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. It is not a piece of hardware, as you
say; it is a living thing, for a great man's thoughts and fancies
have put life into it, and it loves us though we are only poor
little children, and we love it with all our hearts and souls, and
up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I
will go and try and get work to-morrow! I will ask them to let me
cut ice or make the paths through the snow. There must be
something I could do, and I will beg the people we owe money to to
wait; they are all neighbors, they will be patient. But sell
Hirschvogel!--oh, never! never! never! Give the florins back to