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 Nuernberg 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 grandsons, 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.
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