he meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over
your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid
for, for months and months; if it had not been for your grandfather I
should have been in prison all summer and autumn, and he is out of
patience and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the
masters go to younger men: they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can
keep his head above water with ten hungry children dragging him down?
When your mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I
were a mad dog. You have made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes,
goes to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep
me out of prison for a little and with the spring things may turn--"

August stood like a creature paralysed. His eyes were wide open,
fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his face
had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with tearless
sobs.

"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to him
that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could
take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God's
sun out of the heavens.

"You will find it true," said his father, doggedly, and angered
because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away
the heirloom and treasure of his race, and the comfort and healthgiver
of his young children. "You will find it true. The dealer has paid me
half the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow when
he packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a
great deal more--at least I suppose so, as he gives that--but beggars
cannot be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm
you all just as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor
house like this, when one can make two hundred florins by it?
Dorothea, you never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it,
when all is said?--a bit of hardware, much too grand-looking for such
a room as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground.
'It is a stove for a museum,' the trader said when he saw it. 'To a
museum let it go.'"

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for its
death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.

"Oh, father, father!" he cried, convulsively, his hands closing on
Strehla's knees, and his up