Bimbi | Page 6

hands clasped on his
knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove.
"It is only a week to Christmas," he said suddenly.
"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five years
old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else.
"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured
Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty might
pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would not find

some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little sister's socks.
"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the calf's
life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he had told them so
that month, he was so proud of it.
"And Aunt Maila will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of
flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their Aunt Maila had a chalet
and a little farm over on the green slopes towards Dorp Ampas.
"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said August;
they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine boughs and
ivy and mountain berries. The heat soon withered the crown; but it was
part of the religion of the day to them, as much so as it was to cross
themselves in church and raise their voices in the "O Salutaris Hostia."
And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christ-night, and one
little voice piped loud against another's, and they were as happy as
though their stockings would be full of golden purses and jeweled toys,
and the big goose in the soup pot seemed to them such a meal as kings
would envy.
In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air and a
spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and reached
them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins and the great stove. It
was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it was their father
who had come home.
The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden armchair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set the
jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe; for their
father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice in anger, and
they had been trained by the mother they had loved to dutifulness and
obedience and a watchful affection.
To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat down
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.
"I am well enough," he answered dully, and sat there with his head bent,
letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with labor.
"Take the children to bed," he said suddenly, at last, and Dorothea
obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at nine years old,

and when one earns money in the summer from the farmers, one is not
altogether a child any more, at least in one's own estimation.
August did not heed his father's silence; he was used to it. Karl Strehla
was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was usually too
tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his beer and sleep.
August lay on the wolfskin, dreamy and comfortable, looking up
through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of the
great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been
made for, and what grand places and scenes it had known.
Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the
cuckoo clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father and the
untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. She
thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had been often so with
him of late.
There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice; August
dropped to sleep, his curls falling over his face; Dorothea's wheel
hummed like a cat.
Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the pipe on
the ground.
"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
ashamed in his throat. The spinning wheel stopped. August sprang erect
out of his sleep.
"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix on the
floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have shuddered under
the horror of a greater blasphemy.
"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla in