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."