Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.  Hirschvogel was here.

Presently the key turned in the lock of the door, he heard heavy footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father, “You have a little mad dog; muzzle him!” The voice said, “Ay, ay, you have called me a fool many times.  Now you shall see what I have gotten for two hundred dirty florins.  Potztausend! never did you do such a stroke of work.”

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse’s does when it is on the top of a cheese and hears a housemaid’s broom sweeping near.  They began to strip the stove of its wrappings:  that he could tell by the noise they made with the hay and the straw.  Soon they had stripped it wholly:  that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not seen it before.

“A right royal thing!  A wonderful and never-to-be-rivaled 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 Nurnberg master’s work for nigh an hour, praising, marveling, 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 quarreled, 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.