He was a small boy of nine years at that time,--a chubby-faced
little man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls
the brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor,
and there were many mouths at home to feed. In this country the
winters are long and very cold; the whole land lies wrapped in
snow for many months; and this night that he was trotting home,
with a jug of beer in his numb red hands, was terribly cold and
dreary. The good burghers of Hall had shut their double shutters,
and the few lamps there were flickered dully behind their quaint,
old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains indeed were beautiful,
all snow-white under the stars that are so big in frost. Hardly
any one was astir; a few good souls wending home from vespers, a
tired post-boy, who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled horn as
he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall
go early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled
the beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept
up his courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall
soon be at home with dear Hirschvogel."

He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guardhouse, and so into the place where the great church was, and
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a
sculptured Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the
Three Kings painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand
outside the gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and the
broad white snow, and had been belated, and had thought he had
heard the wolves behind him at every step, and had reached the
town in a great state of terror, thankful with all his little