And August's
imagination, always quick, had made a living personage out of
these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he were in the
flesh walking up and down the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to
Innspruck, and maturing beautiful things in his brain as he stood
on the bridge and gazed on the emerald green flood of the Inn.
So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if
it were a living creature, and little August was very proud
because he had been named after that famous old dead German who
had had the genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children
loved the stove, but with August the love of it was a passion;
and in his secret heart he used to say to himself, "When I am a
man, I will make just such things too, and then I will set
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will build
myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts
are, by the river; that is what I will do when I am a man."
For August, a salt baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was
anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high
alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him,
was quite certain that he would live for greater things than
driving the herds up when the springtide came among the blue sea
of gentians, or toiling down in the town with wood and with timber
as his father and grandfather did every day of their lives.
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