The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child slept soundly, for a long while.  When he did awake, it was quite dark outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was in absolute darkness; and for a while he was solely frightened, and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken fashion, thinking of them all at home.  Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would be!  How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather’s at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim!  His conscience smote him for the sorrow he must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but it never occurred to him to try and go back.  If he once were to lose sight of Hirschvogel how could he ever hope to find it again? how could he ever know whither it had gone—­north, south, east or west?  The old neighbour had said that the world was small; but August knew at least that it must have a great many places in it; that he had seen himself on the maps on his school-house walls.  Almost any other little boy would, I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position in which he found himself; but August was brave, and he had a firm belief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him.  The master-potter of Nuernberg was always present to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he had been the maker.

A droll fancy, you say?  But every child with a soul in him has quite as quaint fancies as this one was of August’s.

So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so utterly in the dark.  He did not feel cramped at all, because the stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through the fretwork running round the top.  He was hungry again, and again nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage.  He could not at all tell the hour.  Every time the train stopped and he heard the banging, stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth.  If they should find him out!  Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead chamois.  Every time the men trampled near him, and swore at each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so frightened 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 armoured Kuffstein standing across the beautiful