Bimbi | Page 4

through all its iridescent surface at
the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known three
centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.
It was one of those magnificent stoves in enameled faience which so
excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nurnberg that in a body they
demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be
forbidden to make any more of them,--the magistracy, happily, proving
of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the
artisans to cripple their greater fellow.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica luster which
Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to
the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the
statue of a king at each corner, modeled with as much force and
splendor as his friend Albrecht Durer could have given unto them on
copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into
panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the
borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other foliage,
and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old World moralizing, such
as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their
chimney-places and their drinking cups, their dishes and flagons. The
whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant
everywhere with that brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel family,
painters on glass and great in chemistry, as they were, were all masters.
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.
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,