and solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes of Austria.  It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of Bavaria.  And here the Nuernberg stove, with August inside it, was lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way.  When it was lifted out, the boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to and fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of his beloved fire-king were not cushions of down.  However, though they swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that a living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the platform and set it down under the roof of the goods-shed.  There it passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and August was all the while within it.

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow.  If there had not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all.  Happily for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of which, else, he must have died—­frozen.  He had still some of his loaf, and a little—­a very little—­of his sausage.  What he did begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured because they could not find any water but the salt sea.  It was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water of the hills.

But, fortunately for him, the stove having been marked and registered as “fragile and valuable,” was not treated quite like a mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim stationmaster, who knew its consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that would leave there at daybreak.  And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under the grass.  Those words, “fragile and valuable,” had made the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care.  He had begun to get used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so mightily clever.  All in the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthenware sides of the Nuernberg giant and saying, softly, “Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!”