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 armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful 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 Nurnberg 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.