“My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove?  Be not afraid:  tell me the truth.  I am the king.”

August in an instinct of homage cast his great battered black hat with the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded his little brown hands in supplication.  He was too intensely in earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly majesty.  He was only so glad—­so glad it was the king.  Kings were always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords.

“Oh, dear king!” he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint little voice, “Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and father sold it.  And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside it.  And last night it spoke and said beautiful things.  And I do pray you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it.  No one ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves me; it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it had been happier with us than if it were in any palace—­”

And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little eager, pale face to the young king’s, great tears were falling down his cheeks.

Now, the king liked all poetic and uncommon things, and there was that in the child’s face which pleased and touched him.  He motioned to his gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.

“What is your name?” he asked him.

“I am August Strehla.  My father is Hans Strehla.  We live in Hall, in the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long—­so long!”

His lips quivered with a broken sob.

“And have you truly travelled inside this stove all the way from Tyrol?”

“Yes,” said August; “no one thought to look inside till you did.”

The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.

“Who bought the stove of your father?” he inquired.

“Traders of Munich,” said August, who did not know that he ought not to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea.

“What sum did they pay your father, do you know?” asked the sovereign.

“Two hundred florins,” said August, with a great sigh of shame.  “It was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.”

The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting.  “Did these dealers of Munich come with the stove?”

He was answered in the affirmative.  He desired them to be sought for and brought before him.  As one of his chamberlains hastened on the errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.

“You are very pale, little fellow:  when did you eat last?”