The king smiled a little, and said nothing.  The gentleman had made out the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.

“You will give at once to this boy’s father the two thousand gold ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that you paid him,” said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects.  “You are great rogues.  Be thankful you are not more greatly punished.”

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these gave the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable.  Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats for his father!  Why, his father would never need to go any more to the salt-baking!  And yet whether for ducats or for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let him stay with it?—­would he?

“Oh, do! oh, please do!” he murmured, joining his little brown weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception so basely practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a trusted counselor was bitter to him.

He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.

“Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a kind voice; “kneel only to your God.  Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel?  Yes, I will; you shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a painter,—­in oils or on porcelain as you will,—­and you must grow up worthily, and win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when you are twenty-one years old you have done well and bravely, then I will give you your Nurnberg stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who reign after me shall do so.  And now go away with this gentleman, and be not afraid, and you shall light a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and cut the wood.”

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy.  He threw his two arms about the king’s knees, and kissed his feet passionately; then he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger, and tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.

As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy the voice from Hirschvogel saying:—­

“Let us be worthy our maker!”

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises to be a great man.  Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, where the gold ducats have made his father prosperous.  In the old house room there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to Dorothea and ’Gilda.

And August never goes home without going into the great church and saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey in the Nurnberg stove.  As for his dream in the dealers’ room that night, he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel.  And who shall say that he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?