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[52] passenger-train that would leave there at daybreak. and when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to vienna, prague, buda-pesth, 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 nürnberg 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[53] 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, “münchen! münchen!”
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,[54] by reason of those bitter struggles and midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of jäger 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, [55]vienna china, turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-à-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!”[56] 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.
