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 to 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 centred 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 travelling 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 Nuernberg, 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 labours, as the men of those earlier ages
did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.
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