Edgar A. Guest - "Over Here"

G. P. Cuttriss - "Over the Top With the Third Australian Division"

Hesba Stretton - "Fern's Hollow"

Anonymous - "The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition"

Books of The Times: It’s Still Making the World Go ’Round
Michael Wolff has written a supercilious yet star-struck portrait of Rupert Murdoch, the planet’s most notorious press baron.

Books of The Times: A Media Mogul With Relentless Moxie
In this novel of the 17th century, Morrison performs her deepest excavation yet into America’s history and exhumes our twin original sins: the enslavement of Africans and the near extermination of Native Americans.

Original Sins
Malcolm Gladwell says success depends not only on brains and drive, but on where we come from — and what we do about it.

Various - Famous Stories Every Child Should Know

V >> Various >> Famous Stories Every Child Should Know




Then the old man hobbled away to draw his brazen pail full of water at
the well.

August remained leaning against the wall; his head was buzzing and his
heart fluttering with the new idea which had presented itself to his
mind. "Go after it," had said the old man. He thought, "Why not go
with it?" He loved it better than anyone, even better than Dorothea;
and he shrank from the thought of meeting his father again, his father
who had sold Hirschvogel.

He was by this time in that state of exaltation in which the
impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still
wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the
court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of
the church. From there he could watch unseen his father's house-door,
at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such as are
common and so picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house was let
to a man who dealt in pottery.

He hid himself in the grand portico, which he had so often passed
through to go to mass or compline within, and presently his heart gave
a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought out and
laid with infinite care on the bullock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept over the snow of
the place--snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble old minster looked
its grandest and most solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its vast
archways, and its porch that was itself as big as many a church, and
its strange gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the snow on its
roof and on the pavement; but for once August had no eyes for it; he
only watched for his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable figure
enough, like a score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by any of
his brothers or sisters, out of the porch and over the shelving uneven
square, and followed in the wake of the dray.

Its course lay toward the station of the railway, which is close to
the salt-works, whose smoke at times sullies this part of clean little
Hall, though it does not do very much damage. From Hall the iron road
runs northward through glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague,
Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going
north or south? This at least he would soon know.

August had often hung about the little station, watching the trains
come and go and dive into the heart of the hills and vanish. No one
said anything to him for idling about; people are kind-hearted and
easy of temper in this pleasant land, and children and dogs are both
happy there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and vociferating a great
deal, and learned that they meant to go too and wanted to go with the
great stove itself. But this they could not do, for neither could the
stove go by a passenger train nor they themselves go in a goods-train.
So at length they insured their precious burden for a large sum, and
consented to send it by a luggage train which was to pass through Hall
in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice the existence
of Hall at all.

August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in his little
mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave one terrible thought
to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting in the cold at home, then
set to work to execute his project. How he managed it he never knew
very clearly himself, but certain it is that when the goods-train from
the north, that had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, moved
out of Hall, August was hidden behind the stove in the great covered
truck, and wedged, unseen and undreamt of by any human creature,
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna
toys, of Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which
shared the same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No
doubt he was very naughty, but it never occurred to him that he was
so: his whole mind and soul were absorbed in the one entrancing idea,
to follow his beloved friend and fire-king.

It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a little window
above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell in it from
the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But August was not
frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be
closer still; for he meant to do nothing less than get inside
Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little boy, and having had by great
luck two silver groschen in his breeches-pocket, which he had earned
the day before by chopping wood, he had bought some bread and sausage
at the station of a woman there who knew him, and who thought he was
going out to his uncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had
with him, and this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a train
of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast, and being a
child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how or when he ever
would eat again.

When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he thought
was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to buy anything
more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a hole in the
withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If it had been put
in a packing-case he would have been defeated at the onset. As it was,
he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and pushed, just as a mouse would
have done, making his hole where he guessed that the opening of the
stove was--the opening through which he had so often thrust the big
oak logs to feed it. No one disturbed him; the heavy train went
lumbering on and on, and he saw nothing at all of the beautiful
mountains, and shining waters, and great forests through which he was
being carried. He was hard at work getting through the straw and hay
and twisted ropes; and get through them at last he did, and found the
door of the stove, which he knew so well, and which was quite large
enough for a child of his age to slip through, and it was this which
he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done
at home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if he could anyhow
remain during many hours. He found that he could; air came in through
the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable caution in such a
little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and straw together,
rearranged the ropes, so that no one could ever have dreamed a little
mouse had been at them. Then he curled himself up again, this time
more like a dormouse than anything else; and, being safe inside his
dear Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he went fast asleep as if he were
in his own bed at home with Albrecht, and Christof on either side of
him. The train lumbered on, stopped often and long, as the habit of
goods-trains is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher, and
rumbling through the deep heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow
like the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child slept
soundly, for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite dark
outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he was in
absolute darkness; and for a while he was solely frightened, and
trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken fashion,
thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would be!
How she would run over the town and walk up to grandfather's at Dorf
Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he had taken
refuge with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for the sorrow he
must be even then causing to his gentle sister; but it never occurred
to him to try and go back. If he once were to lose sight of
Hirschvogel how could he ever hope to find it again? how could he ever
know whither it had gone--north, south, east or west? The old
neighbour had said that the world was small; but August knew at least
that it must have a great many places in it; that he had seen himself
on the maps on his school-house walls. Almost any other little boy
would, I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position
in which he found himself; but August was brave, and he had a firm
belief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. The
master-potter of Nuernberg was always present to his mind, a kindly,
benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porcelain
tower whereof he had been the maker.

A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has quite
as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.

So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so
utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the stove
was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through the
fretwork running round the top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled
with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at all tell
the hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the banging,
stamping, shouting, and jangling of chains that went on, his heart
seemed to jump up into his mouth. If they should find him out!
Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the other, a sack
here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead chamois. Every time the
men trampled near him, and swore at each other, and banged this and
that to and fro, he was so frightened that his very breath seemed to
stop. When they came to lift the stove out, would they find him? and
if they did find him, would they kill him? That was what he kept
thinking of all the way, all through the dark hours, which seemed
without end. The goods-trains are usually very slow, and are many days
doing what a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker
than most, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria; still,
it took all the short winter's day and the long winter's night and
half another day to go over ground that the mail-trains cover in a
forenoon. It passed great armoured Kuffstein standing across the
beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of way to all the foes
of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after lying by in
out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of
Bavaria. And here the Nuernberg 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. It was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the
wooden spout of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling,
ice-cold water of the hills.

But, fortunately for him, the stove having been marked and registered
as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like a mere bale of
goods, and the Rosenheim stationmaster, who knew its consignees,
resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that would leave there at
daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage
belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg,
was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the
winter under the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made
the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get
used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always
accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so mightily
clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he
kept feeling the earthenware sides of the Nuernberg giant and saying,
softly, "Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"

He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out in the
world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that they
must have been all over the world in all this time that the rolling
and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up
in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in
Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good house at Dorf, of gnomes
and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the
black horse of night, and--and--and he began to sob and to tremble
again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming
itself so loudly that no one, had there been anyone nigh, would have
heard him; and in another minute or so the train stopped with a jar
and a jerk, and he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "Muenchen!
Muenchen!"

Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart of
Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by the
Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a black bear
he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had
taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name
of Bavaria a terror to August.

"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the stove
said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak
without fire than a man can see without light. Give it fire, and it
will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in return all the
sympathy you ask.

"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of
jaeger and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped; Munich
was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking like a
little aspen-leaf, felt himself once more carried out on the shoulders
of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set down, where he knew
not, only he knew he was thirsty--so thirsty! If only he could have
reached his hand out and scooped up a little snow!

He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in truth
the stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a shop in
the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set upright on its
four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect having been affixed to
its written label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in the small
dark curiosity-shop of one Hans Rhilfer.

"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice say;
and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken stillness
that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to peep through
the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square room filled with
pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, old steel armour,
shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all
the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a _bric-a-brac_ dealer's. It
seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water
in it all? That was his single thought; for his tongue was parching,
and his throat felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked
as with dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice
window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered
with snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his
hiding place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his
mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the hay
and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and shut the
brass door down on himself. He had brought some big icicles in with
him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only temporarily,
quenched. Then he sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening
intently, wide awake, and once more recovering his natural boldness.

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience with
a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If I can take
her back Hirschvogel then how pleased she will be, and how little
'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all selfish in his love for
Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at home quite as much as for
himself. There was at the bottom of his mind a kind of ache of shame
that his father--his own father--should have stripped their hearth and
sold their honour thus.

A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
house-eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his
pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so easily on
the frozen snow.

In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made faint by
the stove-wall and the window-glass that was between him and it, but
still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the robin, singing after
feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard, burst into tears. He
thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw out some grain or some
bread on the snow before the church. "What use is it going _there_,"
she said, "if we forget the sweetest creatures God has made?" Poor
Dorothea! Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little soul! He thought of
her till his tears ran like rain.

Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home. Hirschvogel
was here.

Presently the key turned in the lock of the door; he heard heavy
footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father, "You
have a little mad dog; muzzle him!" The voice said, "Ay, ay, you have
called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I have gotten for
two hundred dirty florins. _Potztausend_! never did _you_ do such a
stroke of work."

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men
approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat,
pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a cheese and
hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove
of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the
hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly; that too, he
knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture
which broke from the man who had not seen it before.

"A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime! magnificent!
matchless!"

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell of
lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August crouching in
his stronghold. If they should open the door of the stove! That was
his frantic fear. If they should open it, it would be all over with
him. They would drag him out; most likely they would kill him, he
thought, as his mother's young brother had been killed in the Wald.

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by the
Nuernberg master's work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling,
expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a little
distance and began talking of sums of money and divided profits, of
which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he could make out
was that the name of the king--the king--the king came over very often
in their arguments. He fancied at times they quarrelled, for they
swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and high; but after a while
they seemed to pacify each other and agree to something, and were in
great glee, and so in these merry spirits came and slapped the
luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel, and shouted to it:

"Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you were
smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker's kitchen all these years!"

Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to them
that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his father, when
he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word or make a sound
was to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever from Hirschvogel.
So he kept quite still, and the men barred the shutters of the little
lattice and went out by the door, double-locking it after them. He had
made out from their talk that they were going to show Hirschvogel to
some great person: therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.

Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets
below--the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, and bursts
of that military music which is so seldom silent in the streets of
Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on the stairs kept
him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity of his anxiety, he
forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from cheerful, Old World
little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the ramparts of
the mountains all round.

Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two
dealers' voices murmuring unctuous words, in which "honour,"
"gratitude," and many fine long noble titles played the chief parts.
The voice of another person, more clear and refined than theirs,
answered them curtly, and then, close by the Nuernberg stove and the
boy's ear, ejaculated a single "_Wunderschoen_!" August almost lost his
terror for himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel
being thus admired in the great city. He thought the master-potter
must be glad too.

"_Wunderschoen_!" ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then
examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed long
on all its devices.

"It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian," he said at last;
and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was "hugged up into
nothing," as you children say, dreading that every moment he would
open the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the brass-work
of the door; but inside it was so dark that crouching August passed
unnoticed, screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The
gentleman shut to the door at length, without having seen anything
strange inside it; and then he talked long and low with the tradesmen,
and, as his accent was different from that which August was used to,
the child could distinguish little that he said, except the name of
the king and the word "gulden" again and again. After a while he went
away, one of the dealers accompanying him, one of them lingering
behind to bar up the shutters. Then this one also withdrew again,
double-locking the door.

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe aloud.

What time was it?

Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they had
lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and through the
brass fretwork had seen the lines of light.

He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and
Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If only
he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang of how at
this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it
from Aunt Maila's farm orchard, and sang together, and listened to
Dorothea's reading of little tales, and basked in the glow and delight
that had beamed on them from the great Nuernberg fire-king.

"Oh, poor, poor little 'Gilda! What is she doing without the dear
Hirschvogel?" he thought. Poor little 'Gilda! she had only now the
black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father!

August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his
father, but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell
Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all those long winter evenings, when
they had all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab-apples in
it, and listened to the howling of the wind and the deep sound of the
church-bells, and tried very much to make each other believe that the
wolves still came down from the mountains into the streets of Hall,
and were that very minute growling at the house door--all this memory
coming on him with the sound of the city bells, and the knowledge that
night drew near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and
his fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth
time since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he would starve
to death, and wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was
sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with
alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme and
honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had he ever forgotten when Santa
Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all
around?

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