To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid
a mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green
boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol
country. In winter all their joys centered in it, and scampering
home from school over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing
that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the
broad ardent glow of its noble tower, which rose eight feet high
above them with all its spires and pinnacles and crowns.
Once a traveling peddler had told them that the letters on it
meant Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great
German potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-
sanctified city of Nurnberg, and had made many such stoves, that
were all miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his
heart and his soul and his faith into his labors, as the men of
those earlier ages did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.
An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church,
had told August a little more about the brave family of
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen in Nuremberg to this day; of
old Veit, the first of them, who painted the Gothic windows of St.
Sebald with the marriage of the margravine; of his sons and of his
grand-sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of them
great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of the North.
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