down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains of
Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market people, cloaked
and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods
of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see
nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was
now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten wood of the huge
barge.

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.

"Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward
at Christmas-time," said one of the dealers to his porters, who,
stout, strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at
their task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly
the Nurnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight,
but little dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting,
trembling boy; for August began to tremble now that he was about
to see the future owner of Hirschvogel.

"If he look a good, kind man," he thought, "I will beg him to let
me stay with it."

The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the
village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over
his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky.
He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little
mountaineer, used to hanging head downwards over crevasses, and,
moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of
the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been
made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of