Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly
the Nurnberg stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight,
but little dreaming that they carried within it a small, panting,
trembling boy; for August began to tremble now that he was about
to see the future owner of Hirschvogel.
"If he look a good, kind man," he thought, "I will beg him to let
me stay with it."
The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the
village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over
his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky.
He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little
mountaineer, used to hanging head downwards over crevasses, and,
moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of
the hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been
made ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of
position to which he had been subjected.
The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road
was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still.
The dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one
breath; besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for
a clock was striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach
their destination at that hour, and, though the air was so cold,
the heat-drops rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they
were so frightened at being late.
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