should be forbidden to make any more of them,--the magistracy,
happily, proving of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with
the wish of the artisans to cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica luster
which Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was
making love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married.
There was the statue of a king at each corner, modeled with as
much force and splendor as his friend Albrecht Durer could have
given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove
itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of Man painted
on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had roses and
holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes in black
letter of odd Old World moralizing, such as the old Teutons, and
the Dutch after them, love to have on their chimney-places and
their drinking cups, their dishes and flagons. The whole was
burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant everywhere
with that brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel family,
painters on glass and great in chemistry, as they were, were all
masters.

The stove was a very grand thing, as I say; possibly Hirschvogel
had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he
was an imperial guest at Innspruck, and fashioned so many things
for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who
had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he
was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home,