was esteemed at his due worth, and his
+work was so also, and he was passably rich, and known as a good
+artist beyond the Marches; but there was a younger man over at
+Gubbio, the Don Giorgio who was precursor of unequaled Maestro
+Giorgio Andreoli, who surpassed him, and made him sleep o' nights
+on thorns, as envy makes all those to do who take her as their
+bedfellow.
+
+The house of Maestro Benedetto was a long stone building, with a
+loggia at the back all overclimbed by hardy rose trees, and
+looking on a garden that was more than half an orchard, and in
+which grew abundantly pear trees, plum trees, and wood strawberries.
+The lancet windows of his workshop looked on all this quiet greenery.
+There were so many such pleasant workshops then in the land--calm,
+godly, homelike places, filled from without with song of birds and
+scent of herbs and blossoms. Nowadays men work in crowded, stinking
+cities, in close factory chambers; and their work is barren as their
+lives are.
+
+The little son of neighbor Sanzio ran in and out this bigger,
+wider house and garden of Maestro Benedetto at his pleasure, for
+the maiden Pacifica was always glad to see him, and even the
+sombre master-potter would unbend to him, and show him how to lay
+the color on to the tremulous, fugitive, unbaked biscuit.
+
+Pacifica was a lovely young woman of some seventeen or eighteen
+summers; and perhaps Raffaelle was but remembering her when he
+painted in his after-years the face of his Madonna di San Sisto.
+He loved her as he loved everything that was beautiful and every
+one who was kind; and almost better than his own beloved father's
+studio, almost better than his dear old grandsire's cheerful
+little shop, did he love this grave, silent, sweet-smelling, sun-
+pierced, shadowy old house of Maestro Benedetto.
+
+Maestro Benedetto had four apprentices or pupils in that time
+learning to become figuli, but the one whom Raffaelle liked the
+most (and Pacifica too) was one Luca Torelli, of a village above
+in the mountains,--a youth with a noble, dark, pensive beauty of
+his own, and a fearless gait, and a supple, tall, slender figure
+that would have looked well in the light coat of mail and silken
+doublet of a man-at-arms. In sooth, the spirit of Messer Luca was
+more made for war and its risks and glories than for the wheel and
+the brush of the bottega; but he had loved Pacifica ever since he
+had come down one careless holy-day into Urbino, and had bound
+himself to her father's service in a heedless moment of eagerness
+to breathe the same air and dwell under the same roof as she did.
+He had gained little for his pains: to see her at mass and at
+mealtimes, now and then to be allowed to bring water from the well
+for her or feed her pigeons, to see her gray gown go down between
+the orchard trees and catch the sunlight, to hear the hum of her
+spinning wheel, the thrum of her viol--this was the uttermost he
+got of joy in two long years; and how he envied Raffaelle running
+along the stone floor of the loggia to leap into her arms, to hang
+upon her skirts, to pick the summer fruit with her, and sort with
+her the autumn herbs for drying!
+
+"I love Pacifica!" he would say, with a groan, to Raffaelle; and
+Raffaelle would say, with a smile, "Ah, Luca, so do I!"
+
+"It is not the same thing, my dear," sighed Luca; "I want her for
+my wife."
+
+"I shall have no wife; I shall marry myself to painting," said
+Raffaelle, with a little grave, wise face looking out from under
+the golden roof of his fair hair. For he was never tired of
+watching his father painting the saints with their branch of palm
+on their ground of blue or of gold, or Maestro Benedetto making
+the dull clay glow with angels' wings and prophets' robes and holy
+legends told in color.
+
+Now, one day, as Raffaelle was standing and looking thus at his
+favorite window in the potter's house, his friend, the handsome,
+black-browed Luca, who was also standing there, did sigh so deeply
+and so deplorably that the child was startled from his dreams.
+
+"Good Luca, what ails you?" he murmured, winding his arms about
+the young man's knees.
+
+"Oh, 'Faello!" mourned the apprentice, woefully. "Here is such a
+chance to win the hand of Pacifica if only I had talent--such
+talent as that Giorgio of Gubbio has! If the good Lord had only
+gifted me with a master's skill, instead of all this bodily
+strength and sinew, like a wild hog of the woods, which avails me
+nothing here!"
+
+"What chance is it?" asked Raffaelle, "and what is there new about
+Pacifica? She told me nothing, and I was with her an hour."
+
+"Dear simple one, she knows nothing of it," said Luca, heaving
+another tremendous sigh from his heart's deepest depths. "You must
+know that a new order has come in this very forenoon from the
+duke; he wishes a dish and a jar of the very finest and firmest
+majolica to be painted with the story of Esther, and made ready in
+three months from this date, to then go as his gifts to his
+cousins of Gonzaga. He has ordered that no cost be spared in the
+work, but that the painting thereof be of the best that can be
+produced, and the prize he will give is fifty scudi. Now, Maestro
+Benedetto, having known some time, it seems, of this order, has
+had made in readiness several large oval dishes and beautiful big-
+bellied jars: he gives one of each to each of his pupils,--to
+myself, to Berengario, to Tito, and Zenone. The master is sorely
+distraught that his eyesight permits him not himself to execute
+the duke's commands; but it is no secret that should one of us be
+so fortunate as to win the duke's approbation, the painter who
+does so shall become his partner here and shall have the hand of
+Pacifica. Some say that he has only put forth this promise as a
+stimulus to get the best work done of which his bottega is
+capable; but I know Maestro Benedetto too well to deem him guilty
+of any such evasion. What he has said, he will carry out; if the
+vase and the dish win the duke's praise, they will also win
+Pacifica. Now you see, 'Faello mine, why I am so bitterly sad of
+heart, for I am a good craftsman enough at the wheel and the
+furnace, and I like not ill the handling and the moulding of the
+clay, but at the painting of the clay I am but a tyro, and
+Berengario or even the little Zenone will beat me; of that I am
+sure."
+
+Raffaelle heard all this in silence, leaning his elbows on his
+friend's knee, and his chin on the palms of his own hands. He knew
+that the other pupils were better painters by far than his Luca,
+though not one of them was such a good-hearted or noble-looking
+youth, and for none of them did the maiden Pacifica care.
+
+"How long a time is given for the jar and the dish to be ready?"
+he asked, at length.
+
+"Three months, my dear," said Luca, with a sigh sadder than ever.
+"But if it were three years, what difference would it make? You
+cannot cudgel the divine grace of art into a man with blows as you
+cudgel speed into a mule, and I shall be a dolt at the end of the time
+as I am now. What said your good father to me but yesternight?--and
+he IS good to me and does not despise me. He said: 'Luca, my son,
+it is of no more avail for you to sigh for Pacifica than for the
+moon. Were she mine I would give her to you, for you have a heart
+of gold, but Signor Benedetto will not; for never, I fear me, will
+you be able to decorate anything more than an apothecary's mortar
+or a barber's basin. If I hurt you, take it not ill; I mean kindness,
+and were I a stalwart youth like you I would go try my fortunes in
+the Free Companies in France or Spain, or down in Rome, for you are
+made for a soldier.' That was the best even your father could say
+for me, 'Faello."
+
+"But Pacifica," said the child,--"Pacifica would not wish you to
+join the Free Companies."
+
+"God knows," said Luca, hopelessly. "Perhaps she would not care."
+
+"I am sure she would," said Raffaelle, "for she does love you,
+Luca, though she cannot say so, being but a girl, and Signor
+Benedetto against you. But that redcap you tamed for her, how she
+loves it, how she caresses it, and half is for you, Luca, half for
+the bird!"
+
+Luca kissed him.
+
+But the tears rolled down the poor youth's face, for he was much
+in earnest and filled with despair.
+
+"Even if she did, if she do," he murmured hopelessly, "she never
+will let me know it, since her father forbids a thought of me; and
+now here is this trial of skill at the duke's order come to make
+things worse, and if that swaggering Berengario of Fano win her,
+then truly will I join the free lances and pray heaven send me
+swift shrive and shroud."
+
+Raffaelle was very pensive for a while; then he raised his head,
+and said:--
+
+"I have thought of something, Luca. But I do not know whether you
+will let me try it."
+
+"You angel child! What would your old Luca deny to you? But as for
+helping me, my dear, put that thought out of your little mind
+forever, for no one can help me, 'Faello, not the saints
+themselves, since I was born a dolt!"
+
+Raffaelle kissed him, and said, "Now listen!"
+
+A few days later Signer Benedetto informed his pupils in
+ceremonious audience of the duke's command and of his own
+intentions; he did not pronounce his daughter's name to the
+youths, but he spoke in terms that were clear enough to assure
+them that whoever had the good fortune and high merit to gain the
+duke's choice of his pottery should have the honor of becoming
+associate in his own famous bottega. Now, it had been known in
+Urbino ever since Pacifica had gone to her first communion that
+whoever pleased her father well enough to become his partner would
+have also to please her as her husband. Not much attention was
+given to maidens' wishes in those times, and no one thought the
+master-potter either unjust or cruel in thus suiting himself
+before he suited his daughter. And what made the hearts of all the
+young men quake and sink the lowest was the fact that Signer
+Benedetto offered the competition, not only to his own apprentices,
+but to any native of the duchy of Urbino. For who could tell what
+hero might not step forth from obscurity and gain the great prize
+of this fair hand of Pacifica's? And with her hand would go many
+a broad gold ducat, and heritage of the wide old gray stone house,
+and many an old jewel and old brocade that were kept there in dusky
+sweet-smelling cabinets, and also more than one good piece of land,
+smiling with corn and fruit trees, outside the gates in the lower
+pastures to the westward.
+
+Luca, indeed, never thought of these things, but the other three
+pupils did, and other youths as well. Had it not been for the
+limitation as to birth within the duchy, many a gallant young
+painter from the other side of the Apennines, many a lusty
+vasalino or boccalino from the workshops of fair Florence herself,
+or from the Lombard cities, might have traveled there in hot haste
+as fast as horses could carry them, and come to paint the clay for
+the sake of so precious a recompense. But Urbino men they had to
+be; and poor Luca, who was so full of despair that he could almost
+have thrown himself headlong from the rocks, was thankful to
+destiny for even so much slender mercy as this,--that the number
+of his rivals was limited.
+
+"Had I been you," Giovanni Sanzio ventured once to say
+respectfully to Signor Benedetto, "I think I should have picked
+out for my son-in-law the best youth that I knew, not the best
+painter; for be it said in all reverence, my friend, the greatest
+artist is not always the truest man, and by the hearthstone humble
+virtues have sometimes high claim."
+
+Then Signor Benedetto had set his stern face like a flint, knowing
+very well what youth Messer Giovanni would have liked to name to
+him.
+
+"I have need of a good artist in my bottega to keep up its fame,"
+he had said stiffly. "My vision is not what it was, and I should
+be loath to see Urbino ware fall back, whilst Pesaro and Gubbio
+and Castel Durante gain ground every day. Pacifica must pay the
+penalty, if penalty there be, for being the daughter of a great
+artist."
+
+Mirthful, keen-witted Sanzio smiled to himself, and went his way
+in silence; for he who loved Andrea Mantegna did not bow down in
+homage before the old master-potter's estimation of himself, which
+was in truth somewhat overweening in its vanity.
+
+"Poor Pacifica!" he thought; "if only my 'Faello were but some
+decade older!"
+
+He, who could not foresee the future, the splendid, wondrous,
+unequaled future that awaited his young son, wished nothing better
+for him than a peaceful painter's life here in old Urbino, under
+the friendly shadow of the Montefeltro's palace walls.
+
+Meanwhile, where think you was Raffaelle? Half the day, or all the
+day, and every day whenever he could? Where think you was he?
+Well, in the attic of Luca, before a bowl and a dish almost as big
+as himself. The attic was a breezy, naked place, underneath the
+arches supporting the roof of Maestro Benedetto's dwelling. Each
+pupil had one of these garrets to himself,--a rare boon, for which
+Luca came to be very thankful, for without it he could not have
+sheltered his angel; and the secret that Raffaelle had whispered
+to him that day of the first conference had been, "Let ME try and
+paint it!"
+
+For a long time Luca had been afraid to comply, had only forborne
+indeed from utter laughter at the idea from his love and reverence
+for the little speaker. Baby Sanzio, who was only just seven years
+old as the April tulips reddened the corn, painting a majolica
+dish and vase to go to the Gonzaga of Mantua! The good fellow
+could scarcely restrain his shouts of mirth at the audacious
+fancy; and nothing had kept him grave but the sight of that most
+serious face of Raffaelle, looking up to his with serene, sublime
+self-confidence, nay, perhaps, rather, confidence in heaven and in
+heaven's gifts.
+
+"Let me try!" said the child a hundred times. He would tell no
+one, only Luca would know; and if he failed--well, there would
+only be the spoiled pottery to pay for, and had he not two whole
+ducats that the duke had given him when the court had come to
+behold his father's designs for the altar frescos at San Dominico
+di Cagli?
+
+So utterly in earnest was he, and so intense and blank was Luca's
+absolute despair, that the young man had in turn given way to his
+entreaties. "Never can I do aught," he thought, bitterly, looking
+at his own clumsy designs, "And sometimes by the help of cherubs
+the saints work miracles,"
+
+"It will be no miracle," said Raffaelle, hearing him murmur this;
+"it will be myself, and that which the dear God has put into me."
+
+From that hour Luca let him do what he would, and through all
+these lovely early summer days the child came and shut himself up
+in the garret, and studied, and thought, and worked, and knitted
+his pretty fair brows, and smiled in tranquil satisfaction,
+according to the mood he was in and the progress of his labors.
+
+Giovanni Sanzio went away at that time to paint an altar-piece
+over at Citta di Castello, and his little son for once was glad he
+was absent. Messer Giovanni would surely have remarked the long
+and frequent visits of Raffaelle to the attic, and would, in all
+likelihood, have obliged him to pore over his Latin or to take
+exercise in the open fields; but his mother said nothing, content
+that he should be amused and safe, and knowing well that Pacifica
+loved him and would let him come to no harm under her roof.
+Pacifica herself did wonder that he deserted her so perpetually
+for the garret. But one day when she questioned him the sweet-
+faced rogue clung to her and murmured, "Oh, Pacifica, I do want
+Luca to win you, because he loves you so; and I do love you both!"
+And she grew pale, and answered him, "Ah, dear, if he could!" and
+then said never a word more, but went to her distaff; and
+Raffaelle saw great tears fall off her lashes down among the flax.
+
+She thought he went to the attic to watch how Luca painted, and
+loved him more than ever for that, but knew in the hopelessness of
+her heart--as Luca also knew it in his--that the good and gallant
+youth would never be able to create anything that would go as the
+duke's gifts to the Gonzaga of Mantua. And she did care for Luca!
+She had spoken to him but rarely indeed, yet passing in and out of
+the same doors, and going to the same church offices, and dwelling
+always beneath the same roof, he had found means of late for a
+word, a flower, a serenade. And he was so handsome and so brave,
+and so gentle, too, and so full of deference. Poor Pacifica cared
+not in the least whether he could paint or not. He could have made
+her happy.
+
+In the attic Raffaelle passed the most anxious hours of all his
+sunny little life. He would not allow Luca even to look at what he
+did. He barred the door and worked; when he went away he locked
+his work up in a wardrobe. The swallows came in and out of the
+unglazed window, and fluttered all around him; the morning
+sunbeams came in, too, and made a nimbus round his golden head,
+like that which his father gilded above the heads of saints.
+Raffaelle worked on, not looking off, though clang of trumpet, or
+fanfare of cymbal, often told him there was much going on worth
+looking at down below. He was only seven years old, but he labored
+as earnestly as if he were a man grown, his little rosy ringers
+gripping that pencil which was to make him in life and death
+famous as kings are not famous, and let his tender body lie in its
+last sleep in the Pantheon of Rome.
+
+He had covered hundreds of sheets with designs before he had
+succeeded in getting embodied the ideas that haunted him. When he
+had pleased himself at last, he set to work to transfer his
+imaginations to the clay in color in the subtile luminous metallic
+enamel that characterizes Urbino majolica.
+
+Ah, how glad he was now that his father had let him draw from the
+time he was two years old, and that of late Messer Benedetto had
+shown him something of the mysteries of painting on biscuit and
+producing the metallic lustre which was the especial glory of the
+pottery of the duchy!
+
+How glad he was, and how his little heart bounded and seemed to
+sing in this his first enjoyment of the joyous liberties and
+powers of creative work!
+
+A well-known writer has said that genius is the power of taking
+pains; he should have said rather that genius HAS this power also,
+but that first and foremost it possesses the power of spontaneous
+and exquisite production without effort and with delight.
+
+Luca looked at him (not at his work, for the child had made him
+promise not to do so) and began to marvel at his absorption, his
+intentness, the evident facility with which he worked: the little
+figure leaning over the great dish on the bare board of the table,
+with the oval opening of the window and the blue sky beyond it,
+began to grow sacred to him with more than the sanctity of
+childhood. Raffaelle's face grew very serious, too, and lost its
+color, and his large hazel eyes looked very big and grave and
+dark.
+
+"Perhaps Signer Giovanni will be angry with me if ever he knows,"
+thought poor Luca; but it was too late to alter anything now. The
+child Sanzio had become his master.
+
+So Raffaelle, unknown to any one else, worked on and on there in
+the attic while the tulips bloomed and withered, and the
+honeysuckle was in flower in the hedges, and the wheat and barley
+were being cut in the quiet fields lying far down below in the
+sunshine. For midsummer was come; the three months all but a week
+had passed by. It was known that every one was ready to compete
+for the duke's choice.
+
+One afternoon Raffaelle took Luca by the hand and said to him,
+"Come."
+
+He led the young man up to the table, beneath the unglazed window,
+where he had passed so many of these ninety days of the spring and
+summer.
+
+Luca gave a great cry, and stood gazing, gazing, gazing. Then he
+fell on his knees and embraced the little feet of the child: it
+was the first homage that he, whose life became one beautiful song
+of praise, received from man.
+
+"Dear Luca," he said softly, "do not do that. If it be indeed
+good, let us thank God."
+
+What his friend saw were the great oval dish and the great jar or
+vase standing with the sunbeams full upon them, and the brushes
+and the tools and the colors all strewn around. And they shone
+with lustrous opaline hues and wondrous flame-like glories and
+gleaming iridescence, like melted jewels, and there were all
+manner of graceful symbols and classic designs wrought upon them;
+and their borders were garlanded with cherubs and flowers, bearing
+the arms of Montefeltro, and the landscapes were the tender,
+homely landscapes round about Urbino; and the mountains had the
+solemn radiance that the Apennines wore at eveningtime; and amidst
+the figures there was one supreme, white-robed, golden-crowned
+Esther, to whom the child painter had given the face of Pacifica.
+And this wondrous creation, wrought by a baby's hand, had safely
+and secretly passed the ordeal of the furnace, and had come forth
+without spot or flaw.
+
+Luca ceased not from kneeling at the feet of Raffaelle, as ever
+since has kneeled the world.
+
+"Oh, wondrous boy! Oh, angel sent unto men!" sighed the poor
+'prentice, as he gazed; and his heart was so full that he burst
+into tears.
+
+"Let us thank God," said little Raffaelle again; and he joined his
+small hands that had wrought this miracle, and said his Laus
+Domini.
+
+When the precious jar and the great platter were removed to the
+wardrobe and shut up in safety behind the steel wards of the
+locker, Luca said timidly, feeling twenty years in age behind the
+wisdom of this divine child: "But, dearest boy, I do not see how
+your marvelous and most exquisite accomplishment can advantage me.
+Even if you would allow it to pass as mine, I could not accept
+such a thing; it would be a fraud, a shame: not even to win
+Pacifica could I consent."
+
+"Be not so hasty, good friend," said Raffaelle. "Wait just a
+little longer yet and see. I have my own idea. Do trust in me."
+
+"Heaven speaks in you, that I believe," said Luca, humbly.
+
+Raffaelle answered not, but ran downstairs, and, passing Pacifica,
+threw his arms about her in more than his usual affectionate
+caresses.
+
+"Pacifica, be of good heart," he murmured, and would not be
+questioned, but ran homeward to his mother.
+
+"Can it be that Luca has done well," thought Pacifica; but she
+feared the child's wishes had outrun his wisdom. He could not be
+any judge, a child of seven years, even though he were the son of
+that good and honest painter and poet, Giovanni Sanzio.
+
+The next morning was midsummer day. Now, the pottery was all to be
+placed on this forenoon in the bottega of Signor Benedetto; and
+the Duke Guidobaldo was then to come and make his choice from
+amidst them; and the master-potter, a little because he was a
+courtier, and more because he liked to affect a mighty indifference
+and to show he had no favoritism, had declared that he would not
+himself see the competing works of art until the eyes of the Lord
+of Montefeltro also fell upon them.
+
+As for Pacifica, she had locked herself in her chamber, alone with
+her intense agitation. The young men were swaggering about, and
+taunting each other, and boasting. Luca alone sat apart, thrumming
+an old lute. Giovanni Sanzio, who had ridden home at evening from
+Citta di Castello, came in from his own house and put his hand on
+the youth's shoulder.
+
+"I hear the Pesaro men have brought fine things. Take courage, my
+lad. Maybe we can entreat the duke to dissuade Pacifica's father
+from this tyrannous disposal of her hand."
+
+Luca shook his head wearily.
+
+There would be one beautiful thing there, indeed, he knew; but
+what use would that be to him?
+
+"The child--the child--" he stammered, and then remembered that he
+must not disclose Raffaelle's secret.
+
+"My child?" said Signor Giovanni. "Oh, he will be here; he will be
+sure to be here: wherever there is a painted thing to be seen,
+there always, be sure, is Raffaelle."
+
+Then the good man sauntered within from the loggia, to exchange
+salutations with Ser Benedetto, who, in a suit of fine crimson
+with doublet of sad-colored velvet, was standing ready to advance
+bareheaded into the street as soon as the hoofs of the duke's
+charger should strike on the stones.
+
+"You must be anxious in your thoughts," said Signor Giovanni to
+him. "They say a youth from Pesaro brings something fine: if you
+should find yourself bound to take a stranger into your workroom
+and your home--"
+
+"If he be a man of genius, he will be welcome," answered Messer
+Ronconi, pompously. "Be he of Pesaro, or of Fano, or of Castel
+Durante, I go not back from my word: I keep my word, to my own
+hindrance even, ever."
+
+"Let us hope it will bring you only joy and triumph here," said
+his neighbor, who knew him to be an honest man and a true, if
+over-obstinate and too vain of his own place in Urbino.
+
+"Our lord the duke!" shouted the people standing in the street;
+and Ser Benedetto walked out with stately tread to receive the
+honor of his master's visit to his bottega.
+
+Raffaelle slipped noiselessly up to his father's side, and slid
+his little hand into Sanzio's.
+
+"You are not surely afraid of our good Guidobaldo!" said his
+father, with a laugh and some little surprise, for Raffaelle was
+very pale, and his lower lip trembled a little.
+
+"No," said the child, simply.
+
+The young duke and his court came riding down the street, and
+paused before the old stone house of the master-potter,--splendid
+gentlemen, though only in their morning apparel, with noble
+Barbary steeds fretting under them, and little pages and liveried
+varlets about their steps. Usually, unless he went hunting or on a
+visit to some noble, Guidobaldo, like his father, walked about
+Urbino like any one of his citizens; but he knew the pompous and
+somewhat vainglorious temper of Messer Benedetto, and good-
+naturedly was willing to humor its harmless vanities. Bowing to
+the ground, the master-potter led the way, walking backward into
+his bottega; the courtiers followed their prince; Giovanni Sanzio
+with his little son and a few other privileged persons went in
+also at due distance. At the farther end of the workshop stood the
+pupils and the artists from Pesaro and other places in the duchy
+whose works were there in competition. In all there were some ten
+competitors: poor Luca, who had set his own work on the table with
+the rest as he was obliged to do, stood hindmost of all, shrinking
+back, to hide his misery, into the deepest shadow of the deep-
+bayed latticed window.
+
+On the narrow deal benches that served as tables on working days
+to the pottery painters were ranged the dishes and the jars, with
+a number attached to each--no name to any, because Signor
+Benedetto was resolute to prove his own absolute disinterestedness
+in the matter of choice: he wished for the best artist. Prince
+Guidobaldo, doffing his plumed cap courteously, walked down the
+long room and examined each production in its turn. On the whole,
+the collection made a brave display of majolica, though he was
+perhaps a little disappointed at the result in each individual
+case, for he had wanted something out of the common run and
+absolutely perfect. Still, with fair words he complimented Signor
+Benedetto on the brave show, and only before the work of poor Luca
+was he entirely silent, since indeed silence was the greatest
+kindness he could show to it: the drawing was bold and regular,
+but the coloring was hopelessly crude, glaring, and ill-disposed.
+
+At last, before a vase and a dish that stood modestly at the very
+farthest end of the deal bench, the duke gave a sudden exclamation
+of delight, and Signor Benedetto grew crimson with pleasure and
+surprise, and Giovanni Sanzio pressed a little nearer and tried to
+see over the shoulders of the gentlemen of the court, feeling sure
+that something rare and beautiful must have called forth that cry
+of wonder from the Lord of Montefeltro, and having seen at a
+glance that for his poor friend Luca there was no sort of hope.
+
+"This is beyond all comparison," said Guidobaldo, taking the great
+oval dish up reverently in his hands. "Maestro Benedetto, I do
+felicitate you indeed that you should possess such a pupil. He
+will be a glory to our beloved Urbino."
+
+"It is indeed most excellent work, my lord duke," said the master-
+potter, who was trembling with surprise and dared not show all the
+astonishment and emotion that he felt at the discovery of so
+exquisite a creation in his bottega. "It must be," he added, for
+he was a very honest man, "the work of one of the lads of Pesaro
+or Castel Durante. I have no such craftsman in my workshop. It is
+beautiful exceedingly!"
+
+"It is worth its weight in gold!" said the prince, sharing his
+emotion. "Look, gentlemen--look! Will not the fame of Urbino be
+borne beyond the Apennines and Alps?"
+
+Thus summoned, the court and the citizens came to look, and
+averred that truly never in Urbino had they seen such painting on
+majolica. "But whose is it?" said Guidobaldo, impatiently, casting
+his eyes over the gathered group in the background of apprentices
+and artists. "Maestro Benedetto, I pray you, the name of the
+artist; I pray you, quick!"
+
+"It is marked number eleven, my lord," answered the master-potter.
+"Ho, you who reply to that number, stand out and give your name.
+My lord duke has chosen your work. Ho, there! do you hear me?"
+
+But not one of the group moved. The young men looked from one to
+another. Who was this nameless rival? There were but ten of
+themselves.
+
+"Ho, there!" repeated Signor Benedetto, getting angry. "Cannot you
+find a tongue, I say? Who has wrought this work? Silence is but
+insolence to his highness and to me!"
+
+Then the child Sanzio loosened his little hand from his father's
+hold, and went forward, and stood before the master-potter.
+
+"I painted it," he said, with a pleased smile; "I, Raffaelle."
+
+Can you not fancy, without telling, the confusion, the wonder, the
+rapture, the incredulity, the questions, the wild ecstasy of
+praise, that followed on the discovery of the child artist? Only
+the presence of Guidobaldo kept it in anything like decent
+quietude, and even he, all duke though he was, felt his eyes wet
+and felt his heart swell; for he himself was childless, and for
+the joy that Giovanni Sanzio felt that day he would have given his
+patrimony and duchy.
+
+He took a jewel hung on a gold chain from his own breast and threw
+it over Raffaelle's shoulders.
+
+"There is your first guerdon," he said; "you will have many, O
+wondrous child, who shall live when we are dust!"
+
+Raffaelle, who himself was all the while quite tranquil and
+unmoved, kissed the duke's hand with sweetest grace, then turned
+to his own father.
+
+"It is true I have won my lord duke's prize?"
+
+"Quite true, my angel!" said Giovanni Sanzio, with tremulous
+voice.
+
+Raffaelle looked up at Maestro Benedetto.
+
+"Then I claim the hand of Pacifica!"
+
+There was a smile on all the faces round, even on the darker
+countenances of the vanquished painters.
+
+"Oh, would indeed you were of age to be my son by marriage, as you
+are the son of my heart!" murmured Signor Benedetto. "Dear and
+marvelous child, you are but jesting, I know. Tell me what it is
+indeed that you would have. I could deny you nothing; and truly it
+is you who are my master."
+
+"I am your pupil," said Raffaelle, with that pretty serious smile
+of his, his little fingers playing with the ducal jewel. "I could
+never have painted that majolica yonder had you not taught me the
+secrets and management of your colors. Now, dear maestro mine, and
+you, O my lord duke, do hear me! I by the terms of the contest
+have won the hand of Pacifica and the right of association with
+Messer Ronconi. I take these rights and I give them over to my
+dear friend Luca of Fano, because he is the honestest man in all
+the world, and does honor Signor Benedetto and love Pacifica as no
+other can do so well, and Pacifica loves him, and my lord duke
+will say that thus all will be well."
+
+So with the grave, innocent audacity of a child he spoke--this
+seven-year-old painter who was greater than any there.
+
+Signor Benedetto stood mute, sombre, agitated. Luca had sprung
+forward and dropped on one knee; he was as pale as ashes.
+Raffaelle looked at him with a smile.
+
+"My lord duke," he said, with his little gentle smile, "you have
+chosen my work; defend me in my rights."
+
+"Listen to the voice of an angel, my good Benedetto; heaven speaks
+by him," said Guidobaldo, gravely, laying his hand on the arm of
+his master-potter.
+
+Harsh Signor Benedetto burst into tears.
+
+"I can refuse him nothing," he said, with a sob. "He will give
+such glory unto Urbino as never the world hath seen!"
+
+"And call down this fair Pacifica whom Raffaelle has won," said
+the sovereign of the duchy, "and I will give her myself as her
+dower as many gold pieces as we can cram into this famous vase. An
+honest youth who loves her and whom she loves--what better can you
+do, Benedetto? Young man, rise up and be happy. An angel has
+descended on earth this day for you."
+
+But Luca heard not; he was still kneeling at the feet of
+Raffaelle, where the world has knelt ever since.
+
+
+
+
+FINDELKIND
+
+
+
+
+There was a little boy, a year or two ago, who lived under the
+shadow of Martinswand. Most people know, I should suppose, that
+the Martinswand is that mountain in the Oberinnthal where, several
+centuries past, brave Kaiser Max lost his footing as he stalked
+the chamois, and fell upon a ledge of rock, and stayed there, in
+mortal peril, for thirty hours, till he was rescued by the
+strength and agility of a Tyrol hunter--an angel in the guise of a
+hunter, as the chronicles of the time prefer to say.
+
+The Martinswand is a grand mountain, being one of the spurs of the
+greater Sonnstein, and rises precipitously, looming, massive and
+lofty, like a very fortress for giants, where it stands right
+across that road which, if you follow it long enough, takes you
+through Zell to Landeck,--old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where
+Frederick of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows in ballads to
+his people,--and so on by Bludenz into Switzerland itself, by as
+noble a highway as any traveler can ever desire to traverse on a
+summer's day. It is within a mile of the little burg of Zell,
+where the people, in the time of their emperor's peril, came out
+with torches and bells, and the Host lifted up by their priest,
+and all prayed on their knees underneath the steep gaunt pile of
+limestone, that is the same to-day as it was then, whilst Kaiser
+Max is dust; it soars up on one side of this road, very steep and
+very majestic, having bare stone at its base, and being all along
+its summit crowned with pine woods; and on the other side of the
+road are a little stone church, quaint and low, and gray with age,
+and a stone farmhouse, and cattle sheds, and timber sheds, all of
+wood that is darkly brown from time; and beyond these are some of
+the most beautiful meadows in the world, full of tall grass and
+countless flowers, with pools and little estuaries made by the
+brimming Inn River that flows by them; and beyond the river are
+the glaciers of the Sonnstein and the Selrain and the wild Arlberg
+region, and the golden glow of sunset in the west, most often seen
+from here through the veil of falling rain.
+
+At this farmhouse, with Martinswand towering above it, and Zell a
+mile beyond, there lived, and lives still, a little boy who bears
+the old historical name of Findelkind, whose father, Otto Korner,
+is the last of a sturdy race of yeomen, who had fought with Hofer
+and Haspinger, and had been free men always.
+
+Findelkind came in the middle of seven other children, and was a
+pretty boy of nine years, with slenderer limbs and paler cheeks
+than his rosy brethren, and tender dreamy eyes that had the look,
+his mother told him, of seeking stars in midday: de chercher midi
+a quatorze heures, as the French have it. He was a good little
+lad, and seldom gave any trouble from disobedience, though he
+often gave it from forgetfulness. His father angrily complained
+that he was always in the clouds,--that is, he was always
+dreaming, and so very often would spill the milk out of the pails,
+chop his own fingers instead of the wood, and stay watching the
+swallows when he was sent to draw water. His brothers and sisters
+were always making fun of him: they were sturdier, ruddier, and
+merrier children than he was, loved romping and climbing and
+nutting, thrashing the walnut trees and sliding down snowdrifts,
+and got into mischief of a more common and childish sort than
+Findelkind's freaks of fancy. For indeed he was a very fanciful
+little boy: everything around had tongues for him; and he would
+sit for hours among the long rushes on the river's edge, trying to
+imagine what the wild green-gray water had found in its
+wanderings, and asking the water rats and the ducks to tell him
+about it; but both rats and ducks were too busy to attend to an
+idle little boy, and never spoke, which vexed him.
+
+Findelkind, however, was very fond of his books; he would study
+day and night, in his little ignorant, primitive fashion. He loved
+his missal and his primer, and could spell them both out very
+fairly, and was learning to write of a good priest in Zirl, where
+he trotted three times a week with his two little brothers. When
+not at school, he was chiefly set to guard the sheep and the cows,
+which occupation left him very much to himself; so that he had
+many hours in the summertime to stare up to the skies and wonder--
+wonder--wonder about all sorts of things; while in the winter--the
+long, white, silent winter, when the post-wagons ceased to run,
+and the road into Switzerland was blocked, and the whole world
+seemed asleep, except for the roaring of the winds--Findelkind,
+who still trotted over the snow to school in Zirl, would dream
+still, sitting on the wooden settle by the fire, when he came home
+again under Martinswand. For the worst--or the best--of it all was
+that he WAS Findelkind.
+
+This is what was always haunting him. He was Findelkind; and to
+bear this name seemed to him to mark him out from all other
+children and to dedicate him to heaven. One day three years
+before, when he had been only six years old, the priest in Zirl,
+who was a very kindly and cheerful man, and amused the children as
+much as he taught them, had not allowed Findelkind to leave school
+to go home, because the storm of snow and wind was so violent, but
+had kept him until the worst should pass, with one or two other
+little lads who lived some way off, and had let the boys roast a
+meal of apples and chestnuts by the stove in his little room, and,
+while the wind howled and the blinding snow fell without, had told
+the children the story of another Findelkind--an earlier
+Findelkind, who had lived in the flesh on Arlberg as far back as
+1381, and had been a little shepherd lad, "just like you," said
+the good man, looking at the little boys munching their roast
+crabs, and whose country had been over there, above Stuben, where
+Danube and Rhine meet and part.
+
+The pass of Arlberg is even still so bleak and bitter that few
+care to climb there; the mountains around are drear and barren,
+and snow lies till midsummer, and even longer sometimes. "But in
+the early ages," said the priest (and this is quite a true tale
+that the children heard with open eyes, and mouths only not open
+because they were full of crabs and chestnuts), "in the early
+ages," said the priest to them, "the Arlberg was far more dreary
+than it is now. There was only a mule track over it, and no refuge
+for man or beast; so that wanderers and peddlers, and those whose
+need for work or desire for battle brought them over that
+frightful pass, perished in great numbers, and were eaten by the
+bears and the wolves. The little shepherd-boy Findelkind--who was
+a little boy five hundred years ago, remember," the priest
+repeated--"was sorely disturbed and distressed to see these poor
+dead souls in the snow winter after winter, and seeing the
+blanched bones lie on the bare earth, unburied, when summer melted
+the snow. It made him unhappy, very unhappy; and what could he do,
+he a little boy keeping sheep? He had as his wages two florins a
+year; that was all; but his heart rose high, and he had faith in
+God. Little as he was, he said to himself, he would try and do
+something, so that year after year those poor lost travelers and
+beasts should not perish so. He said nothing to anybody, but he
+took the few florins he had saved up, bade his master farewell,
+and went on his way begging--a little fourteenth-century boy, with
+long, straight hair, and a girdled tunic, as you see them,"
+continued the priest, "in the miniatures in the black-letter
+missal that lies upon my desk. No doubt heaven favored him very
+strongly, and the saints watched over him; still, without the
+boldness of his own courage and the faith in his own heart, they
+would not have done so. I suppose, too, that when knights in their
+armor, and soldiers in their camps, saw such a little fellow all
+alone, they helped him, and perhaps struck some blows for him, and
+so sped him on his way, and protected him from robbers and from
+wild beasts. Still, be sure that the real shield and the real
+reward that served Findelkind of Arlberg was the pure and noble
+purpose that armed him night and day. Now, history does not tell
+us where Findelkind went, nor how he fared, nor how long he was
+about it; but history does tell us that the little barefooted,
+long-haired boy, knocking so loudly at castle gates and city walls
+in the name of Christ and Christ's poor brethren, did so well
+succeed in his quest that before long he had returned to his
+mountain home with means to have a church and a rude dwelling
+built, where he lived with six other brave and charitable souls,
+dedicating themselves to St. Christopher, and going out night and
+day to the sound of the Angelus, seeking the lost and weary. This
+is really what Findelkind of Arlberg did five centuries ago, and
+did so quickly that his fraternity of St. Christopher twenty years
+after numbered among its members archdukes, and prelates, and
+knights without number, and lasted as a great order down to the
+days of Joseph II. This is what Findelkind in the fourteenth
+century did, I tell you. Bear like faith in your hearts, my
+children; and though your generation is a harder one than this,
+because it is without faith, yet you shall move mountains, because
+Christ and St. Christopher will be with you."
+
+Then the good man, having said that, blessed them, and left them
+alone to their chestnuts and crabs, and went into his own oratory
+to prayer. The other boys laughed and chattered; but Findelkind
+sat very quietly, thinking of his namesake, all the day after, and
+for many days and weeks and months this story haunted him. A
+little boy had done all that; and this little boy had been called
+Findelkind; Findelkind, just like himself.
+
+It was beautiful, and yet it tortured him. If the good man had
+known how the history would root itself in the child's mind,
+perhaps he would never have told it; for night and day it vexed
+Findelkind, and yet seemed beckoning to him and crying, "Go thou
+and do likewise!"
+
+But what could he do?
+
+There was the snow, indeed, and there were the mountains, as in
+the fourteenth century, but there were no travelers lost. The
+diligence did not go into Switzerland after autumn, and the
+country people who went by on their mules and in their sledges to
+Innspruck knew their way very well, and were never likely to be
+adrift on a winter's night, or eaten by a wolf or a bear.
+
+When spring came, Findelkind sat by the edge of the bright pure
+water among the flowering grasses, and felt his heart heavy.
+Findelkind of Arlberg who was in heaven now must look down, he
+fancied, and think him so stupid and so selfish, sitting there.
+The first Findelkind, a few centuries before, had trotted down on
+his bare feet from his mountain pass, and taken his little crook,
+and gone out boldly over all the land on his pilgrimage, and
+knocked at castle gates and city walls in Christ's name and for
+love of the poor! That was to do something indeed!
+
+This poor little living Findelkind would look at the miniatures in
+the priest's missal, in one of which there was the little
+fourteenth-century boy with long hanging hair and a wallet and
+bare feet, and he never doubted that it was the portrait of the
+blessed Findelkind who was in heaven; and he wondered if he looked
+like a little boy there, or if he were changed to the likeness of
+an angel.
+
+"He was a boy just like me," thought the poor little fellow, and
+he felt so ashamed of himself--so very ashamed; and the priest had
+told him to try and do the same. He brooded over it so much, and
+it made him so anxious and so vexed, that his brothers ate his
+porridge and he did not notice it, his sisters pulled his curls
+and he did not feel it, his father brought a stick down on his
+back and he only started and stared, and his mother cried because
+he was losing his mind and would grow daft, and even his mother's
+tears he scarcely saw. He was always thinking of Findelkind in
+heaven.
+
+When he went for water, he spilt one-half; when he did his
+lessons, he forgot the chief part; when he drove out the cow, he
+let her munch the cabbages; and when he was set to watch the oven,
+he let the loaves burn, like great Alfred. He was always busied
+thinking: "Little Findelkind that is in heaven did so great a
+thing: why may not I? I ought! I ought!" What was the use of being
+named after Findelkind that was in heaven, unless one did
+something great, too?
+
+Next to the church there is a little stone lodge, or shed, with
+two arched openings, and from it you look into the tiny church
+with its crucifixes and relics, or out to the great, bold, sombre
+Martinswand, as you like best; and in this spot Findelkind would
+sit hour after hour, while his brothers and sisters were playing,
+and look up at the mountains or on to the altar, and wish and pray
+and vex his little soul most woefully; and his ewes and his lambs
+would crop the grass about the entrance, and bleat to make him
+notice them and lead them farther afield, but all in vain. Even
+his dear sheep he hardly heeded, and his pet ewes, Katte and
+Greta, and the big ram Zips, rubbed their soft noses in his hand
+unnoticed. So the summer droned away--the summer that is so short
+in the mountains, and yet so green and so radiant, with the
+torrents tumbling through the flowers, and the hay tossing in the
+meadows, and the lads and lasses climbing to cut the rich sweet
+grass of the alps. The short summer passed as fast as a dragonfly
+flashes by, all green and gold, in the sun; and it was near winter
+once more, and still Findelkind was always dreaming and wondering
+what he could do for the good of St. Christopher; and the longing
+to do it all came more and more into his little heart, and he
+puzzled his brain till his head ached. One autumn morning, whilst
+yet it was dark, Findelkind made his mind up, and rose before his
+brothers, and stole downstairs and out into the air, as it was
+easy to do, because the house door never was bolted. He had
+nothing with him; he was barefooted, and his school satchel was
+slung behind him, as Findelkind of Arlberg's wallet had been five
+centuries before.
+
+He took a little staff from the piles of wood lying about, and
+went out on to the highroad, on his way to do heaven's will. He
+was not very sure what that divine will wished, but that was
+because he was only nine years old, and not very wise; but
+Findelkind that was in heaven had begged for the poor; so would
+he.
+
+His parents were very poor, but he did not think of them as in any
+want at any time, because he always had his bowlful of porridge
+and as much bread as he wanted to eat. This morning he had nothing
+to eat; he wished to be away before any one could question him.
+
+It was quite dusk in the fresh autumn morning: the sun had not
+risen behind the glaciers of the Stubaithal, and the road was
+scarcely seen; but he knew it very well, and he set out bravely,
+saying his prayers to Christ, and to St. Christopher, and to
+Findelkind that was in heaven.
+
+He was not in any way clear as to what he would do, but he thought
+he would find some great thing to do somewhere, lying like a jewel
+in the dust; and he went on his way in faith, as Findelkind of
+Arlberg had done before him.
+
+His heart beat high, and his head lost its aching pains, and his
+feet felt light; so light as if there were wings to his ankles. He
+would not go to Zirl, because Zirl he knew so well, and there
+could be nothing very wonderful waiting there; and he ran fast the
+other way. When he was fairly out from under the shadow of
+Martinswand, he slackened his pace, and saw the sun come on his
+path, and the red day redden the gray-green water, and the early
+Stellwagen from Landeck, that had been lumbering along all the
+night, overtook him.
+
+He would have run after it, and called out to the travelers for
+alms, but he felt ashamed; his father had never let him beg, and
+he did not know how to begin.
+
+The Stellwagen rolled on through the autumn mud, and that was one
+chance lost. He was sure that the first Findelkind had not felt
+ashamed when he had knocked at the first castle gates.
+
+By and by, when he could not see Martinswand by turning his head
+back ever so, he came to an inn that used to be a posthouse in the
+old days when men traveled only by road. A woman was feeding
+chickens in the bright clear red of the cold daybreak.
+
+Findelkind timidly held out his hand. "For the poor!" he murmured,
+and doffed his cap.
+
+The old woman looked at him sharply. "Oh, is it you, little
+Findelkind? Have you run off from school? Be off with you home! I
+have mouths enough to feed here."
+
+Findelkind went away, and began to learn that it is not easy to be
+a prophet or a hero in one's own country.
+
+He trotted a mile farther, and met nothing. At last he came to
+some cows by the wayside, and a man tending them.
+
+"Would you give me something to help make a monastery?" he said
+timidly, and once more took off his cap. The man gave a great
+laugh. "A fine monk, you! And who wants more of these lazy drones?
+Not I."
+
+Findelkind never answered; he remembered the priest had said that
+the years he lived in were very hard ones, and men in them had no
+faith.
+
+Ere long he came to a big walled house, with turrets and grated
+casements,--very big it looked to him,--like one of the first
+Findelkind's own castles. His heart beat loud against his side,
+but he plucked up his courage, and knocked as loud as his heart
+was beating.
+
+He knocked and knocked, but no answer came. The house was empty.
+But he did not know that; he thought it was that the people within
+were cruel, and he went sadly onward with the road winding before
+him, and on his right the beautiful impetuous gray river, and on
+his left the green Mittelgebirge and the mountains that rose
+behind it. By this time the day was up; the sun was glowing on the
+red of the cranberry shrubs and the blue of the bilberry-boughs;
+he was hungry and thirsty and tired. But he did not give in for
+that; he held on steadily; he knew that there was near, somewhere
+near, a great city that the people called Sprugg, and thither he
+had resolved to go. By noontide he had walked eight miles, and
+came to a green place where men were shooting at targets, the tall
+thick grass all around them; and a little way farther off was a
+train of people chanting and bearing crosses and dressed in long
+flowing robes.
+
+The place was the Hottinger Au, and the day was Saturday, and the
+village was making ready to perform a miracle play on the morrow.
+
+Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure that he saw
+the people of God. "Oh, take me, take me!" he cried to them; "do
+take me with you to do heaven's work."
+
+But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that spoiled
+their rehearsing.
+
+"It is only for Hotting folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get
+out of the way with you, Liebchen." And the man who earned the
+cross knocked him with force on the head, by mere accident; but
+Findelkind thought he had meant it.
+
+Were people so much kinder five centuries before, he wondered, and
+felt sad as the many-colored robes swept on through the grass, and
+the crack of the rifles sounded sharply through the music of the
+chanting voices. He went on footsore and sorrowful, thinking of
+the castle doors that had opened, and the city gates that had
+unclosed, at the summons of the little long-haired boy whose
+figure was painted on the missal.
+
+He had come now to where the houses were much more numerous,
+though under the shade of great trees,--lovely old gray houses,
+some of wood, some of stone, some with frescos on them and gold
+and color and mottoes, some with deep barred casements, and carved
+portals, and sculptured figures; houses of the poorer people now,
+but still memorials of a grand and gracious time. For he had
+wandered into the quarter of St. Nicholas in this fair mountain
+city, which he, like his country-folk, called Sprugg, though the
+government calls it Innspruck.
+
+He got out upon a long gray wooden bridge, and looked up and down
+the reaches of the river, and thought to himself, maybe this was
+not Sprugg but Jerusalem, so beautiful it looked with its domes
+shining golden in the sun, and the snow of the Soldstein and
+Branjoch behind them. For little Findelkind had never come so far
+as this before. As he stood on the bridge so dreaming, a hand
+clutched him, and a voice said:--
+
+"A whole kreutzer, or you do not pass!"
+
+Findelkind started and trembled.
+
+A kreutzer! he had never owned such a treasure in all his life.
+
+"I have no money," he murmured timidly; "I came to see if I could
+get money for the poor."
+
+The keeper of the bridge laughed.
+
+"You are a little beggar, you mean? Oh, very well! Then over my
+bridge you do not go."
+
+"But it is the city on the other side?"
+
+"To be sure it is the city; but over nobody goes without a
+kreutzer."
+
+"I never have such a thing of my own! never! never!" said
+Findelkind, ready to cry.
+
+"Then you were a little fool to come away from your home, wherever
+that may be," said the man at the bridge-head. "Well, I will let
+you go, for you look a baby. But do not beg; that is bad."
+
+"Findelkind did it!"
+
+"Then Findelkind was a rogue and a vagabond," said the taker of
+tolls.
+
+"Oh, no--no--no!"
+
+"Oh, yes--yes--yes, little sauce-box; and take that," said the
+man, giving him a box on the ear, being angry at contradiction.
+
+Findelkind's head drooped, and he went slowly over the bridge,
+forgetting that he ought to have thanked the toll taker for a free
+passage. The world seemed to him very difficult. How had
+Findelkind done when he had come to bridges?--and, oh, how had
+Findelkind done when he had been hungry?
+
+For this poor little Findelkind was getting very hungry, and his
+stomach was as empty as was his wallet.
+
+A few steps brought him to the Goldenes Dachl.
+
+He forgot his hunger and his pain, seeing the sun shine on all
+that gold, and the curious painted galleries under it. He thought
+it was real solid gold. Real gold laid out on a house roof--and
+the people all so poor! Findelkind began to muse, and wonder why
+everybody did not climb up there and take a tile off and be rich?
+But perhaps it would be wicked. Perhaps God put the roof there
+with all that gold to prove people. Findelkind got bewildered.
+
+If God did such a thing, was it kind?
+
+His head seemed to swim, and the sunshine went round and round
+with him. There went by him, just then, a very venerable-looking
+old man with silver hair; he was wrapped in a long cloak.
+Findelkind pulled at the coat gently, and the old man looked down.
+
+"What is it, my boy?" he asked.
+
+Findelkind answered, "I came out to get gold; may I take it off
+that roof?"
+
+"It is not gold, child, it is gilding."
+
+"What is gilding?"
+
+"It is a thing made to look like gold: that is all."
+
+"It is a lie, then!"
+
+The old man smiled. "Well, nobody thinks so. If you like to put it
+so, perhaps it is. What do you want gold for, you wee thing?"
+
+"To build a monastery and house the poor."
+
+The old man's face scowled and grew dark, for he was a Lutheran
+pastor from Bavaria.
+
+"Who taught you such trash?" he said crossly.
+
+"It is not trash. It is faith."
+
+And Findelkind's face began to burn and his blue eyes to darken
+and moisten. There was a little crowd beginning to gather, and the
+crowd was beginning to laugh. There were many soldiers and rifle-
+shooters in the throng, and they jeered and joked, and made fun of
+the old man in the long cloak, who grew angry then with the child.
+"You are a little idolater and a little impudent sinner!" he said
+wrathfully, and shook the boy by the shoulder, and went away, and
+the throng that had gathered round had only poor Findelkind left
+to tease.
+
+He was a very poor little boy indeed to look at, with his
+sheepskin tunic, and his bare feet and legs, and his wallet that
+never was to get filled.
+
+"Where do you come from, and what do you want?" they asked; and he
+answered, with a sob in his voice:--
+
+"I want to do like Findelkind of Arlberg."
+
+And then the crowd laughed, not knowing at all what he meant, but
+laughing just because they did not know: as crowds always will do.
+And only the big dogs that are so very big in this country, and
+are all loose, and free, and good-natured citizens, came up to him
+kindly, and rubbed against him, and made friends; and at that
+tears came into his eyes, and his courage rose, and he lifted his
+head.
+
+"You are cruel people to laugh," he said indignantly; "the dogs
+are kinder. People did not laugh at Findelkind. He was a little
+boy just like me, no better and no bigger, and as poor; and yet he
+had so much faith, and the world then was so good, that he left
+his sheep and got money enough to build a church and a hospice to
+Christ and St. Christopher. And I want to do the same for the
+poor. Not for myself, no; for the poor! I am Findelkind, too, and
+Findelkind of Arlberg that is in heaven speaks to me."
+
+Then he stopped, and a sob rose again in his throat.
+
+"He is crazy!" said the people, laughing, yet a little scared; for
+the priest at Zirl had said rightly, this is not an age of faith.
+At that moment there sounded, coming from the barracks, that used
+to be the Schloss in the old days of Kaiser Max and Mary of
+Burgundy, the sound of drums and trumpets and the tramp of
+marching feet. It was one of the corps of Jagers of Tyrol, going
+down from the avenue to the Rudolfplatz, with their band before
+them and their pennons streaming. It was a familiar sight, but it
+drew the street throngs to it like magic: the age is not fond of
+dreamers, but it is very fond of drums. In almost a moment the old
+dark arcades and the riverside and the passages near were all
+empty, except for the women sitting at their stalls of fruit or
+cakes, or toys, They are wonderful old arched arcades, like the
+cloisters of a cathedral more than anything else, and the shops
+under them are all homely and simple--shops of leather, of furs,
+of clothes, of wooden playthings, of sweet and wholesome bread.
+They are very quaint, and kept by poor folks for poor folks; but
+to the dazed eyes of Findelkind they looked like a forbidden
+paradise, for he was so hungry and so heartbroken, and he had
+never seen any bigger place than little Zirl.
+
+He stood and looked wistfully, but no one offered him anything.
+Close by was a stall of splendid purple grapes, but the old woman
+that kept it was busy knitting. She only called to him to stand
+out of her light.
+
+"You look a poor brat; have you a home?" said another woman, who
+sold bridles and whips and horses' bells and the like.
+
+"Oh, yes, I have a home--by Martinswand," said Findelkind, with a
+sigh.
+
+The woman looked at him sharply. "Your parents have sent you on an
+errand here?"
+
+"No; I have run away."
+
+"Run away? Oh, you bad boy!--unless, indeed--are they cruel to
+you?"
+
+"No; very good."
+
+"Are you a little rogue, then, or a thief?"
+
+"You are a bad woman to think such things," said Findelkind,
+hotly, knowing himself on how innocent and sacred a quest he was.
+
+"Bad? I? Oh ho!" said the old dame, cracking one of her new whips
+in the air, "I should like to make you jump about with this, you
+thankless little vagabond. Be off!"
+
+Findelkind sighed again, his momentary anger passing; for he had
+been born with a gentle temper, and thought himself to blame much
+more readily than he thought other people were,--as, indeed, every
+wise child does, only there are so few children--or men--that are
+wise.
+
+He turned his head away from the temptation of the bread and fruit
+stalls, for in truth hunger gnawed him terribly, and wandered a
+little to the left. From where he stood he could see the long,
+beautiful street of Teresa, with its oriels and arches, painted
+windows and gilded signs, and the steep, gray, dark mountains
+closing it in at the distance; but the street frightened him, it
+looked so grand, and he knew it would tempt him; so he went where
+he saw the green tops of some high elms and beeches. The trees,
+like the dogs, seemed like friends. It was the human creatures
+that were cruel.
+
+At that moment there came out of the barrack gates, with great
+noise of trumpets and trampling of horses, a group of riders in
+gorgeous uniforms, with sabres and chains glancing and plumes
+tossing. It looked to Findelkind like a group of knights--those
+knights who had helped and defended his namesake with their steel
+and their gold in the old days of the Arlberg quest. His heart
+gave a great leap, and he jumped on the dust for joy, and he ran
+forward and fell on his knees and waved his cap like a little mad
+thing, and cried out:--
+
+"Oh, dear knights! oh, great soldiers! help me! Fight for me, for
+the love of the saints! I have come all the way from Martinswand,
+and I am Findelkind, and I am trying to serve St. Christopher like
+Findelkind of Arlberg."
+
+But his little swaying body and pleading hands and shouting voice
+and blowing curls frightened the horses; one of them swerved and
+very nearly settled the woes of Findelkind forever and aye by a
+kick. The soldier who rode the horse reined him in with
+difficulty; he was at the head of the little staff, being indeed
+no less or more than the general commanding the garrison, which in
+this city is some fifteen thousand strong. An orderly sprang from
+his saddle and seized the child, and shook him, and swore at him.
+Findelkind was frightened; but he shut his eyes and set his teeth,
+and said to himself that the martyrs must have had very much worse
+than these things to suffer in their pilgrimage. He had fancied
+these riders were knights--such knights as the priest had shown
+him the likeness of in old picture books, whose mission it had
+been to ride through the world succoring the weak and weary, and
+always defending the right.
+
+"What are your swords for, if you are not knights?" he cried,
+desperately struggling in his captor's grip, and seeing through
+his half-closed lids the sunshine shining on steel scabbards.
+
+"What does he want?" asked the officer in command of the garrison,
+whose staff all this bright and martial array was. He was riding
+out from the barracks to an inspection on the Rudolfplatz. He was
+a young man, and had little children himself, and was half amused,
+half touched, to see the tiny figure of the little dusty boy.
+
+"I want to build a monastery, like Findelkind of Arlberg, and to
+help the poor," said our Findelkind, valorously, though his heart
+was beating like that of a little mouse caught in a trap; for the
+horses were trampling up the dust around him, and the orderly's
+grip was hard.
+
+The officers laughed aloud; and indeed he looked a poor little
+scrap of a figure, very ill able to help even himself.
+
+"Why do you laugh?" cried Findelkind, losing his terror in his
+indignation, and inspired with the courage which a great
+earnestness always gives. "You should not laugh. If you were true
+knights, you would not laugh; you would fight for me. I am little,
+I know,--I am very little,--but he was no bigger than I; and see
+what great things he did. But the soldiers were good in those
+days; they did not laugh and use bad words--"
+
+And Findelkind, on whose shoulder the orderly's hold was still
+fast, faced the horses, which looked to him as huge as Martinswand,
+and the swords, which he little doubted were to be sheathed in his
+heart.
+
+The officers stared, laughed again, then whispered together, and
+Findelkind heard them say the word "crazed." Findelkind, whose
+quick little ears were both strained like a mountain leveret's,
+understood that the great men were saying among themselves that it
+was not safe for him to be about alone, and that it would be
+kinder to him to catch and cage him--the general view with which
+the world regards enthusiasts.
+
+He heard, he understood; he knew that they did not mean to help
+him, these men with the steel weapons and the huge steeds, but
+that they meant to shut him up in a prison; he, little free-born,
+forest-fed Findelkind. He wrenched himself out of the soldier's
+grip, as the rabbit wrenches itself out of the jaws of the trap
+even at the cost of leaving a limb behind, shot between the
+horses' legs, doubled like a hunted thing, and spied a refuge.
+Opposite the avenue of gigantic poplars and pleasant stretches of
+grass shaded by other bigger trees, there stands a very famous
+church, famous alike in the annals of history and of art,--the
+church of the Franciscans, that holds the tomb of Kaiser Max,
+though, alas! it holds not his ashes, as his dying desire was that
+it should. The church stands here, a noble, sombre place, with the
+Silver Chapel of Philippina Wessler adjoining it, and in front the
+fresh cool avenues that lead to the river and the broad water-
+meadows and the grand Hall road bordered with the painted stations
+of the Cross.
+
+There were some peasants coming in from the country driving cows,
+and some burghers in their carts, with fat, slow horses; some
+little children were at play under the poplars and the elms; great
+dogs were lying about on the grass; everything was happy and at
+peace, except the poor, throbbing heart of little Findelkind, who
+thought the soldiers were coming after him to lock him up as mad,
+and ran and ran as fast as his trembling legs would carry him,
+making for sanctuary, as, in the old bygone days that he loved,
+many a soul less innocent than his had done. The wide doors of the
+Hofkirche stood open, and on the steps lay a black-and-tan hound,
+watching no doubt for its master or mistress, who had gone within
+to pray. Findelkind, in his terror, vaulted over the dog, and into
+the church tumbled headlong.
+
+It seemed quite dark, after the brilliant sunshine on the river
+and the grass; his forehead touched the stone floor as he fell,
+and as he raised himself and stumbled forward, reverent and
+bareheaded, looking for the altar to cling to when the soldiers
+should enter to seize him, his uplifted eyes fell on the great
+tomb.
+
+The tomb seems entirely to fill the church, as, with its twenty-
+four guardian figures round it, it towers up in the twilight that
+reigns here even at midday. There are a stern majesty and grandeur
+in it which dwarf every other monument and mausoleum. It is grim,
+it is rude, it is savage, with the spirit of the rough ages that
+created it; but it is great with their greatness, it is heroic
+with their heroism, it is simple with their simplicity.
+
+As the awe-stricken eyes of the terrified child fell on the mass
+of stone and bronze, the sight smote him breathless. The mailed
+warriors standing around it, so motionless, so solemn, rilled him
+with a frozen, nameless fear. He had never a doubt that they were
+the dead arisen. The foremost that met his eyes were Theodoric and
+Arthur; the next, grim Rudolf, father of a dynasty of emperors.
+There, leaning on their swords, the three gazed down on him,
+armored, armed, majestic, serious, guarding the empty grave, which
+to the child, who knew nothing of its history, seemed a bier; and
+at the feet of Theodoric, who alone of them all looked young and
+merciful, poor little desperate Findelkind fell with a piteous
+sob, and cried: "I am not mad! Indeed, indeed, I am not mad!"
+
+He did not know that these grand figures were but statues of
+bronze. He was quite sure they were the dead, arisen, and meeting
+there, around that tomb on which the solitary kneeling knight
+watched and prayed, encircled, as by a wall of steel, by these his
+comrades. He was not frightened, he was rather comforted and
+stilled, as with a sudden sense of some deep calm and certain
+help.
+
+Findelkind, without knowing that he was like so many dissatisfied
+poets and artists much bigger than himself, dimly felt in his
+little tired mind how beautiful and how gorgeous and how grand the
+world must have been when heroes and knights like these had gone
+by in its daily sunshine and its twilight storms. No wonder
+Findelkind of Arlberg had found his pilgrimage so fair, when if he
+had needed any help he had only had to kneel and clasp these firm,
+mailed limbs, these strong cross-hiked swords, in the name of
+Christ and of the poor.
+
+Theodoric seemed to look down on him with benignant eyes from
+under the raised visor; and our poor Findelkind, weeping, threw
+his small arms closer and closer round the bronze knees of the
+heroic figure, and sobbed aloud, "Help me, help me! Oh, turn the
+hearts of the people to me, and help me to do good!"
+
+But Theodoric answered nothing.
+
+There was no sound in the dark, hushed church; the gloom grew
+darker over Findelkind's eyes; the mighty forms of monarchs and of
+heroes grew dim before his sight. He lost consciousness, and fell
+prone upon the stones at Theodoric's feet; for he had fainted from
+hunger and emotion.
+
+When he awoke it was quite evening; there was a lantern held over
+his head; voices were muttering curiously and angrily; bending
+over him were two priests, a sacristan of the church, and his own
+father. His little wallet lay by him on the stones, always empty.
+
+"Boy of mine! were you mad?" cried his father, half in rage, half
+in tenderness. "The chase you have led me!--and your mother
+thinking you were drowned!--and all the working day lost, running
+after old women's tales of where they had seen you! Oh, little
+fool, little fool! what was amiss with Martinswand, that you must
+leave it?"
+
+Findelkind slowly and feebly rose, and sat up on the pavement, and
+looked up, not at his father, but at the knight Theodoric.
+
+"I thought they would help me to keep the poor," he muttered
+feebly, as he glanced at his own wallet." And it is empty--
+empty."
+
+"Are we not poor enough?" cried his father, with natural
+impatience, ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a
+little idiot for a son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to
+help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth?
+Oh, little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for a
+madhouse, talking to iron figures and taking them for real men!
+What have I done, O heaven, that I should be afflicted thus?"
+
+And the poor man wept, being a good affectionate soul, but not
+very wise, and believing that his boy was mad. Then, seized with
+sudden rage once more, at thought of his day all wasted, and its
+hours harassed and miserable through searching for the lost child,
+he plucked up the light, slight figure of Findelkind in his own
+arms, and, with muttered thanks and excuses to the sacristan of
+the church, bore the boy out with him into the evening air, and
+lifted him into a cart which stood there with a horse harnessed to
+one side of the pole, as the country people love to do, to the
+risk of their own lives and their neighbors'. Findelkind said
+never a word; he was as dumb as Theodoric had been to him; he felt
+stupid, heavy, half blind; his father pushed him some bread, and
+he ate it by sheer instinct, as a lost animal will do; the cart
+jogged on, the stars shone, the great church vanished in the gloom
+of night.
+
+As they went through the city towards the riverside along the
+homeward way, never a word did his father, who was a silent man at
+all times, address to him. Only once, as they jogged over the
+bridge, he spoke.
+
+"Son," he asked, "did you run away truly thinking to please God
+and help the poor?"
+
+"Truly I did!" answered Findelkind, with a sob in his throat.
+
+"Then thou wert an ass!" said his father. "Didst never think of
+thy mother's love and of my toil? Look at home."
+
+Findelkind was mute. The drive was very long, backward by the same
+way, with the river shining in the moonlight and the mountains
+half covered with the clouds. It was ten by the bells of Zirl when
+they came once more under the solemn shadow of grave Martinswand.
+There were lights moving about his house, his brothers and sisters
+were still up; his mother ran out into the road, weeping and
+laughing with fear and joy.
+
+Findelkind himself said nothing.
+
+He hung his head.
+
+They were too fond of him to scold him or to jeer at him; they
+made him go quickly to his bed, and his mother made him a warm
+milk posset and kissed him.
+
+"We will punish thee to-morrow, naughty and cruel one," said his
+parent. "But thou art punished enough already, for in thy place
+little Stefan had the sheep, and he has lost Katte's lambs--the
+beautiful twin lambs! I dare not tell thy father to-night. Dost
+hear the poor thing mourn? Do not go afield for thy duty again."
+
+A pang went through the heart of Findelkind, as if a knife had
+pierced it. He loved Katte better than almost any other living
+thing, and she was bleating under his window childless and alone.
+They were such beautiful lambs, too!--lambs that his father had
+promised should never be killed, but be reared to swell the flock.
+
+Findelkind cowered down in his bed, and felt wretched beyond all
+wretchedness. He had been brought back; his wallet was empty; and
+Katte's lambs were lost. He could not sleep.
+
+His pulses were beating like so many steam hammers; he felt as if
+his body were all one great throbbing heart. His brothers, who lay
+in, the same chamber with him, were sound asleep; very soon his
+father and mother snored also, on the other side of the wall.
+Findelkind was alone wide awake, watching the big white moon sail
+past his little casement, and hearing Katte bleat.
+
+Where were her poor twin lambs?
+
+The night was bitterly cold, for it was already far on in autumn;
+the rivers had swollen and flooded many fields, the snow for the
+last week had fallen quite low down on the mountainsides.
+
+Even if still living, the little lambs would die, out on such a
+night without the mother or food and shelter of any sort.
+Findelkind, whose vivid brain always saw everything that he
+imagined as if it were being acted before his eyes, in fancy saw
+his two dear lambs floating dead down the swollen tide, entangled
+in rushes on the flooded shore, or fallen with broken limbs upon a
+crest of rocks. He saw them so plainly that scarcely could he hold
+back his breath from screaming aloud in the still night and
+answering the mourning wail of the desolate mother.
+
+At last he could bear it no longer: his head burned, and his brain
+seemed whirling round; at a bound he leaped out of bed quite
+noiselessly, slid into his sheepskins, and stole out as he had
+done the night before, hardly knowing what he did. Poor Katte was
+mourning in the wooden shed with the other sheep, and the wail of
+her sorrow sounded sadly across the loud roar of the rushing
+river.
+
+The moon was still high.
+
+Above, against the sky, black and awful with clouds floating over
+its summit, was the great Martinswand.
+
+Findelkind this time called the big dog Waldmar to him, and with
+the dog beside him went once more out into the cold and the gloom,
+whilst his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, were
+sleeping, and poor childless Katte alone was awake.
+
+He looked up at the mountain and then across the water-swept
+meadows to the river. He was in doubt which way to take. Then he
+thought that in all likelihood the lambs would have been seen if
+they had wandered the river way, and even little Stefan would have
+had too much sense to let them go there. So he crossed the road
+and began to climb Martinswand.
+
+With the instinct of the born mountaineer, he had brought out his
+crampons with him, and had now fastened them on his feet; he knew
+every part and ridge of the mountains, and had more than once
+climbed over to that very spot where Kaiser Max had hung in peril
+of his life.
+
+On second thoughts he bade Waldmar go back to the house. The dog
+was a clever mountaineer, too, but Findelkind did not wish to lead
+him into danger. "I have done the wrong, and I will bear the
+brunt," he said to himself; for he felt as if he had killed
+Katte's children, and the weight of the sin was like lead on his
+heart, and he would not kill good Waldmar too.
+
+His little lantern did not show much light, and as he went higher
+upwards he lost sight of the moon. The cold was nothing to him,
+because the clear still air was that in which he had been reared;
+and the darkness he did not mind, because he was used to that
+also; but the weight of sorrow upon him he scarcely knew how to
+bear, and how to find two tiny lambs in this vast waste of silence
+and shadow would have puzzled and wearied older minds than his.
+Garibaldi and all his household, old soldiers tried and true,
+sought all night once upon Caprera in such a quest, in vain.
+
+If he could only have awakened his brother Stefan to ask him which
+way they had gone! but then, to be sure, he remembered, Stefan
+must have told that to all those who had been looking for the
+lambs from sunset to nightfall. All alone he began the ascent.
+
+Time and again, in the glad springtime and the fresh summer
+weather, he had driven his flock upwards to eat the grass that
+grew in the clefts of the rocks and on the broad green alps. The
+sheep could not climb to the highest points; but the goats did,
+and he with them. Time and again he had lain on his back in these
+uppermost heights, with the lower clouds behind him and the black
+wings of the birds and the crows almost touching his forehead, as
+he lay gazing up into the blue depth of the sky, and dreaming,
+dreaming, dreaming.
+
+He would never dream any more now, he thought to himself. His
+dreams had cost Katte her lambs, and the world of the dead
+Findelkind was gone forever; gone were all the heroes and knights;
+gone all the faith and the force; gone every one who cared for the
+dear Christ and the poor in pain.
+
+The bells of Zirl were ringing midnight. Findelkind heard, and
+wondered that only two hours had gone by since his mother had
+kissed him in his bed. It seemed to him as if long, long nights
+had rolled away, and he had lived a hundred years.
+
+He did not feel any fear of the dark calm night, lit now and then
+by silvery gleams of moon and stars. The mountain was his old
+familiar friend, and the ways of it had no more terror for him
+than these hills here used to have for the bold heart of Kaiser
+Max. Indeed, all he thought of was Katte--Katte and the lambs. He
+knew the way that the sheep tracks ran; the sheep could not climb
+so high as the goats; and he knew, too, that little Stefan could
+not climb so high as he. So he began his search low down upon
+Martinswand.
+
+After midnight the cold increased; there were snow clouds hanging
+near, and they opened over his head, and the soft snow came flying
+along. For himself he did not mind it, but alas for the lambs!--
+if it covered them, how would he find them? And if they slept in
+it, they were dead.
+
+It was bleak and bare on the mountainside, though there were still
+patches of grass such as the flocks liked, that had grown since
+the hay was cut. The frost of the night made the stone slippery,
+and even the irons gripped it with difficulty; and there was a
+strong wind rising like a giant's breath, and blowing his small
+horn lantern to and fro.
+
+Now and then he quaked a little with fear--not fear of the night
+or the mountains, but of strange spirits and dwarfs and goblins of
+ill repute, said to haunt Martinswand after nightfall. Old women
+had told him of such things, though the priest always said that
+they were only foolish tales, there being nothing on God's earth
+wicked save men and women who had not clean hearts and hands.
+Findelkind believed the priest; still, all alone on the side of
+the mountain, with the snowflakes flying round him, he felt a
+nervous thrill that made him tremble and almost turn backward.
+Almost, but not quite; for he thought of Katte and the poor little
+lambs lost--and perhaps dead--through his fault. The path went
+zigzag and was very steep; the Arolla pines swayed their boughs in
+his face; stones that lay in his path unseen in the gloom made him
+stumble. Now and then a large bird of the night flew by with a
+rushing sound; the air grew so cold that all Martinswand might
+have been turning to one huge glacier. All at once he heard
+through the stillness--for there is nothing so still as a
+mountainside in snow--a little pitiful bleat. All his terrors
+vanished; all his memories of ghost tales passed away; his heart
+gave a leap of joy; he was sure it was the cry of the lambs. He
+stopped to listen more surely. He was now many score of feet above
+the level of his home and of Zirl; he was, as nearly as he could
+judge, halfway as high as where the cross in the cavern marks the
+spot of the Kaiser's peril. The little bleat sounded above him,
+and it was very feeble and faint.
+
+Findelkind set his lantern down, braced himself up by drawing
+tighter his old leathern girdle, set his sheepskin cap firm on his
+forehead, and went towards the sound as far as he could judge that
+it might be. He was out of the woods now; there were only a few
+straggling pines rooted here and there in a mass of loose lying
+rock and slate; so much he could tell by the light of the lantern,
+and the lambs, by the bleating, seemed still above him.
+
+It does not, perhaps, seem very hard labor to hunt about by a
+dusky light upon a desolate mountainside; but when the snow is
+falling fast,--when the light is only a small circle, wavering,
+yellowish on the white,--when around is a wilderness of loose
+stones and yawning clefts,--when the air is ice and the hour is
+past midnight,--the task is not a light one for a man; and
+Findelkind was a child, like that Findelkind that was in heaven.
+
+Long, very long, was his search; he grew hot and forgot all fear,
+except a spasm of terror lest his light should burn low and die
+out. The bleating had quite ceased now, and there was not even a
+sigh to guide him; but he knew that near him the lambs must be,
+and he did not waver or despair.
+
+He did not pray; praying in the morning had been no use; but he
+trusted in God, and he labored hard, toiling to and fro, seeking
+in every nook and behind each stone, and straining every muscle
+and nerve, till the sweat rolled in a briny dew off his forehead,
+and his curls dripped with wet. At last, with a scream of joy, he
+touched some soft close wool that gleamed white as the white snow.
+He knelt down on the ground, and peered behind the stone by the
+full light of his lantern; there lay the little lambs--two little
+brothers, twin brothers, huddled close together, asleep. Asleep?
+He was sure they were asleep, for they were so silent and still.
+
+He bowed over them, and kissed them, and laughed, and cried, and
+kissed them again. Then a sudden horror smote him; they were so
+very still. There they lay, cuddled close, one on another, one
+little white head on each little white body--drawn closer than
+ever together, to try and get warm.
+
+He called to them; he touched them; then he caught them up in his
+arms, and kissed them again, and again, and again. Alas! they were
+frozen and dead. Never again would they leap in the long green
+grass, and frisk with each other, and lie happy by Katte's side;
+they had died calling for their mother, and in the long, cold,
+cruel night only death had answered.
+
+Findelkind did not weep, or scream, or tremble; his heart seemed
+frozen, like the dead lambs,
+
+It was he who had killed them.
+
+He rose up and gathered them in his arms,--and cuddled them in the
+skirts of his skeepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that he
+might carry them, and so, thus burdened with their weight, set his
+face to the snow and the wind once more, and began his downward
+way.
+
+Once a great sob shook him; that was all. Now he had no fear.
+
+The night might have been noonday, the snow storm might have been
+summer, for aught he knew or cared.
+
+Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to rest;
+often the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his eyelids, and
+he longed to lie down and be at rest, as the little brothers were;
+often it seemed to him that he would never reach home again. But
+he shook the lethargy off him and resisted the longing, and held
+on his way: he knew that his mother would mourn for him as Katte
+mourned for the lambs. At length, through all difficulty and
+danger, when his light had spent itself and his strength had well
+nigh spent itself too, his feet touched the old highroad. There
+were flickering torches and many people, and loud cries around the
+church, as there had been four hundred years before, when the last
+sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king in peril
+above.
+
+His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen long before it
+was dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber, and had found
+the bed of Findelkind empty once more.
+
+He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in
+his arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbors nor the
+frenzied joy of his mother: his eyes looked straight before him,
+and his face was white like the snow.
+
+"I killed them," he said, and then two great tears rolled down his
+cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two little dead
+brothers.
+
+Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that.
+
+Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them!"
+
+Never anything else.
+
+So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep snow filled up
+lands and meadows, and covered the great mountains from summit to
+base, and all around Martinswand was quite still, and now and then
+the post went by to Zirl, and on the holy-days the bells tolled;
+that was all. His mother sat between the stove and his bed with a
+sore heart; and his father, as he went to and fro between the
+walls of beaten snow, from the wood shed to the cattle byre, was
+sorrowful, thinking to himself the child would die, and join that
+earlier Findelkind whose home was with the saints,
+
+But the child did not die.
+
+He lay weak and wasted and almost motionless a long time; but
+slowly, as the springtime drew near, and the snows on the lower
+hills loosened, and the abounding waters coursed green and crystal
+clear clown all the sides of the hills, Findelkind revived as the
+earth did, and by the time the new grass was springing and the
+first blue of the gentian gleamed on the Alps, he was well.
+
+But to this day he seldom plays and scarcely ever laughs. His face
+is sad, and his eyes have a look of trouble.
+
+Sometimes the priest of Zirl says of him to others, "He will be a
+great poet or a great hero some day." Who knows?
+
+Meanwhile, in the heart of the child there remains always a weary
+pain, that lies on his childish life as a stone may lie on a
+flower.
+
+"I killed them!" he says often to himself, thinking of the two
+little white brothers frozen to death on Martinswand that cruel
+night; and he does the things that are told him, and is obedient,
+and tries to be content with the humble daily duties that are his
+lot, and when he says his prayers at bedtime always ends them so:
+--
+
+"Dear God, do let the little lambs play with the other Findelkind
+that is in heaven."
+
+
+
+
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