And
here the Nurnberg stove, with August inside it, was lifted out
heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was lifted out, the
boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to and fro
as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls of his
beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though they
swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected that
a living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the
platform and set it down under the roof of the goods shed. There
it passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and
August was all the while within it.
The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of
which, else, he must have died--frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a little--a very little--of his sausage. What he did
begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost
more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured because
they could not find any water but the salt sea.
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