In another moment Hirschvogel was gone—­gone forever and aye.

August stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from the violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the house.  The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the peaks of the mountains.

Into the court an old neighbour hobbled for water, and, seeing the boy, said to him: 

“Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?”

August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.

“Well, for sure he is a fool,” said the neighbour.  “Heaven forgive me for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was worth a mint of money.  I do remember in my young days, in old Anton’s time (that was your great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw it, and said that it was worth its weight in gold.”

August’s sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.

“I loved it!  I loved it!” he moaned.  “I do not care what its value was.  I loved it! I loved it!”

“You little simpleton!” said the old man, kindly.  “But you are wiser than your father, when all’s said.  If sell it he must, he should have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spruez, who would have given him honest value.  But no doubt they took him over his beer, ay, ay! but if I were you I would do better than cry.  I would go after it.”

August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.

“Go after it when you are bigger,” said the neighbour, with a good-natured wish to cheer him up a little.  “The world is a small thing after all:  I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time, and I know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it; anything that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in cotton wool by everybody.  Ay, ay, don’t cry so much; you will see your stove again some day.”

Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of water at the well.

August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing and his heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented itself to his mind.  “Go after it,” had said the old man.  He thought, “Why not go with it?” He loved it better than anyone, even better than Dorothea; and he shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel.

He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible looks quite natural and commonplace.  His tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall.  He ran out of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of the church.  From there he could watch unseen his father’s house-door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are common and so picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let to a man who dealt in pottery.