“Oh!” said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood entirely yet.  He looked at Hirschvogel:  surely it had a royal soul within it:  would it not wake up and speak?  Oh, dear! how he longed to hear the voice of his fire-king!  And he began to forget that he stood by a lady who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen mark.

“What will you be when you are a man?” said the little lady, sharply, for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were smiling.  “Will you work for the Konigliche Porcellan-Manufactur, like my great dead Kandler?”

“I have never thought,” said August, stammering; “at least—­that is—­I do wish—­I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin Hirschvogel at Nurnberg.”

“Bravo!” said all the real bric-a-brac in one breath, and the two Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, “Begone!” For there is not a bit of true bric-a-brac in all Europe that does not know the names of the mighty masters.

August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as red as the lady’s shoes with bashful contentment.

“I knew all the Hirschvogels, from old Veit downwards,” said a fat gres de Flandre beer jug; “I myself was made at Nurnberg.”  And he bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver hat—­I mean lid—­with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have learned from burgomasters.  The stove, however, was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for what is such heartbreak as a suspicion of what we love?) came through the mind of August:  Was Hirschvogel only imitation?

“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself stoutly; though Hirschvogel never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it!  After all their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had kissed in his babyhood?  “No, no, no, no!” he said again, with so much emphasis that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at him.

“No,” she said, with pretty disdain; “no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’ forever.  They can never look like us!  They imitate even our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they chassent de race.”

“How should they?” said a bronze statuette of Vischer’s.  “They daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only the ages can give that!”

“And my imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of a hostelry’s signboard!” said the Lady of Meissen, with a shiver.

“Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, as I am,” said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner.  “He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us.  Almost he might be mistaken for me.  But yet what a difference there is!  How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black letters!  He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!”