that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to lift the
stove out, would they find him? and if they did find him, would
they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all the way, all
through the dark hours, which seemed without end. The goods trains
are usually very slow, and are many days doing what a quick train
does in a few hours. This one was quicker than most, because it
was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still, it took all the
short winter's day and the long winter's night and half another
day to go over ground that the mail trains cover in a forenoon. It
passed great armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful and
solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes of Austria.
It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out-of-the-way
stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of Bavaria. And
here the Nurnberg stove, with August inside it, was lifted out
heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was lifted out, the
boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to and fro
as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of his
beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though they
swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that
a living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the
platform and set it down under the roof of the goods shed. There
it passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and
August was all the while within it.

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of