better than anyone, even better than Dorothea;
and he shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father
who had sold Hirschvogel.

He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the
impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still
wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the
court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of
the church. From there he could watch unseen his father's house-door,
at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are
common and so picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let
to a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
through to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heart gave
a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought out and
laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept over the snow of
the place--snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble old minster looked
its grandest and most solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its vast
archways, and its porch that was itself as big as many a church, and
its strange gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the snow on its
roof and on the pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it; he
only watched for his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure
enough, like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of
his brothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving uneven
square, and followed in the wake of the dray.

Its course lay toward the station of the railway, which is close to
the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of clean little
Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From Hall the iron road
runs northward through glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague,
Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going
north or south? This at least he would soon know.

August had often hung about the little station, watching the trains
come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and vanish. No one
said anything to him for idling about; people are kind-hearted and
easy of temper in this pleasant land, and children and dogs are both
happy there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and vociferating a great
deal, and learned that they meant to go too and wanted to go with the
great stove itself. But this they could not do, f