“A right royal thing!  A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!  Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg!  Sublime! magnificent! matchless!”

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell of lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August crouching in his stronghold.  If they should open the door of the stove!  That was his frantic fear.  If they should open it, it would be all over with him.  They would drag him out; most likely they would kill him, he thought, as his mother’s young brother had been killed in the Wald.

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by the Nuernberg master’s work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling, expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a little distance and began talking of sums of money and divided profits, of which discourse he could make out no meaning.  All he could make out was that the name of the king—­the king—­the king came over very often in their arguments.  He fancied at times they quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and high; but after a while they seemed to pacify each other and agree to something, and were in great glee, and so in these merry spirits came and slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel, and shouted to it: 

“Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck!  To think you were smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker’s kitchen all these years!”

Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to them that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his father, when he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word or make a sound was to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever from Hirschvogel.  So he kept quite still, and the men barred the shutters of the little lattice and went out by the door, double-locking it after them.  He had made out from their talk that they were going to show Hirschvogel to some great person:  therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets below—­the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, and bursts of that military music which is so seldom silent in the streets of Munich.  An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on the stairs kept him in perpetual apprehension.  In the intensity of his anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from cheerful, Old World little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the ramparts of the mountains all round.

Presently the door opened again sharply.  He could hear the two dealers’ voices murmuring unctuous words, in which “honour,” “gratitude,” and many fine long noble titles played the chief parts.  The voice of another person, more clear and refined than theirs, answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nuernberg stove and the boy’s ear, ejaculated a single “Wunderschoen!” August almost lost his terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great city.  He thought the master-potter must be glad too.