Robert Ross - "Masques & Phases"

Various - "The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884"

E.V. Lucas - "A Wanderer in Venice"

Ethel M. Dell - "The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories"

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




"Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!" he prayed to the old
fire-king, and forgot poor little man, that he had come on this
wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!

After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they weep, and
little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they where they may.
It was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly shut up, and
very full of things, and at the back of it were the hot pipes of an
adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. Moreover,
August's clothes were warm ones, and his blood was young. So he was
not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in the nights of December;
and he slept on and on--which was a comfort to him, for he forgot his
woes, and his perils, and his hunger for a time.

Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the
city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to put
his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a strange
bright light was round him.

It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is
perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did what
he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done you or me.
For what he saw was nothing less than all the _bric-a-brac_ in motion.

A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a minuet
with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a
gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll porcelain
figure of Zitzenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in _terre
cuite_ of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a
queer little shrill plaintive music that thought itself merry came
from a painted spinet covered with faded roses; some gilt Spanish
leather had got up on the wall and laughed; a Dresden mirror was
tripping about, crowned with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding
along on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a
stout Ferrara sabre, all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in
white Nymphenburg china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in _gres
gris_ was calling aloud, "Oh, these Italians! always at feud!" But
nobody listened to him at all. A great number of little Dresden cups
and saucers were all skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with their
broad round faces, were spinning their own lids like teetotums; the
high-backed gilded chairs were having a game of cards together; and a
little Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at its throat, was running from
one to another, whilst a yellow cat of Cornelis Zachtleven's rode
about on a Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the
brilliant light shed on the scene came from three silver candelabra,
though they had no candles set up in them; and, what is the greatest
miracle of all, August looked on at these mad freaks and felt no
sensation of wonder! He only, as he heard the violin and the spinet
playing, felt an irresistible desire to dance too.

No doubt his face said what he wished; for a lovely little lady, all
in pink and gold and white, with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes,
and all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up
to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a
minuet. And he danced it perfectly--poor little August in his thick,
clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough
homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it
perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were
duly honoured, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never
scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately
measures the spinet was playing that August could not take his eyes
off her till, the minuet ended, she sat down on her own white-and-gold
bracket.

"I am the Princess of Saxe-Royal," she said to him, with a benignant
smile; "and you have got through that minuet very fairly."

Then he ventured to say to her:

"Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the figures
and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner like
lumber? It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?"

For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of the _bric-a-brac_ was all
full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a single
thrill in it.

"My dear child," said the powdered lady, "is it possible that you do
not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are _imitation_."

This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered it a
condensed but complete answer.

"Imitation?" repeated August, timidly, not understanding.

"Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!" said the princess in pink
shoes, very vivaciously. "They only _pretend_ to be what we are! They
never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any soul in it
yet."

"Oh!" said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood entirely
yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul within it:
would it not wake up and speak? Oh dear! how he longed to hear the
voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he stood by a lady
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, with the year 1746
cut on it, and the Meissen mark.

"What will you be when you are a man?" said the little lady, sharply,
for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were smiling. "Will
you work for the _Konigliche Porcellan-Manufactur_, like my great dead
Kandler?"

"I have never thought," said August, stammering; "at least--that is--I
do wish--I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin Hirschvogel
at Nuernberg."

"Bravo!" said all the real _bric-a-brac_ in one breath, and the two
Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, "_Benone_!" For there is not
a bit of true _bric-a-brac_ in all Europe that does not know the names
of the mighty masters.

August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as
red as the lady's shoes with bashful contentment.

"I knew all the Hirschvogel, from old Veit downwards," said a fat
_gres de Flandre_ beer-jug: "I myself was made at Nuernberg." And he
bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver
hat--I mean lid--with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have
learned from burgomasters. The stove, however, was silent, and a
sickening suspicion (for what is such heart-break as a suspicion of
what we love?) came through the mind of August: _Was Hirschvogel only
imitation_?

"No, no, no, no!" he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel
never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it! After
all their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy
he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion's
feet he had kissed in his babyhood? "No, no, no, no!" he said, again,
with so much emphasis that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at
him.

"No," she said, with pretty disdain; "no, believe me, they may
'pretend' forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even our
marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they
_chassent de race_."

"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's "They daub
themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted;
but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages can give that!"

"And _my_ imitations are all in primary colours, staring colours, hot
as the colours of a hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of Meissen,
with a shiver.

"Well, there is a _gres de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to be a
Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with
his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner. "He has
copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he
might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference there is! How
crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black
letters! He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a
lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in
his becomes actual deformity!"

"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a
table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my
name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film
and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias,
worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand
the Most Christian. _His_ gilding is one part gold to eleven other
parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a
brush--_a brush_--pah! of course he will be as black as a crock in a
few years' time, whilst I am as bright as when I first was made, and,
unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on
forever."

"They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and
call it _me_" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.

"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarise you so much as the cups
they paint to-day and christen after _me_," said a Carl Theodor cup
subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.

"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping _me_,"
interposed the princess in the pink shoes.

"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a
_Trauerkrug_ of Regensburg in black-and-white.

"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!" sighed
the little white maid of Nymphenburg.

"And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates, calling
them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of
to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its
year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.

"That is what is so terrible in these _bric-a-brac_ places," said the
princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low,
imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under
glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."

"And they get even there," sighed the _gres de Flandre_. "A terrible
thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a _terre cuite_ of Blasius
(you know the _terres cuites_ of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he was
put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found
himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at
Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with
a grin? 'Old Pipeclay,' that is what he called my friend, 'the fellow
that bought _me_ got just as much commission on me as the fellow that
bought _you_, and that was all that _he_ thought about. You know it is
only the public money that goes!' And the horrid creature grinned
again till he actually cracked himself. There is a Providence above
all things, even museums."

"Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public money,"
said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.

"After all, does it matter?" said a Dutch jar of Haarlem, "All the
shamming in the world will not _make_ them us!"

"One does not like to be vulgarised," said the Lady of Meissen,
angrily.

"My maker, the Krabbetje,[1] did not trouble his head about that,"
said the Haarlem jar, proudly. "The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen,
the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries
ago, and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at
home; yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining
canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine."

[Footnote 1: Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born
1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.]

"Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio plate,
thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the
Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome souls of the
dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing
cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the
spinet sighed--thinking of dead hands.

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and only
the swords went on quarrelling, and made such a clattering noise that
the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and knocked them both
right over, and they lay straight and still, looking foolish, and the
little Nymphenburg maid, though she was crying, smiled and almost
laughed.

Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little human
comrade gave a great jump of joy.

"My friends," said that clear voice from the turret of Nuernberg
faience, "I have listened to all you have said. There is too much
talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called the
Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much vain
speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty
boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble
mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to
weaken and envenom all his undertakings. For over two hundred years I
have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only
speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me.
If we all might but go back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We
were made in days when even men were true creatures, and so we, the
work of their hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days,
derive all the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us
with zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith--not to win fortunes
or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create for
the honour of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human thing
who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves Art. Now, I
want him forever to remember this night and these words; to remember
that we are what we are, and precious in the eyes of the world,
because centuries ago those who were of single mind and of pure hand
so created us, scorning sham and haste and counterfeit. Well do I
recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless
life, and wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time beautiful
thereby, like one of his own rich, many-coloured church casements,
that told holy tales as the sun streamed through them. Ah, yes, my
friends, to go back to our masters!--that would be the best that could
befall us. But they are gone, and even the perishable labours of their
lives outlive them. For many, many years I, once honoured of emperors,
dwelt in a humble house and warmed in successive winters three
generations of little, cold, hungry children. When I warmed them they
forgot that they were hungry; they laughed and told tales, and slept
at last about my feet. Then I knew that humble as had become my lot it
was one that my master would have wished for me, and I was content.
Sometimes a tired woman would creep up to me, and smile because she
was near me, and point out my golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby
in her arms. That was better than to stand in a great hall of a great
city, cold and empty, even though wise men came to gaze and throngs of
fools gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I go now I know
not; but since I go from that humble house where they loved me, I
shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon--those fleeting mortal
lives! Only we endure--we the things that the human brain creates. We
can but bless them a little as they glide by: if we have done that, we
have done what our masters wished. So in us our masters, being dead,
yet may speak and live."

Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light that
had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light died down
in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through
the room. It came from the old, old spinet that was covered with the
faded roses.

Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks of
the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the
Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found himself
lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber; and all the
_bric-a-brac_ was lying quite still all around. The pretty Lady of
Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket, and the little Saxe
poodle was quiet at her side.

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not sensible
of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty entrails. He
was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that he
had seen and heard.

All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning come?
Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard the tiny
song of the robin.

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a moment
in which to scramble back into the interior of the great stove, when
the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing burning candles
with them to see their way.

August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold or
hunger. A marvellous sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was
about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding him and lifting him
upward--upward--upward! Hirschvogel would defend him.

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the red-breast away; and then
tramped about in their heavy boots and chatted in contented voices,
and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw and hay and
cordage.

It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they look
inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell again for
all its glorious beauty of exterior.

The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come to
him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.

Presently the two traders called up their porters, and the stove,
heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some sick
prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six stout
Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the Marienplatz.
Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy bite of the
intense cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter's day in Munich. The
men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so that he had
often been far more roughly shaken in his big brothers' arms than he
was in his journey now; and though both hunger and thirst made
themselves felt, being foes that will take no denial, he was still in
that state of nervous exaltation which deadens all physical suffering
and is at once a cordial and an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel
speak; that was enough.

The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the
Nuernberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right across
Munich to the railway-station, and August in the dark recognised all
the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing railway-noises, and
thought, despite his courage and excitement, "Will it be a _very_ long
journey?" For his stomach had at times an odd sinking sensation, and
his head often felt sadly light and swimming. If it was a very, very
long journey he felt half afraid that he would be dead or something
bad before the end, and Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what
he thought most about; not much about himself, and not much about
Dorothea and the house at home. He was "high strung to high emprise,"
and could not look behind him.

Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe, the
stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up into a
great van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two dealers as
well as the six porters were all with it.

He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The train
glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the men
say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was strange
to him, and he could not make out what these names meant.

The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of steam,
and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on
account of the snow which was falling, and which had fallen all night.

"He might have waited till he came to the city," grumbled one man to
another. "What weather to stay on at Berg!"

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out at
all.

Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the season,
they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed often, and,
when they swore, did so good-humouredly, and promised their porters
fine presents at New Year; and August, like a shrewd little boy as he
was, who even in the secluded Innthal had learned that money is the
chief mover of men's mirth, thought to himself, with a terrible pang:

"They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum! They have sold him
already!"

Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very well
that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus; and what
new owner of the great fireplace would ever permit him to dwell in it?

"Never mind; I _will_ die," thought he; "and Hirschvogel will know
it."

Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not.

It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.

It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to pass
from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg but this morning the
journey was much slower, because the way was encumbered by snow. When
it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and the Nuernberg stove was lifted
out once more, August could see through the fretwork of the brass
door, as the stove stood upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See
was a calm and noble piece of water, of great width, with low wooded
banks and distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.

It was now near ten o'clock. The sun had come forth; there was a clear
gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay white and
smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water, which before long
would itself be ice.

Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green gliding
surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a large boat that
was in waiting--one of those very long and huge boats which the women
in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber-rafts. The
stove, with much labour and much expenditure of time and care, was
hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and giddy with the
heaving and falling if his big brothers had not long used him to such
tossing about, so that he was as much at ease head, as feet, downward.
The stove, once in it safely with its guardians, the big boat moved
across the lake to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got
that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat
was a long time crossing; the lake here is about three miles broad,
and these heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though
they are towed and tugged at from the shore.

"If we should be too late!" the two dealers muttered to each other, in
agitation and alarm. "He said eleven o'clock."

"Who was he?" thought August; "the buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel."
The slow passage across the Wurm-See was accomplished at length: the
lake was placid; there was a sweet calm in the air and on the water;
there was a great deal of snow in the sky, though the sun was shining
and gave a solemn hush to the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer
were going up and down; in the clear frosty light the distant
mountains of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible;
market-people, cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on the
banks; the deep woods of the shores were black and gray and brown.
Poor August could see nothing of a scene that would have delighted
him; as the stove was now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten
wood of the huge barge.

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.

"Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward at
Christmas time," said one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout,
strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at their
task. Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the
Nuernberg 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 looks 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-downward 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. But the porters would not budge a foot quicker than they chose,
and as they were not poor four-footed carriers their employers dared
not thrash them, though most willingly would they have done so.

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