The stove was a very grand thing, as I say; possibly Hirschvogel
had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he
was an imperial guest at Innspruck, and fashioned so many things
for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who
had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he
was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home,
and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one
to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the
stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three
generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
prettier, perhaps, in all its many years than the children tumbled
now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with beauty;
white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when
they went into the church to Mass, with their curling locks and
their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like
cherubs flown down off some fresco.
"Tell us a story, August," they cried in chorus, when they had
seen charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he
did every night pretty nearly--looked up at the stove and told
them what he imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows
of the human being who figured on the panels from his cradle to
his grave.
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