or neither could the
stove go by a passenger train nor they themselves go in a goods-train.
So at length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and
consented to send it by a luggage train which was to pass through Hall
in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the existence
of Hall at all.

August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his little
mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible thought
to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting in the cold at home, then
set to work to execute his project. How he managed it he never knew
very clearly himself, but certain it is that when the goods-train from
the north, that had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, moved
out of Hall, August was hidden behind the stove in the great covered
truck, and wedged, unseen and undreamt of by any human creature,
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna
toys, of Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which
shared the same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No
doubt he was very naughty, but it never occurred to him that he was
so: his whole mind and soul were absorbed in the one entrancing idea,
to follow his beloved friend and fire-king.

It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little window
above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell in it from
the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But August was not
frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be
closer still; for he meant to do nothing less than get inside
Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little boy, and having had by great
luck two silver groschen in his breeches-pocket, which he had earned
the day before by chopping wood, he had bought some bread and sausage
at the station of a woman there who knew him, and who thought he was
going out to his uncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had
with him, and this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a train
of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast, and being a
child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how or when he ever
would eat again.

When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he thought
was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to buy anything
more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a hole in the
withes of