burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran like
rain.

Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.
Hirschvogel was here.

Presently the key turned in the lock of the door, he heard heavy
footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father,
"You have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay,
you have called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I
have gotten for two hundred dirty florins. Potztausend! never did
YOU do such a stroke of work."

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two
men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-
a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a
cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to
strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise
they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it
wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder
and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not seen
it before.

"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivaled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime!
magnificent! matchless!"

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell
of lager beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August
crouching in his stronghold. If they should open the door of the