Bimbi | Page 5

the Luca della Robbia
of the North. 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. He was a strong and healthy
little fellow, fed on the free mountain air, and he was very happy, and
loved his family devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of them
went a very long way for a little boy who was only one among many,
and to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach him
his letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a little,
hungry schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or to bring the
loaves from the bakehouse, or to carry his father's boots to the cobbler;
and in summer he was only one of hundreds of cowboys, who drove the
poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing their throat bells,
out into the sweet intoxication of the sudden sunlight, and lived up with
them in the heights among the Alpine roses, with only the clouds and

the snow summits near. But he was always thinking, thinking, thinking,
for all that; and under his little sheepskin winter coat and his rough
hempen summer shirt his heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's
ever had,-- great Hofer, who is a household word in all the Innthal, and
whom August always reverently remembered when he went to the city
of Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water mill and under the
wooded height of Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children stories,
his own little brown face growing red with excitement as his
imagination glowed to fever heat. That human being on the panels, who
was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing among flowers,
as a lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in the midst of strife,
as a father with children round him, as a weary, old, blind man on
crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels, had
always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made, not
one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale
twice. He had never seen a storybook in his life; his primer and his
Mass book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him
Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many
things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing! and
then she is of no use at all.
"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea, looking up
from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you must not sit up for
him."
"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little rosy
and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel is so
warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us another tale,
August?"
"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his story had
come to an end, and who sat serious, with his