"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.
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