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+Project Gutenberg's A Romance Of Tompkins Square, by Thomas A. Janvier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Romance Of Tompkins Square
+       1891
+
+Author: Thomas A. Janvier
+
+Illustrator: W. T. Smedley
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23808]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE.
+
+By Thomas A. Janvier
+
+Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Brothers
+
+
+Whether the honey shall be brought to the boiling-point slowly or
+rapidly; whether it shall boil a long time or a short time; when and in
+what quantities the flour shall be added; how long the kneading shall
+last; in what size of earthen pot the dough shall be stored, and what
+manner of cover upon these pots best preserves the dough against the
+assaults of damp and mould; whether the pots shall be half-buried in the
+cool earth of the cellar or ranged on shelves to be freely exposed
+to the cool cellar air--all these several matters are enshrouded in a
+mystery that is penetrated only by the elect few of Nürnberg bakers by
+whom perfect lebkuchen is made. And the same is true of the Brunswick
+bakers, who call this rare compound honigkuchen, and of the makers of
+pferfferkuchen, as it is called by the bakers of Saxony.
+
+Nor does the mystery end here. This first stage in the making of
+lebkuchen is but means to an end, and for the compassing of that
+end--the blending and the baking of the finished and perfect
+honey-cake--each master-baker has his own especial recipe, that has come
+down to him from some ancestral baker of rare parts, or that by his own
+inborn genius has been directly inspired. And so, whether the toothsome
+result be Nürnberger lebkuchen, or Brunsscheiger peppernotte, or Basler
+leckerly, the making of it is a mystery from first to last.
+
+It was because of this mystery that the life of Gottlieb Brekel had been
+imbittered for nearly twenty years--ever since, in fact, his first essay
+in the compounding of Nürnberger lebkuchen had been made. He was but a
+young baker then: now he was an old one, and notwithstanding the guarded
+praise of friends and the partial approval of the public (notably of
+that portion of the public under the age of ten years that attended St.
+Bridget's Parochial School) he full well knew that his efforts through
+all these years to make, in New York, lebkuchen such as he himself had
+eaten when he was a boy, at home in Nürnberg, had been neither more nor
+less than a long series of failures.
+
+In the hopeful days of his apprenticeship all had seemed so easy before
+him. Let him but have a little shop, and then a little capital wherewith
+to lay in his supply of honey, and the thing would be done! He had
+no recipe, it is true; for he was a baker not by heredity, but by
+selection. Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of
+honey-cake making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of
+his own genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen
+so excellent that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem
+tasteless. But these were the bright dreams of youth, which age had
+refused to realize.
+
+In course of time the little shop became an accomplished fact; a very
+little shop it was in East Fourth Street. Capital came more slowly, and
+three several times, when a sum almost sufficient had been saved, was
+it diverted from its destined purpose of buying the honey without which
+Gottlieb could not make even a beginning in his triumphal lebkuchen
+career.
+
+His first accumulation was swept away through the conquest of Ambition
+by Love. In this case Love was personified in one Minna Schaus--who was
+not by any means a typical sturdy German lass, with laughing looks and
+stalwart ways, but a daintily-finished, golden-haired maiden, with soft
+blue eyes full of tenderness, and a gentleness of manner that Gottlieb
+thought--and with more reason than lovers sometimes think things of this
+sort--was very like the manner of an angel. And for love of her Gottlieb
+forgot for a while his high resolves in regard to lebkuchen making;
+and on the altar of his affections--in part to pay for his modest
+wedding-feast, in part to pay for the modest outfit for their
+housekeeping over the bakery--the money laid aside for the filling of
+his honey-pots very willingly was offered up.
+
+A second time were his honey-pots sacrificed, that the coming into
+the world of the little Minna might be made smooth. This, also, was a
+willing sacrifice; though in his heart of hearts Gottlieb felt a twinge
+of regret that his first-born was not a son, to whom the fame and
+fortune incident to the making of perfect lebkuchen might descend.
+But he was a philosopher in his way, and did not suffer himself to be
+seriously disconcerted by an accident that by no means was irreparable.
+As he smoked his long pipe that night, while the bread was baking,
+he said to himself, cheerily: "It is a girl. Yes, that is easy. Girls
+sprout everywhere; they are like grass. But a boy, and a boy who is to
+grow up into such a baker as my boy will be--ah, that is another matter.
+But patience, Gottlieb; all in good time." Then, when his third pipe was
+finished--which was his measure of time for the baking--he fetched out
+the sweet-smelling hot bread from the oven with his long peel, and set
+forth upon his round of delivery. And he whistled a mellow old Nürnberg
+air as he pushed his cart through the streets before him that frosty
+morning, and in his heart he thanked the good God who had sent him
+the blessings of a dear wife and a sweet little daughter and a growing
+trade.
+
+And yet once more were his honey-pots sacrificed, and this time the
+sacrifice was sad indeed. From the day that the little Minna came into
+the world his own Minna, as in a little while was but too plain to
+him, began to make ready to leave it. As the weeks went by, the little
+strength that at first had come to her was lost again; the faint color
+faded from her cheeks, and left them so wan that through the fair skin
+the blue veins showed in most delicate tracery; and as her dear eyes
+ever grew gentler and more loving, the light slowly went out from them.
+So within the year the end came. In that great sorrow Gottlieb forgot
+his ambition, and cared not, when the bills were paid, that his
+honey-pots still remained unfilled. For the care of his home and of
+little Minna his good sister Hedwig came to him. Very drearily, for a
+long while, the work of the bakery went on.
+
+But a strong man, stirred by a strong purpose, does not relinquish
+that purpose lightly; and the one redeeming feature of the life of many
+sorrows which in this world we all are condemned to live is that even
+the bitterest sorrow is softened by time. But for this partial relief
+our race no doubt would have been extinguished ages ago in a madness
+wrought of grief and rage.
+
+Gottlieb's strong purpose was to make the best lebkuchen that baker ever
+baked. After a fashion his sorrow healed, as the flesh heals about a
+bullet that has gone too deep to be extracted by the surgeon's craft,
+and while it was with him always, and not seldom sent through all his
+being thrills of pain, he bore it hidden from the world, and went
+about his work again. Working comforted him. The baking of bread is an
+employment that is at once soothing and sustaining. As a man kneads the
+spongy dough he has good exercise and wholesome time for thought.
+While the baking goes on he may smoke and meditate. The smell of the
+newly-baked bread is a pleasant smell, and brings with it pleasant
+thoughts of many people well nourished in the eating of it. Moreover,
+there is no time in the whole twenty-four hours when a city is so
+innocent, so like the quiet honest country-side, as that time in the
+crisp morning when a baker goes his rounds.
+
+As Gottlieb found himself refreshed and strengthened by these manifold
+good influences of his gentle trade, his burden of sorrow was softened
+to him and made easier to bear. Comforting thoughts of the little
+Minna--growing to be a fine little lass now--stole in upon him, and
+within him the hope arose that she would grow to be like the dear mother
+whom she never had known. So the little fine roots of a new love struck
+down into his sad heart; and presently the sweet plant of love began
+to grow for him again, casting its delicate tendrils strongly about the
+child, who truly was a part of the being about which his earlier and
+stronger love had clung. Yet the love that thus was re-established in
+Gottlieb's breast was far from filling it, and so for ambition there was
+ample room.
+
+[Illustration: Sat beside the oven smoking his second pipe 204]
+
+Somewhat to his surprise, one night, as he sat beside the oven smoking
+his second pipe, he found himself thinking once more about his project
+for making such lebkuchen as never yet had been known outside of
+Nürnberg--lebkuchen that would make him at once the admiration and
+the despair of every German baker in New York. Nor was there, as he
+perceived as he turned the matter over in his mind, any reason now why
+he should not set about making this project a reality; for he had money
+enough, and more than enough, in store to buy the honey that he had so
+long desired. His eyes sparkled; he forgot to smoke; and when he turned
+again, half unconsciously, to his pipe, it had gone out. This roused
+him. The brightness faded from his eyes; he drew a long sigh. Then he
+lighted his pipe again, and until the baking was ended his thoughts no
+longer were busied with ambitious schemes for the making of lebkuchen,
+but went back with a sad tenderness to the happy time that had come so
+quickly to so cruel an end.
+
+But the spark was kindled, and presently the fire burned. When he told
+the good Hedwig that he had bought the honey at last, that excellent
+woman--albeit not much given to display of the tender emotions--shed
+tears of joy. She was a sturdy, thick-waisted, stout-ankled person, this
+Aunt Hedwig, with a cheery red face, and prodigiously fine white teeth,
+and very bright black eyes; and her taste in dress was such that when
+of a Sunday she went to the Church of the Redemptorist Fathers, in Third
+Street, she was more brilliant than ever King Solomon was in all his
+glory, in her startling array of vivid reds and greens and blues. But
+beneath her violent exterior of energetic color she had a warm and
+faithful heart, as little Minna knew already, and as her brother
+Gottlieb had known for many a long good year. Therefore was Gottlieb now
+gladdened by her hearty show of sympathy; and he returned with a good
+will the sounding smack that she gave him with her red lips, and the
+strong hug that she gave him with her stout arms.
+
+It was at sight of this pleasing manifestation of affection that Herr
+Sohnstein, the notary--who was present in the little room back of the
+shop where it occurred--at once declared that he meant to buy some honey
+too. And Aunt Hedwig, smiling so generously as to show every one of her
+fine white teeth, promptly told him that he had better be off and buy
+it, because perhaps he could buy at the same place some hugs and kisses
+too: at which sally and quick repartee they all laughed. Herr Sohnstein
+long had been the declared lover of Aunt Hedwig's, and long had been
+held at arm's-length (quite literally occasionally) by that vigorous
+person; who believed, because of her good heart, that her present duty
+was not to consult her own happiness by becoming Frau Sohnstein, but
+to remain the Fräulein Brekel, and care for her lonely brother and her
+brother's child.
+
+Being thus encouraged, Gottlieb bought the honey forthwith; and with
+Aunt Hedwig's zealous assistance set about boiling it and straining it
+and kneading it into a sticky dough, all in accordance with the wise old
+baker's directions which he so long had treasured in his mind. And when
+the dough was packed in earthen pots, over which bladders were tied, all
+the pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar, as far from
+the great oven as possible, that the precious honey-cake might undergo
+that subtle change which only comes with time.
+
+[Illustration: Pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar 208]
+
+For at least a year must pass before the honey-cake really can be said
+to be good at all; and the longer that it remains in the pots, even
+until five-and-twenty years, the better does it become. Therefore it is
+that all makers of lebkuchen who aspire to become famous professors of
+the craft add each year to their stock of honey-cake, yet draw always
+from the oldest pots a time-soaked dough that ever grows more precious
+in its sweet excellence of age. Thus large sums--more hundreds of
+dollars than a young baker, just starting upon his farinaceous career,
+would dare to dream of--may be invested; and the old rich bakers who can
+dower their daughters with many honey-pots know that in the matter of
+sons-in-law they have but to pick and choose.
+
+It was about Christmas-time--which is the proper time for this
+office--that Gottlieb made his first honey-cake; and it was a little
+before the Christmas following that his first lebkuchen was baked. For
+a whole week before this portentous event occurred he was in a nervous
+tremor; by day he scarcely slept; as he sat beside the oven at night his
+pipe so frequently went out that twice, having thus lost track of time,
+his baking of bread came near to being toast. And when at last the
+fateful night arrived that saw his first batch of lebkuchen in the oven,
+he actually forgot to smoke at all!
+
+Gottlieb had but a sorry Christmas that year. The best that even
+Aunt Hedwig could say of his lebkuchen was that it was not bad. Herr
+Sohnstein, to be sure, brazenly declared that it was delicious; but
+Gottlieb remembered that Herr Sohnstein, who conducted a flourishing
+practice in the criminal courts, was trained in the art of romantic
+deviations from the truth whenever it was necessary to put a good face
+on a bad cause; and he observed sadly that the notary's teeth were at
+variance with his tongue, for the piece of lebkuchen that Herr Sohnstein
+ate was infinitessimally small. As for the regular German customers of
+the bakery, they simply bit one single bite and then refused to buy.
+Indeed, but for the children from St. Bridget's School--who, being
+for the most part boys, and Irish boys at that, presumably could eat
+anything--it is not impossible that that first baking of lebkuchen
+might have remained uneaten even until this present day. And it was
+due mainly to the stout stomachs of successive generations of these
+enterprising boys that the series of experiments which Gottlieb then
+began in the making of lebkuchen was brought, in the course of years,
+to something like a satisfactory conclusion. But even at its best, never
+was this lebkuchen at all like that of which in his hopeful youth he had
+dreamed.
+
+Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, spoke highly of it, and even managed to eat
+of it quite considerable quantities. Gottlieb did not imagine that
+Herr Sohnstein could have in this matter any ulterior motives; but Aunt
+Hedwig much more than half suspected that in order to please her by
+pleasing her brother he was making a sacrifice of his stomach to his
+heart. If this theory had any foundation in fact, it is certain that
+Herr Sohnstein did not appreciably profit by his gallant risk of
+indigestion; for while Aunt Hedwig by no means seemed disposed to
+shatter all his hopes by a sharp refusal, she gave no indication
+whatever of any intention to permit her ripe red lips to utter the
+longed-for word of assent. Aunt Hedwig, unquestionably, was needlessly
+cruel in her treatment of Herr Sohnstein, and he frequently told her so.
+Sometimes he would ask her, with a fine irony, if she meant to keep him
+waiting for his answer until her brother had made lebkuchen as good as
+the lebkuchen of Nürnberg? To which invariably she would reply that, in
+the first place, she did not know of any question that he ever had asked
+her that required an answer; and, in the second place, that she did mean
+to keep him waiting just precisely that long. And then she would add,
+with a delicate drollery that was all her own, that whenever he got
+tired of waiting he might hire a whole horse-car all to himself and ride
+right away. Ah, this Aunt Hedwig had a funny way with her!
+
+And so the years slipped by; and little Minna, who laughed at the
+passing years as merrily as Aunt Hedwig laughed at Herr Sohnstein, grew
+up into a blithe, trig, round maiden, and ceased to be little Minna at
+all. She was her mother over again, Gottlieb said; but this was not by
+any means true. She did have her mother's goodness and sweetness, but
+her sturdy body bespoke her father's stronger strain. Aunt Hedwig, of
+this same strain, undisguisedly was stocky. Minna was only comfortably
+stout, with good broad shoulders, and an honest round waist that anybody
+with half an eye for waists could see would be a satisfactory armful.
+And she had also Aunt Hedwig's constant cheeriness. All day long her
+laugh sounded happily through the house, or her voice went blithely in
+happy talk, or, failing anybody to talk to, trilled out some scrap of a
+sweet old German song. The two apprentices and the young man who drove
+the bread-wagon of course were wildly and desperately in love with
+her--a tender passion that they dared not disclose to its object, but
+that they frequently and boastingly aired to each other. Naturally these
+interchanges of confidence were apt to be somewhat tempestuous. As
+the result of one of them, when the elder apprentice had declared that
+Minna's beautiful brown hair was finer than any wig in the window of the
+hair-dresser on the west side of the square, and that she had given him
+a lock of it; and when the young man who drove the bread-wagon (he was
+a profane young man) had declared that it was a verdammter sight finer
+than any wig, and that she hadn't--the elder apprentice got a dreadful
+black eye, and the younger apprentice was almost smothered in the
+dough-trough, and the young man who drove the bread-wagon had his head
+broken with the peel that was broken over it.
+
+[Illustration: Almost smothered in the dough-trough 214]
+
+Aunt Hedwig did not need to be told, nor did Minna, the little jade, the
+cause of this direful combat; and both of these amiable women thought
+Gottlieb very hard-hearted because he charged the broken peel--it was
+a new one--and the considerable amount of dough that was wasted by
+sticking to the younger apprentice's person, against the wages of the
+three combatants.
+
+This reference to the apprentices and to the wagon shows that Gottlieb's
+bakery no longer was a small bakery, but a large one. In the making of
+lebkuchen, it is true, he had not prospered; but in all other ways he
+had prospered amazingly. From Avenue A over to the East River, and from
+far below Tompkins Square clear away to the upper regions of Lexington
+Avenue, the young man who drove the bread-wagon rattled along every
+morning as hard as ever he could go, and he vowed and declared, this
+young man did, that nothing but his love for Minna kept him in a place
+where all the year round he was compelled in every single day to do the
+work of two. Meanwhile the little shop on East Fourth Street had
+been abandoned for a bigger shop, and this, in turn, for one still
+bigger--quite a palace of a shop, with plate-glass windows--on Avenue B.
+It was here, beginning in a modest way with a couple of tables whereat
+chance-hungry people might sit while they ate zwieback or a thick slice
+of hearty pumpernickel and drank a glass of milk, that a restaurant was
+established as a tender to the bakery. It did not set out to be a large
+restaurant, and, in fact, never became one. In the back part of the
+shop were a dozen tables, covered with oil-cloth and decorated with
+red napkins, and at these tables, under the especial direction of Aunt
+Hedwig, who was a culinary genius, was served a limited, but from a
+German stand-point most toothsome, bill of fare. There was Hasenpfeffer
+mit Spätzle, and Sauerbraten mit Kartoffelklösse, and Rindfleisch mit
+Meerrettig, and Bratwurst mit Rothkraut; and Aunt Hedwig made delicious
+coffee, and the bakery of course provided all manner of sweet cakes. In
+the summer-time they did a famous business in ice-cream.
+
+On the plate-glass windows beneath the sweeping curve of white letters
+in which the name of the owner of the bakery was set forth was added in
+smaller letters the words "Café Nürnberger." Gottlieb and Aunt Hedwig
+and the man who made the sign (this last, however, for the venal reason
+that more letters would be required) had stood out stoutly for the
+honest German "Kaffehaus;" but Minna, whose tastes were refined, had
+insisted upon the use of the French word: there was more style about it,
+she said. And this was a case in which style was wedded to substantial
+excellence. What with the good things which Gottlieb baked and the good
+things which Aunt Hedwig cooked, the Café Nürnberger presently
+acquired a somewhat enviable reputation. It became even a resort of the
+aristocracy, in this case represented by the dwellers in the handsome
+houses on the eastern and northern sides of Tompkins Square. Of winter
+evenings, when bright gas-light and a big glowing stove made the
+restaurant a very cozy place indeed, large parties of these aristocrats
+would drop in on their way home from the Thalia Theatre, and would stuff
+themselves with Hasenpfeffer and Sauerbraten and Kartoffelklösse, and
+would swig Aunt Hedwig's strong coffee (out of cups big enough and thick
+enough to have served as shells and been fired from a mortar), until it
+would seem as though they must certainly crack their aristocratic skins.
+
+Altogether, Gottlieb was in a flourishing line of business; and but
+for the deep sorrow that time never wholly could heal, and but for the
+continued failure of his attempts to make a really excellent lebkuchen,
+he would have been a very happy man. By this time he had come to be a
+baker of ease. The hard part of the work was done by the apprentices,
+and the morning delivery of bread was attended to by the young man who
+drove the bread-wagon. In the summer-time he would take Minna and
+Aunt Hedwig, always accompanied by her faithful Herr Sohnstein, upon
+beer-drinking expeditions to Guttenberg and other fashionable suburban
+resorts; and through the cozy winter evenings he smoked his long pipe
+comfortably in the little room at the back of the shop, where Minna and
+Aunt Hedwig sat with him, and where Herr Sohnstein, also smoking a long
+pipe, usually sat with him too. Sometimes Minna would sing sweet German
+songs to them, accompanying herself very creditably upon a cabinet
+organ--for Minna had received not only the substantial education that
+enabled her to keep the bakery accounts, but also had been instructed
+in the polite accomplishments of music and the dance. In summer, when
+expeditions were not on foot, these smoking parties usually were held
+upon the roof; where Gottlieb had made a garden and grew roses in pots,
+and even had raised some rare and delicious cauliflowers.
+
+It was a pleasant place, that roof, of a warm summer evening, especially
+when the rising full-moon sent a shimmering path of glory across the
+rippling waters of the East River, and cast over the bad-smelling region
+of Hunter's Point a glamour of golden haze that made it seem, oil tanks
+and all, a bit of fairy-land. At such times, as they sat among the
+rose-bushes and cauliflowers, Herr Sohnstein not infrequently would stop
+smoking his long pipe while he slyly squeezed Aunt Hedwig's plump hand.
+And Gottlieb also would stop smoking, as his thoughts wandered away
+along that glittering path across the waters, and so up to heaven where
+his Minna was. And then his thoughts would return to earth, to his
+little Minna--for to him she still was but a child--and he would find
+his sorrow lessened in thankfulness that, while his greatest treasure
+was lost to him, this good daughter and so many other good things still
+were his.
+
+But the lebkuchen dream of Gottlieb's youth remained unrealized; still
+unattained was the goal that twenty years before had seemed so near.
+However, being a stout-hearted baker of the solid Nürnberg strain,
+he did not at all surrender hope. Each year he added to his stock of
+honey-cake; and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he
+still believed that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such
+honey-cake as would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
+Kaiser himself!
+
+After the affair of the broken peel there was a coolness between
+Gottlieb and the elder apprentice, which, increasing, led to a positive
+coldness, and then to a separation. And then it was that Fate put a
+large spoke in all the wheels which ran in the Café Nürnberg by bringing
+into Gottlieb's employment a ruddy young Nürnberger, lately come out of
+that ancient city to America, named Hans Kuhn.
+
+It was not chance that led Hans to earn his living in a bakery when he
+came to New York. He was a born baker: a baker by choice, by force of
+natural genius, by hereditary right. Back in the dusk of the Middle
+Ages, as far as ever the traditions of his family and the records of
+the Guild of Bakers of Nürnberg ran, all the men of his race had been
+bakers, and famous ones at that. A cumulative destiny to bake was upon
+him, and he loved baking with all his heart. It was no desire to abandon
+his craft that had led him to leave Nürnberg and cross the ocean;
+rather was he moved by a noble ambition to build up on a broad and sure
+foundation the noble art of baking in the New World. And it had chanced,
+moreover, that in the conscription he had drawn an unlucky number.
+
+When this young man entered the Café Nürnberg--being drawn thither by
+its display of the name of his own native city--and asked for a job, his
+air was so frank, his talk about baking so intelligent, that Gottlieb
+took kindly to him at once; and Minna, sitting demurely at her accounts
+in the little wire cage over which was a fine tin sign inscribed in
+golden letters with the word "Cashier," was mightily well pleased, in a
+demure and proper way, at sight of his ruddy cheeks and bushy shock of
+light-brown hair and little yellow mustache and honest blue eyes. When
+he told, in answer to Gottlieb's questions, that he was the grandson of
+the very baker in Nürnberg whose delicious lebkuchen Gottlieb had eaten
+when he was a boy, and that a part of his bakerly equipment was the
+lebkuchen recipe that had come down in his family from the baker genius,
+his remote ancestor, who had invented it--well, when he had told this
+much about himself, it is not surprising that Gottlieb fairly jumped for
+joy, and engaged him, not as his apprentice, but as his assistant, on
+the spot.
+
+It was rather dashing to Gottlieb's enthusiasm, however, that his
+assistant--thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom--declined
+immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that
+was required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was
+made--possibly the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after
+all. But the Herr Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the
+neighborhood when the first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on
+sale. Indeed, as the fame of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the
+coming of the new baker was accepted by all Germans with discriminating
+palates as one of the most important events that ever had occurred on
+the East Side. The work of the young man who drove the bread-wagon was
+so greatly increased that he organized a strike, uniting in his own
+person the several functions of strikers, walking delegates, district
+assembly, and executive committee. And when the strike collapsed--that
+is to say, when the young man was discharged summarily--Gottlieb really
+did find it necessary to hire two new young men, and to buy an extra
+horse and wagon. Morally speaking, therefore (although the original
+young man, who remained out of employment for several weeks, and had
+a pretty hard time of it, did not think so), the strike was a complete
+success.
+
+As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of
+three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with
+Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her.
+Nor was it reasonable to suppose that even Minna, who had treated casual
+apprentices and wagon-driving young men with a seemly scorn, would
+continue to sit in the seat of the scornful when siege in form was laid
+to her heart by a properly ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed assistant baker,
+whose skill was such that he could make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
+German portion of the saints in Paradise. At the end of three months
+the feelings of these young people towards each other were quite clearly
+defined in their own minds; at the end of six months, as they were
+sitting together one afternoon in the little back room at a time when
+the shop happened to be empty, things came to the pleasing crisis that
+they both for a considerable period had foreseen.
+
+But then, unfortunately, came a storm--that neither of them had foreseen
+at all--that shook the Café Nürnberg to its very foundations!
+
+Gottlieb was the storm, and he moved over a wide area with great
+rapidity and violence. He was central, naturally, over Hans and Minna:
+the first of whom, after being denounced with great energy as a viper
+who had been warmed to the biting point, was ordered to take himself off
+without a single instant's delay, and never to darken the doors of the
+Café Nürnberg again; and the second of whom was declared to be a baby
+fool, who must be kept locked up in her own third-story back room, and
+fed on nothing more appetizing than pumpernickel and water until she
+came to her senses. In the outer edges of the storm the apprentices and
+the young men who drove the wagons found themselves most hotly involved;
+and a very violent gust swept down upon Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein,
+who surely were as innocent in the premises as any two people quite
+satisfactorily engaged in earnest but somewhat dilatory love-making of
+their own very well could be. Indeed, this storm was an ill wind that
+blew a famous blast of luck to Herr Sohnstein: for Aunt Hedwig, being
+dreadfully upset by her brother's outbreak, went of her own accord to
+Herr Sohnstein for sympathy and consolation--and found both in such
+liberal quantities, and with them such tender pleadings to enter a
+matrimonial haven where storms should be unknown, that presently,
+smiling through her tears, she uttered the words of consent for which
+the excellent notary had waited loyally through more than a dozen weary
+years. It was Herr Sohn-stein's turn to be upset then. He couldn't
+believe, until he had soothed himself with a phenomenal number of pipes,
+that happiness so perfect could be real.
+
+Possibly one reason why Gottlieb's storm was so violent was that he
+could not give any good reason for it. Hans really was a most estimable
+young man; he came of a good family; as a baker he was nothing short of
+a genius. All this Gottlieb knew, and all this he frequently had said to
+Aunt Hedwig and to Herr Sohnstein, and, worst of all, to Minna. As each
+of these persons now pointed out to him, in order to be consistent in
+his new position he must eat a great many of his own words; and he would
+have essayed this indigestible banquet willingly had he been convinced
+that thus he really could have proved that Hans was a viper and all the
+other unpleasant things which he had called him in his wrath. In truth,
+Gottlieb was, and in the depths of his heart he knew that he was,
+neither more nor less than a dog in the manger. His feeling simply was
+that Minna was his Minna, and that neither Hans nor anybody else had any
+right to her. This was not a position that admitted of logical defence;
+but it was one that he could be ugly and stick to: which was precisely
+what he did.
+
+Minna did not remain long a prisoner in her own room, feeding upon
+pumpernickel and water and bitter thoughts. Aunt Hedwig and Herr
+Sohnstein succeeded in putting a stop to that cruelty. And these elderly
+lovers, whose fresh love had made them of a sudden as young as Minna
+herself, and had filled thera with a warm sympathy for her, laid their
+heads together and sought earnestly to circumvent in her interest her
+father's stern decree. It was a joy to see this picture, in the little
+room back of the shop, of middle-aged love-making; and it was a little
+startling to find how the new youth that their love had given them
+had filled them with a quite extravagantly youthful recklessness.
+Herr Sohnstein, who was well known as a grave, sedate, and unusually
+cautious notary, seriously suggested (though he did not explain exactly
+how this would do it) that they should make an effort to bring Gottlieb
+to terms by burning down the bakery. And Aunt Hedwig, whose prudent
+temperament was sufficiently disclosed in the fact that she had
+hesitated in the matter of her own love affair for upward of a dozen
+years, not less seriously advanced the proposition that they all should
+elope from the Café Nürnberg and set up a rival establishment! Herr
+Sohnstein did not make any audible comment upon this violent proposal of
+Aunt Hedwig's, but it evidently put an idea into his head.
+
+As Gottlieb happened to be walking along the south side of Tompkins
+Square, a fortnight or so after the tempest, he found his steps arrested
+by a great sign that lay face downward on trestles across the sidewalk,
+in readiness for hoisting in place upon the front of a smart new shop.
+Inside the shop he saw painters and paper-hangers at work; and on the
+large plate-glass window a man was gluing white letters with a dexterous
+celerity. The letters already in place read "Nürnberger Lebku--" And as
+to this legend he saw "chen" added, he rolled out a stout South German
+oath and stamped upon the ground. But far stronger was the oath that he
+uttered as the big sign was swung upward, and he read upon it, in golden
+German letters:
+
+[Illustration: Bakery Sign 226]
+
+That the Recording Angel blotted out with his tears the fines which
+he was compelled on this occasion to record against Gottlieb Brekel in
+Heaven's high chancery is highly improbable. In the only known case of
+such lachrymic erasure the provocation to profanity was a commendable
+moral motive that was eminently unselfish. But when Gottlieb Brekel
+swore roundly in his native German all the way from the south-west
+corner of Tompkins Square to the corner of Third Street and the Bowery;
+and from that point, when he had transacted his business there, all the
+way back to the Café Nürnberg in Avenue B, his motives could not in any
+wise be regarded as moral, and selfishness lay at their very root.
+
+Gottlieb already found himself involved in serious difficulties with the
+many customers who bought his lebkuchen; for with the departure of Hans
+he had been compelled to fall back upon his own resources, and with
+the most lamentable results. Great quantities of his first baking were
+returned to him, with comments in both High German and Low German of
+a very uncomplimentary sort. His second baking--saving the relatively
+inconsiderable quantities consumed by the omnivorous children of St.
+Bridget's School--simply remained upon his hands unsold. And now,
+to make his humiliation the more complete, here was his discharged
+assistant setting up as his rival; and with every probability that
+the attempted rivalry would be crowned with success. Really there was
+something, perhaps, to be said in palliation of Gottlieb's profanity
+after all.
+
+When he told at home that evening of Hans Kuhn's upstart pretensions,
+his statements were received with an ominous silence. Aunt Hedwig
+only coughed slightly, and continued her knitting with more than usual
+energy. Herr Sohnstein only moved a little in his chair and puffed a
+little harder than usual at his pipe. Minna, who was in her wire cage in
+the shop settling her cash, only bent more intently over her books. But
+when Gottlieb went a step further and said, looking very keenly at Herr
+Sohnstein as he said it, that some great rascal must have lent Hans the
+money to make his fine start, Aunt Hedwig at once bristled up and said
+with emphasis that rascals, neither great nor small, were in the habit
+of lending their money to deserving young men; and Herr Sohnstein, a
+little sheepishly perhaps, and mumbling a little in his gray mustache,
+ventured the statement that this was a free country already, and people
+living in it were at liberty to lend their money to whom they pleased;
+and Minna, looking up from her books--Gottlieb's back was turned towards
+her--blew a most unfilial kiss from the tips of her chubby fingers to
+Herr Sohnstein right over her father's shoulder. All of which goes
+to show that something very like open war had broken out in the Café
+Nürnberg, and that the once united family dwelling therein was fairly
+divided into rival camps.
+
+Gottlieb's dreary case was made a little less dreary when he found that
+the lebkuchen which Hans produced in his fine new bakery was distinctly
+an inferior article; not much better, in fact, than Gottlieb's own. To
+any intelligent baker the reason for this was obvious: Hans was making
+his lebkuchen with new honey-cake. Thus made, even by the best of
+recipes, it could not be anything but a failure. Gottlieb gave a long
+sigh of relief as he realized this comforting fact, and at the same time
+thought of his own great store of honey-pots--there were hundreds
+of them now--all ready and waiting to his hand. But his feeling of
+satisfaction passed quickly to one of impotent rage as he recognized his
+own powerlessness, for all his wealth of honey-pots, to make lebkuchen
+which would be eaten by anybody but the tough-palated children from St.
+Bridget's School. He was alone, smoking, in the little room back of the
+shop as this bitter thought came to him; in his rage he struck the table
+beside him a blow so sounding that the family cat, peacefully slumbering
+behind the stove, sprang up with a yell of terror and made but two jumps
+to the open door. Coming on top of all his other trials--the revolt of
+his own little Minna, the defection of Aunt Hedwig, and the almost open
+enmity of Herr Sohnstein--this compulsory surrender of all his hope of
+honest fame was indeed a deadly blow.
+
+Gottlieb smoked on in sullen anger; his heart torn and tortured, and his
+mind filled with a confusion of bitter evil thoughts. And presently--for
+the devil is at every man's elbow, ready to take advantage of any sudden
+weakness, or turn to his own purposes any too great strength--these
+thoughts grew more evil and more clear: until they fairly resolved
+themselves into the determination to steal from Hans the recipe for
+making lebkuchen, and so to crush completely his rival and at the same
+time to make certain his own fortune and fame.
+
+Of course the devil did not plant the notion of theft in Gottlieb's mind
+in this bald fashion; for the devil is a most considerate person, and
+ever shows a courteous disposition to spare the feelings of those whom
+he would lead into sin. No: the temptation that he suggested was the
+subtle and ingenious one that Gottlieb should proceed to recover his
+own stolen property! His logic was admirable: Hans had been Gottlieb's
+assistant; and as such Gottlieb had owned him and his recipe as well.
+When Hans went away and took the recipe with him, he took that which
+still belonged to his master. Therefore, triumphantly argued the devil,
+Gottlieb had a perfect right to regain the recipe either by fair means
+or by foul. And finally, as a bit of supplementary devil-logic, the
+thought was suggested that inasmuch as Hans certainly must know the
+recipe by heart, the mere loss of the paper on which it was written
+would not be any real loss to him at all! It is only fair to Gottlieb's
+good angel to state that during this able presentment of the wrong
+side of the case he did venture to hint once or twice--in the feeble,
+perfunctory sort of way that unfortunately seems to be characteristic of
+good angels when their services really are most urgently required--that
+the whole matter might be compromised satisfactorily to all the parties
+in interest by permitting Hans to marry Minna, and by then taking him
+into partnership in the bakery. And it is only just to Gottlieb to state
+that to these fainthearted suggestions of his good angel he did not give
+one moment's heed.
+
+Now the devil is a thorough-going sort of a person, and having planted
+the evil wish in Gottlieb's soul he lost no time in opening to him an
+evil way to its accomplishment. When Hans, a stranger in New York, had
+come to work at the Cafe Nürnberg, Gottlieb had commended him to
+the good graces of a friend of his, a highly respectable little round
+Brunswicker widow who let lodgings, and in the comfortable quarters thus
+provided for him Hans ever since had remained. In this same house lodged
+also one of Gottlieb's apprentices--a loose young fellow, for whose
+proper regulation the widow more than once had been compelled to seek
+his master's counsel and aid. In this combination of circumstances,
+to which the devil now directed his attention, Gottlieb saw his
+opportunity. It was easy to make the widow believe that the loose young
+apprentice had taken the short step from looseness to crime, and that
+a suspicion of theft rested upon him so heavily as to justify the
+searching of his room; it was easy to make the widow keep guard below
+while Gottlieb searched; and it was very easy then to search, not for
+imaginary stolen goods in the chest of the apprentice, but for that
+which he himself wanted to steal from the chest of Hans Kuhn. As to
+opening the chest there was no difficulty at all. Gottlieb had half
+a dozen Nürnberg locks in his house, and he had counted, as the event
+proved correctly, upon making the key of one of these locks serve his
+turn. And in the chest, without any trouble at all, he found a leather
+wallet, and in the wallet the precious recipe--written on parchment
+in old High German that he found very difficult to read, and dated
+in Nürnberg in the year 1603. Gottlieb was pale as death as he went
+down-stairs to the widow; and his teeth fairly chattered as he told her
+that he had made a mistake. He tried to say that the apprentice was not
+a thief--but the word _dieb_ somehow stuck in his throat. Keen chills
+penetrated him as he almost ran through the streets to his home. For the
+devil, who heretofore had been in front of him and had only beckoned,
+now was behind him and was driving him with a right goodwill.
+
+When he entered the room at the back of the shop, where Minna was
+sewing, and where Herr Sohnstein, with his arm comfortably around Aunt
+Hedwig's waist, was smoking his long pipe, he created a stir of genuine
+alarm. As Aunt Hedwig very truly said, he looked as though he had seen
+a ghost. Herr Sohnstein, of a more practical turn of mind, asked him if
+he had been knocked down and robbed; and the word _beraubt_ grated most
+harshly upon Gottlieb's ears. But what cut him most of all was the way
+in which Minna--forgetting all his late unkind-ness at sight of his
+pale, frightened face--sprang to him with open arms, and with all the
+old love in her voice asked him to tell her what had gone wrong. Under
+these favoring conditions, Gottlieb's good angel bestirred himself
+somewhat more vigorously, and for a moment it seemed not impossible that
+right might triumph over wrong. But the devil bustled promptly upon the
+scene, and of course had things all his own way again in a moment. It
+certainly is most unfortunate that good angels, as a rule, are so weak
+in their angelic knees!
+
+Gottlieb pushed Minna away from him roughly; addressed to Aunt Hedwig
+the impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a
+surly tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful
+in the vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then, having planted these
+barbed arrows in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his
+friend, sought the retirement of his own upper room. As he left them,
+Minna buried her face in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried
+bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside
+for the moment his pipe, put his arms protectingly around them both.
+They all were very miserable.
+
+In the upper room, where the air seemed so stifling that he had to open
+the window wide in order to breathe, Gottlieb was very miserable too.
+He was fleeing into Tarshish, this temporarily wicked baker; and just as
+fell out in the case of that other one who fled to Tarshish, his flight
+was a failure: for this little world of ours is far too small to give
+any one a chance to run away from committed sin.
+
+Gottlieb tried to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same
+time tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his
+attempt was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the
+brown parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High
+German phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing
+of it at all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never
+would be able to make anything of it--that, without losing any part
+of the penalty justly attendant upon his crime, the crime itself
+might prove to be, so far as the practical benefit that he sought was
+concerned, absolutely futile. As this dreadful possibility arose before
+his mind a faintness and giddiness came over him. The room seemed to be
+whirling around him; life seemed to be slipping away from him; there
+was a strange, horrible ringing in his ears. He leaned forward over the
+table at which he was sitting and buried his face in his hands.
+
+Then, possibly, Gottlieb fell asleep, though of this he never felt
+really sure. What is quite certain is that he saw, as clearly as he
+ever saw her in life, his dear dead Minna; but with a face so sad, so
+reproachful, so full of piteous entreaty, that his blood seemed to stand
+still, while a consuming coldness settled upon his heart. He struggled
+to speak with her, to assure her that he would repair the evil that he
+had done, to plead for forgiveness; but, for all his striving, no other
+words would come to his lips save those which a little while before
+he had spoken so roughly to poor Aunt Hedwig: "The only people who see
+ghosts are women and fools!"
+
+And then, of a sudden, he found himself still seated at the table, the
+brown parchment still spread out before him, and the faint light of
+early morning breaking into the room. The window was wide open, as he
+had left it, and he was chilled to the marrow; he had a shocking cold
+in the head; there were rheumatic twinges in all his joints as he arose.
+What with the physical misery arising from these causes, and the moral
+misery arising from his sense of committed sin, he was in about as
+desperately bad a humor with himself as a man could be. He was in no
+mood to make another effort to read the difficult German of the recipe,
+the cause of all his troubles. The sight of it pained him, and he thrust
+it hurriedly into an old desk in which were stored (and these also
+were a source of pain to him) several generations of uncollected
+bills--practical proofs that the adage in regard to the impossibility of
+simultaneously possessing cakes and pennies does not always hold good.
+
+He locked the desk and put the key in his pocket; and then returned the
+key to the lock and left it there, as the thought occurred to him that
+the locking of this desk, that never in all the years that he had
+owned it had been locked before, might arouse suspicion. It seemed most
+natural to Gottlieb that his actions should be regarded with suspicion;
+he had a feeling that already his crime must be known to half the world.
+
+And before night it certainly is true that the one person most deeply
+interested in the discovery and punishment of Gottlieb's crime--that
+is to say, Hans Kuhn--did know all about it; which fact would seem
+surprising, considering how skilfully Gottlieb had gone about his work,
+were it not remembered that his unwitting accessory had been the
+little round Brunswicker widow, and were it not known that little round
+widows--Brunswick born or born elsewhere--as a class are incapable of
+keeping a secret.
+
+This excellent woman, to do her justice, had followed Gottlieb's orders
+to the letter. He had warned her not to tell the loose apprentice
+that his chest had been searched; and, so far as that apprentice was
+concerned, wild horses might have been employed to drag that little
+round widow to pieces--at least she might have permitted the wild horses
+to be hitched up to her--before ever an indiscreet word would have
+passed her lips. But when Hans Kuhn, for whom she entertained a high
+respect, and for whom she had also that warmly friendly feeling which
+trig middle-aged widows not seldom manifest towards good-looking young
+men, came to her in a fine state of wrath, and told her that his chest
+had been ransacked (he did not tell her of his loss, for he had not
+himself observed it), she did not consider that she violated any
+confidence in telling him everything that had occurred. It was all a
+mistake, she said; the Herr Brekel had gone into the wrong room; she
+must set the matter right at once; that bad young man might be a thief,
+after all. Hans felt a cold thrill run through him at the widow's words.
+But he controlled himself so well that she did not suspect his inward
+perturbation; and she accepted in as good faith his offer to inform the
+Herr Brekel of his error as she did, a day later, his assurance that the
+matter had been satisfactorily adjusted, and that the innocence of the
+apprentice had been proved.
+
+And then Hans returned to his violated chest, and found that the dread
+which had assailed his soul was founded in substantial truth--the recipe
+was gone! In itself the loss of the recipe was no very great matter, for
+he knew it by heart; but that Gottlieb--who had also a cellar full of
+rich old honey-cake--should have gained possession of it was a desperate
+matter indeed. Here instantly was an end to the hope of successful
+rivalry that Hans had cherished; and with the wreck of his luck in
+trade, as it seemed to him in the first shock of his misfortune, away
+in fragments to the four winds of heaven was scattered every vestige
+of probability that he would have luck in love. Being so suddenly
+confronted with a compound catastrophe so overwhelming, even a bolder
+baker than Hans Kuhn very well might have been for a time aghast.
+
+But as his wits slowly came together again Hans perceived that the game
+was not by any means lost, after all; on the contrary, it looked very
+much as though he had it pretty well in his own hands. Gottlieb was a
+thief, and all that was needed to complete the chain of evidence against
+him was his first baking of lebkuchen; for that as clearly would prove
+him to be in possession of the stolen recipe as what the widow could
+tell would prove that he had created for himself an opportunity to steal
+it. The most agreeable way of winning a father-in-law is not by force of
+threatening to hale him to a police court, but it is better to win him
+that way than not to win him at all, Hans thought; and he thought also
+that this was one of the occasions when it was quite justifiable to
+fight the devil with fire. So his spirits rose, and now he longed for,
+as eagerly as in the first moments of his loss he had dreaded, the
+production of such lebkuchen at the Café Nürnberg as would prove the
+proprietor of that highly respectable establishment to be neither more
+nor less than a robber.
+
+Hans was both annoyed and surprised as time passed on and the "cakes
+succulent but damnatory" were not forthcoming from Gottlieb's oven. He
+himself went on making unsatisfactory lebkuchen of bad materials by a
+good formula, and Gottlieb continued to make unsatisfactory lebkuchen
+by a bad formula of the best materials. Orthodox German palates found
+nothing to commend and much to reprobate in both results. This was the
+situation for several weeks. Hans could not understand it at all. The
+subject was a delicate one to broach to Minna during their short but
+blissful interviews about dusk in the central fastnesses of Tompkins
+Square, at which interviews Aunt Hedwig winked and Herr Sohnstein
+openly connived by keeping watch for them against Gottlieb's possible
+appearance; for Hans had determined that until he had positive proof to
+go upon he would keep secret, and most of all from Minna, the dreadful
+fact of her father's crime. Therefore did he remain in a state of very
+harrowing uncertainty, with his plan of campaign completely brought to a
+stand.
+
+During this period a heavy cloud hung over the Café Nürnberg. Gottlieb
+came fitfully to his meals; and when he did come, he ate almost nothing.
+Each day he grew more and more morose; each night, when poor Aunt Hedwig
+was not kept awake by her own sorrowful thoughts, her slumbers were,
+broken by hearing her brother pacing heavily the floor of the adjoining
+room. In some sort he made up for his loss of sleep at night by sleeping
+of an evening in the little room back of the shop, falling into restless
+naps (when he should have been restfully smoking his long pipe), from
+which he would wake with a start and sometimes with a cry of alarm, and
+would dart furtive horrified glances at Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein:
+who were doing nothing of a horrifying nature, only sitting cozily close
+together, more or less enfolded in each other's arms. It was a little
+inconsiderate on the part of the lovers, and very-hard on Minna, this
+extremely open love-making; for Minna's love-making necessarily was
+by fitful snatches amid the bleak desolations of Tompkins Square. They
+would try to comfort each other, she and Hans, as they stood cheerlessly
+under the chill lee of the music stand; but their outlook was a dreary
+one, and their efforts in this direction were not crowned with any great
+success. Sometimes as Minna came home again along the west side of the
+square, and saw in Spengler's window the wreaths of highly-artificial
+immortelles with the word "Ruhe" upon them in vivid purple letters,
+she fairly would fall to crying over the thought that until she should
+become a fit subject for such a wreath there was small chance that any
+real rest would be hers.
+
+However, all this is aside from Gottlieb's horrified looks as he waked
+from his troubled slumbers--looks which would disappear as he became
+thoroughly aroused, but only to return again after his next uneasy nap.
+One day he startled Aunt Hedwig by asking her if she believed in ghosts.
+Remembering his severe words in condemnation of her casual reference to
+these supernatural beings, it was with some hesitation that she replied
+that she did. Still more to her surprise, Gottlieb turned away from her
+hurriedly, yet not so hurriedly but that she saw a strange, scared look
+upon his face, and in a low and trembling voice replied: "And so do I!"
+
+And now the fact may as well be admitted frankly that a ghost was the
+disturbing element that was making Gottlieb's life go wrong; that, as
+there seemed to be every reason to believe, was hurrying him towards the
+grave: for a middle-aged German who refuses to eat, whose regular sleep
+forsakes him, and who actually gives up smoking, naturally cannot be
+expected to remain long in this world.
+
+It was the ghost of his dead wife. At first she appeared to him only in
+his dreams, standing beside the desk in which he had placed the stolen
+recipe for making lebkuchen, and holding down the lid of that desk with
+a firm but diaphanous white hand. Presently she appeared to him quite as
+clearly in his waking hours. Her face still wore an expression at once
+tender and reproachful; but every day the look of tenderness diminished,
+while the look of reproach grew stronger and more stern. Each time that
+he sought to open the desk that he might take thence the recipe and make
+his crime a practical business success, the figure assumed an air
+so terribly menacing that his heart failed him, and he gave over the
+attempt.
+
+This, then, was the all-sufficient reason why the good lebkuchen
+that would have proved Gottlieb a thief was not for sale at the Café
+Nürenburg; and this was the reason why Gottlieb himself, broken down
+by loss of food and sleep and by the nervous wear and tear incident to
+forced companionship with an angry ghost, was drawing each day nearer
+and nearer to that dark portal through which bakers and all other people
+pass hence into the shadowy region whence there is no return.
+
+Gottlieb Brekel never had been an especially pious man. As became a
+reputable German citizen, he had paid regularly the rent of a pew in the
+Church of the Redemptorist Fathers in Third Street; but, excepting on
+such high feasts as Christmas and Easter, he usually had been content
+to occupy it and to discharge his religious duties at large vicariously.
+Aunt Hed-wig's bonnet invariably was the most brilliantly conspicuous
+feature of the entire congregation, just as the prettiest face in the
+entire congregation invariably was Minna's. But now that Gottlieb was
+confronted with a spiritual difficulty, it occurred to him that he might
+advantageously resort in his extremity to spiritual aid. He had no very
+clear notion how the aid would be given; he was not even clear as to
+how he ought to set about asking for it; and he was troubled by the
+conviction that in order to obtain it he must not only repent of his
+sin, but must make atonement by restitution--a possibility (for the
+devil still had a good grip upon him) that made him hesitate a long
+while before he set about purchasing ease for his conscience at so heavy
+a material cost. However, his good angel at last managed to pluck up
+some courage--it was high time--and, strengthened by this tardily given
+assistance, he betook himself in search of consolation within church
+walls.
+
+The Church of the Redemptorist Fathers is a very beautiful church, and
+at all times--save through the watches of the night and through one
+mid-day hour--its doors stand hospitably open, silently inviting poor
+sinners, weary and heavy laden with their sins, to enter into the calm
+of its quiet holiness and there find rest. Tall, slender pillars uphold
+its vaulted roof, in the groinings of which lurk mysterious shadows.
+Below, a warm, rich light comes through the stained-glass windows:
+whereon are pictured the blessed St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, founder
+of the Redemptorist Congregation, blessedly instructing the chubby-faced
+choristers; and the Venerable Clement Hofbauer, "primus in Germania" of
+the Redemptorists, all in his black gown, kneeling, praying no doubt for
+the outcast German souls for the saving of which he worked so hard and
+so well; and (a picture that Minna dearly loved) St. Joseph and the
+sweet Virgin and the little Christ-child fleeing together through the
+desert from the wrath of the Judean king. And ranged around the walls on
+perches high aloft are statues of various minor saints and of the Twelve
+Apostles; of which Minna's favorite was the Apostle Matthias, because
+this saint, with his high forehead tending towards baldness, and his
+long gray beard and gray hair, and his kindly face, and even the axe in
+his hand (that was not unlike a baker's peel), made her think always
+of her dear father. The pew that Gottlieb paid for so regularly, and so
+irregularly occupied, was just beneath the statue of this saint; which,
+however, gave Minna less pleasure than would have been hers had not the
+next saint in the row been the Apostle Simon with his dreadful saw. It
+must have hurt so horribly to be sawed in two, she thought. In the dusky
+depths of the great chancel gleamed the white marble of the beautiful
+altar, guarded by St. Peter with his keys and St. Paul with his naked
+two-edged sword; and above the altar was the dead Christ on Calvary,
+with His desolate mother and the despairing Magdalene and St. John the
+divine.
+
+Into this beautiful church it was that Gottlieb, led thither by his
+good angel, entered; and the devil--raging in the terrible but impotent
+fashion that is habitual with devils when they see slipping away from
+their snares the souls which they thought to win to wickedness--of
+course was forced to remain outside. But what feelings of keen
+repentance filled this poor sinning baker's heart within that holy
+place, what good resolves came to him, what light and refreshment
+irradiated and cheered his darkened, harried soul--all these are things
+which better may be suggested here than written out in full. For these
+things are so real, so sacred, and so beautiful with a heavenly beauty,
+that they may not lightly be used for decorative purposes in mere
+romance.
+
+Let it suffice, then, to tell--for so is our poor human stuff put
+together that trivial commonplace facts often exhibit most searchingly
+the changes for good or for evil which have come to pass in our
+inmost souls--that Gottlieb, on returning to the Café Nürnberg, ate
+a prodigious dinner; and after his dinner, for the first time in a
+fortnight, smoked a thoroughly refreshing pipe.
+
+Over his dinner and his pipe he was silent, manifesting, however, a sort
+of sheepishness and constraint that were not less strange in the eyes
+of Aunt Hedwig and Minna than was the sudden revival of his interest in
+tobacco and food. As he smoked, a pleasant thought came to him. When he
+had knocked the ashes from his pipe he ordered Minna, surlily, to bring
+him his hat and coat; he must pay a visit to that rascal Sohnstein, he
+said; and so went out. He left the two women lost in wonder; and Aunt
+Hed-wig, because of his characterization of her dear Sohnstein as a
+rascal, disposed to weep. And yet, somehow, they both felt that the
+storm was breaking, and that clear weather was at hand. There was nobody
+in the shop just then; and the two, standing behind the rampart of
+freshly-baked cakes that was high heaped up upon the counter, embraced
+each other and mingled tears, which they knew--by reason of the womanly
+instinct that was in them--were tears of joy.
+
+And that very evening the prophecy of happiness that was in their joyful
+sorrow was happily fulfilled.
+
+Gottlieb did not return to the Café Nürnberg until after nine o'clock.
+With him came Herr Sohnstein. They both were very grave and silent, yet
+both exhibited a most curious twinklesomeness in their eyes. Neither
+Aunt Hedwig nor Minna could make anything of their strange mood; and
+Aunt Hedwig was put to her trumps completely when she was sure that
+she saw her brother--who was whispering to Herr Sohnstein behind the
+pie-counter--poke the notary in the ribs. As to the joint chuckle at
+that moment of those two mysterious men there could be no doubt; she
+heard it distinctly! 14
+
+Still further to Aunt Hedwig's surprise, for the Café Nürnberg never
+was closed before ten o'clock, and usually remained open much later,
+Gottlieb himself began to put up the shutters; and when this work was
+finished he came back into the shop and locked behind him the double
+front door. Almost as he turned the key there was a knock outside, as
+though somebody actually had been waiting in the street for the signal
+that the closing of the shutters gave.
+
+"Another rascal would come in already, Sohn-stein," said Gottlieb,
+gruffly. "Open for him, but lock the door again. I must go up-stairs."
+
+Gottlieb, with a queer smile upon his face, left the little back room;
+and a moment later Minna uttered a cry of surprise, as Herr Sohnstein
+unlocked the door and her own Hans entered the shop. What, she thought,
+could all these wonders mean? As for Aunt Hedwig, she had sunk down into
+her big armchair and her bright black eyes seemed to be fairly starting
+from her head.
+
+Herr Sohnstein locked the door again, as he had been ordered to do, and
+then brought Hans through the shop and into the little back room. Hans
+evidently was not a party to the mystery, whatever the mystery might
+be. He looked at Minna as wonderingly as she looked at him, and he was
+distressingly ill at ease. But there was no time for either of them
+to ask questions, for as Hans entered the room from the shop, Gottlieb
+returned to it. In his hand Gottlieb held the brown old parchment on
+which the lebkuchen recipe was written; the smile had left his face; he
+was very pale. For a moment there was an awkward pause. Then Gottlieb,
+trembling a little as he walked, crossed the room to where Hans stood
+and placed the parchment in his hands. And it was in a trembling, broken
+voice that Gottlieb said:
+
+"Hans, a most wicked man have I been. But my dead Minna has helped me,
+and here I give again to thee what I stole from thy chest--I who was a
+robber." Then Gottlieb covered his face with his hands, and presently
+each of his bony knuckles sparkled with a pendant tear.
+
+"My own dear father!" said Minna; and her arms were around him, and her
+head was pressed close upon his breast.
+
+"My own good brother, thou couldst not be a thief!" said Aunt Hedwig;
+and, so saying, clasped her stout arms around them both.
+
+"My good old friend! all now is right again," said Herr Sohnstein; who
+then affected to put his arms around the three, but really embraced only
+Aunt Hedwig. However, there was quite enough of Aunt Hedwig to fill even
+Herr Sohnstein's long arms; and he made the average of his one-third of
+an embrace all right by bestowing it with a threefold energy.
+
+The position of Hans as he regarded this affectionately writhing group
+(that was not unsuggestive of the Laöcoon: with a new motive, a fourth
+figure, a commendable addition of draperies, and a conspicuous lack of
+serpents) would have been awkward under any circumstances; and as the
+circumstances were sufficiently awkward to begin with, he was very much
+embarrassed indeed. To Aunt Hed-wig's credit be it said that she was the
+first (after Minna, of course; and Minna could not properly act in the
+premises) to perceive his forsaken condition.
+
+"Come, Hans," said the good Hedwig, her voice shaken by emotion and the
+tightness of Herr Sohn-stein's grip about her waist.
+
+"Thou hadst better come, Hans," added Herr Sohnstein, jollily.
+
+"_Wilt_ thou come, Hans--and forgive me?" Gottlieb asked.
+
+But it was not until Minna said, very faintly, yet with a heavenly
+sweetness in her voice: "Thou _mayst_ come, Hans!" that Hans actually
+came.
+
+[Illustration: Thou mayst come, Hans 248]
+
+And then for a while there was such hearty embracing of as much of
+the other four as each of them could grasp that the like of it all for
+good-will and lovingness never had been seen in a bakery before. And
+Gottlieb's good angel exulted greatly; and the devil, who had lingered
+about the premises in the hope that even at the eleventh hour the powers
+of evil might get the better of the powers of good, acknowledged his
+defeat with a howl of baffled rage: and then fled away in a blue flame
+and a flash of lightning that made the waters of the East River (which
+stream he was compelled to wade, thanks to General Newton, who took away
+his stepping-stones) fairly hiss and bubble. And never did he dare to
+show so much as the end of his wicked nose in the Café Nürnberg again!
+
+"But thou wilt not take from me this little one, my daughter, Hans?"
+Gottlieb asked, when they had somewhat disentangled themselves. "Thou
+wilt come and live with us, and be my partner, and together we will make
+the good lebkuchen once more. Is it not so?"
+
+Hans found this a trying question. He looked at Herr Sohnstein,
+doubtfully. "Ah," said Herr Sohnstein, "thou meanest that a very
+hard-hearted, money-lending man has hired a shop for thee and has made
+it the most splendid bakery and the finest restaurant on all the East
+Side, eh? And thou art afraid that this man, this old miser man, will
+keep thee to thy bargainings, already?"
+
+Hans gave a deprecating nod of assent.
+
+"Well, my boy Hans," Herr Sohnstein continued, with great good-humor,
+and sliding his arm well around Aunt Hedwig's generous waist again as he
+spoke--"well, my boy Hans, let me tell thee that that bad old miser man
+is not one-half so bad as thou wouldst think. Dost thou remember that
+when he had a garden made upon the roof of that fine bakery, and thou
+toldst to him that to make a garden there was to waste his money, what
+he said? Did he not say that if he made the garden God would send the
+flowers? And when that fine sign was made with 'Nürnberger Bäkerei' upon
+it, and thou toldst to him that to take that name of Nürnberg was not
+fair to his old friend, did he not tell thee that with his old friend
+he would settle that matter so that there should be no broken bones? For
+did he not know already that for these five years past it has been the
+wish of Gottlieb's heart to leave this old bakery--where his lease ends
+this very coming May--and to have just such a new fine bakery upon the
+Square as now you two together will have? Ah, this bad old miser man is
+not afraid but that his miser money will come back to him again; and he
+is not such a fool but that he had faith in his good friend Gottlieb,
+and knew that all would end well. And now, truly, all will be happiness:
+for Gottlieb, who has gained a good son, can spare to me this dear
+Hed-wig, his sister, and he will come to church with us and see us all
+married in one bright day."
+
+Aunt Hedwig looked up into Herr Sohnstein's face as he ended this long
+speech--not so fine, perhaps, as some of the speeches which he had
+delivered in the criminal courts, but much more moving and a great deal
+more genuine than the very best of them--and, with her eyes filling
+with happy tears, said to him: "And it is to thee that we owe it, this
+happiness!"
+
+But Herr Sohnstein's face grew grave and his voice grew reverent as he
+answered: "It is not so, my Hedwig. We owe our happiness to the good God
+who has taken away the evil that was in our dear Gottlieb's heart." They
+all were very quiet for a little space, and upon the silence broke the
+sweet sound of the clock bell in the near-by church-tower.
+
+When the last stroke had sounded Herr Sohnstein spoke again, and in his
+customary jolly tone: "As for these young ones here, we will unlock the
+door and let them walk out and look for a little at the music-stand that
+they love so well in the Square. And Hedwig shall sit beside me while
+we smoke our pipes, Gottlieb, eh? It is a long time already, old friend,
+since thou and I have sat together and smoked our pipes."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Romance Of Tompkins Square, by Thomas A. Janvier
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      A Romance of Tompkins Square., by Thomas A. Janvier
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
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+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's A Romance Of Tompkins Square, by Thomas A. Janvier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Romance Of Tompkins Square
+       1891
+
+Author: Thomas A. Janvier
+
+Illustrator: W. T. Smedley
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23808]
+Last Updated: January 5, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE.
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Thomas A. Janvier <br /> Copyright, 1891, by Harper &amp; Brothers
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      List of Illustrations
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#linkimage-0001"> Sat Beside the Oven Smoking his Second
+            Pipe </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#linkimage-0002"> Pots Were Set Away in the Coolest Part of
+            The Cellar </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#linkimage-0003"> Almost Smothered in the Dough-trough </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#linkimage-0004"> Bakery Sign </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#linkimage-0005"> Thou Mayst Come, Hans </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether the honey shall be brought to the boiling-point slowly or rapidly;
+      whether it shall boil a long time or a short time; when and in what
+      quantities the flour shall be added; how long the kneading shall last; in
+      what size of earthen pot the dough shall be stored, and what manner of
+      cover upon these pots best preserves the dough against the assaults of
+      damp and mould; whether the pots shall be half-buried in the cool earth of
+      the cellar or ranged on shelves to be freely exposed to the cool cellar
+      air&mdash;all these several matters are enshrouded in a mystery that is
+      penetrated only by the elect few of Nürnberg bakers by whom perfect
+      lebkuchen is made. And the same is true of the Brunswick bakers, who call
+      this rare compound honigkuchen, and of the makers of pferfferkuchen, as it
+      is called by the bakers of Saxony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor does the mystery end here. This first stage in the making of lebkuchen
+      is but means to an end, and for the compassing of that end&mdash;the
+      blending and the baking of the finished and perfect honey-cake&mdash;each
+      master-baker has his own especial recipe, that has come down to him from
+      some ancestral baker of rare parts, or that by his own inborn genius has
+      been directly inspired. And so, whether the toothsome result be Nürnberger
+      lebkuchen, or Brunsscheiger peppernotte, or Basler leckerly, the making of
+      it is a mystery from first to last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was because of this mystery that the life of Gottlieb Brekel had been
+      imbittered for nearly twenty years&mdash;ever since, in fact, his first
+      essay in the compounding of Nürnberger lebkuchen had been made. He was but
+      a young baker then: now he was an old one, and notwithstanding the guarded
+      praise of friends and the partial approval of the public (notably of that
+      portion of the public under the age of ten years that attended St.
+      Bridget's Parochial School) he full well knew that his efforts through all
+      these years to make, in New York, lebkuchen such as he himself had eaten
+      when he was a boy, at home in Nürnberg, had been neither more nor less
+      than a long series of failures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the hopeful days of his apprenticeship all had seemed so easy before
+      him. Let him but have a little shop, and then a little capital wherewith
+      to lay in his supply of honey, and the thing would be done! He had no
+      recipe, it is true; for he was a baker not by heredity, but by selection.
+      Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of honey-cake
+      making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of his own
+      genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen so excellent
+      that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem tasteless. But these
+      were the bright dreams of youth, which age had refused to realize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In course of time the little shop became an accomplished fact; a very
+      little shop it was in East Fourth Street. Capital came more slowly, and
+      three several times, when a sum almost sufficient had been saved, was it
+      diverted from its destined purpose of buying the honey without which
+      Gottlieb could not make even a beginning in his triumphal lebkuchen
+      career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first accumulation was swept away through the conquest of Ambition by
+      Love. In this case Love was personified in one Minna Schaus&mdash;who was
+      not by any means a typical sturdy German lass, with laughing looks and
+      stalwart ways, but a daintily-finished, golden-haired maiden, with soft
+      blue eyes full of tenderness, and a gentleness of manner that Gottlieb
+      thought&mdash;and with more reason than lovers sometimes think things of
+      this sort&mdash;was very like the manner of an angel. And for love of her
+      Gottlieb forgot for a while his high resolves in regard to lebkuchen
+      making; and on the altar of his affections&mdash;in part to pay for his
+      modest wedding-feast, in part to pay for the modest outfit for their
+      housekeeping over the bakery&mdash;the money laid aside for the filling of
+      his honey-pots very willingly was offered up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A second time were his honey-pots sacrificed, that the coming into the
+      world of the little Minna might be made smooth. This, also, was a willing
+      sacrifice; though in his heart of hearts Gottlieb felt a twinge of regret
+      that his first-born was not a son, to whom the fame and fortune incident
+      to the making of perfect lebkuchen might descend. But he was a philosopher
+      in his way, and did not suffer himself to be seriously disconcerted by an
+      accident that by no means was irreparable. As he smoked his long pipe that
+      night, while the bread was baking, he said to himself, cheerily: "It is a
+      girl. Yes, that is easy. Girls sprout everywhere; they are like grass. But
+      a boy, and a boy who is to grow up into such a baker as my boy will be&mdash;ah,
+      that is another matter. But patience, Gottlieb; all in good time." Then,
+      when his third pipe was finished&mdash;which was his measure of time for
+      the baking&mdash;he fetched out the sweet-smelling hot bread from the oven
+      with his long peel, and set forth upon his round of delivery. And he
+      whistled a mellow old Nürnberg air as he pushed his cart through the
+      streets before him that frosty morning, and in his heart he thanked the
+      good God who had sent him the blessings of a dear wife and a sweet little
+      daughter and a growing trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet once more were his honey-pots sacrificed, and this time the
+      sacrifice was sad indeed. From the day that the little Minna came into the
+      world his own Minna, as in a little while was but too plain to him, began
+      to make ready to leave it. As the weeks went by, the little strength that
+      at first had come to her was lost again; the faint color faded from her
+      cheeks, and left them so wan that through the fair skin the blue veins
+      showed in most delicate tracery; and as her dear eyes ever grew gentler
+      and more loving, the light slowly went out from them. So within the year
+      the end came. In that great sorrow Gottlieb forgot his ambition, and cared
+      not, when the bills were paid, that his honey-pots still remained
+      unfilled. For the care of his home and of little Minna his good sister
+      Hedwig came to him. Very drearily, for a long while, the work of the
+      bakery went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a strong man, stirred by a strong purpose, does not relinquish that
+      purpose lightly; and the one redeeming feature of the life of many sorrows
+      which in this world we all are condemned to live is that even the
+      bitterest sorrow is softened by time. But for this partial relief our race
+      no doubt would have been extinguished ages ago in a madness wrought of
+      grief and rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb's strong purpose was to make the best lebkuchen that baker ever
+      baked. After a fashion his sorrow healed, as the flesh heals about a
+      bullet that has gone too deep to be extracted by the surgeon's craft, and
+      while it was with him always, and not seldom sent through all his being
+      thrills of pain, he bore it hidden from the world, and went about his work
+      again. Working comforted him. The baking of bread is an employment that is
+      at once soothing and sustaining. As a man kneads the spongy dough he has
+      good exercise and wholesome time for thought. While the baking goes on he
+      may smoke and meditate. The smell of the newly-baked bread is a pleasant
+      smell, and brings with it pleasant thoughts of many people well nourished
+      in the eating of it. Moreover, there is no time in the whole twenty-four
+      hours when a city is so innocent, so like the quiet honest country-side,
+      as that time in the crisp morning when a baker goes his rounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Gottlieb found himself refreshed and strengthened by these manifold
+      good influences of his gentle trade, his burden of sorrow was softened to
+      him and made easier to bear. Comforting thoughts of the little Minna&mdash;growing
+      to be a fine little lass now&mdash;stole in upon him, and within him the
+      hope arose that she would grow to be like the dear mother whom she never
+      had known. So the little fine roots of a new love struck down into his sad
+      heart; and presently the sweet plant of love began to grow for him again,
+      casting its delicate tendrils strongly about the child, who truly was a
+      part of the being about which his earlier and stronger love had clung. Yet
+      the love that thus was re-established in Gottlieb's breast was far from
+      filling it, and so for ambition there was ample room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img src="images/204.jpg"
+      alt="Sat Beside the Oven Smoking his Second Pipe 204 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Somewhat to his surprise, one night, as he sat beside the oven smoking his
+      second pipe, he found himself thinking once more about his project for
+      making such lebkuchen as never yet had been known outside of Nürnberg&mdash;lebkuchen
+      that would make him at once the admiration and the despair of every German
+      baker in New York. Nor was there, as he perceived as he turned the matter
+      over in his mind, any reason now why he should not set about making this
+      project a reality; for he had money enough, and more than enough, in store
+      to buy the honey that he had so long desired. His eyes sparkled; he forgot
+      to smoke; and when he turned again, half unconsciously, to his pipe, it
+      had gone out. This roused him. The brightness faded from his eyes; he drew
+      a long sigh. Then he lighted his pipe again, and until the baking was
+      ended his thoughts no longer were busied with ambitious schemes for the
+      making of lebkuchen, but went back with a sad tenderness to the happy time
+      that had come so quickly to so cruel an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the spark was kindled, and presently the fire burned. When he told the
+      good Hedwig that he had bought the honey at last, that excellent woman&mdash;albeit
+      not much given to display of the tender emotions&mdash;shed tears of joy.
+      She was a sturdy, thick-waisted, stout-ankled person, this Aunt Hedwig,
+      with a cheery red face, and prodigiously fine white teeth, and very bright
+      black eyes; and her taste in dress was such that when of a Sunday she went
+      to the Church of the Redemptorist Fathers, in Third Street, she was more
+      brilliant than ever King Solomon was in all his glory, in her startling
+      array of vivid reds and greens and blues. But beneath her violent exterior
+      of energetic color she had a warm and faithful heart, as little Minna knew
+      already, and as her brother Gottlieb had known for many a long good year.
+      Therefore was Gottlieb now gladdened by her hearty show of sympathy; and
+      he returned with a good will the sounding smack that she gave him with her
+      red lips, and the strong hug that she gave him with her stout arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at sight of this pleasing manifestation of affection that Herr
+      Sohnstein, the notary&mdash;who was present in the little room back of the
+      shop where it occurred&mdash;at once declared that he meant to buy some
+      honey too. And Aunt Hedwig, smiling so generously as to show every one of
+      her fine white teeth, promptly told him that he had better be off and buy
+      it, because perhaps he could buy at the same place some hugs and kisses
+      too: at which sally and quick repartee they all laughed. Herr Sohnstein
+      long had been the declared lover of Aunt Hedwig's, and long had been held
+      at arm's-length (quite literally occasionally) by that vigorous person;
+      who believed, because of her good heart, that her present duty was not to
+      consult her own happiness by becoming Frau Sohnstein, but to remain the
+      Fräulein Brekel, and care for her lonely brother and her brother's child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being thus encouraged, Gottlieb bought the honey forthwith; and with Aunt
+      Hedwig's zealous assistance set about boiling it and straining it and
+      kneading it into a sticky dough, all in accordance with the wise old
+      baker's directions which he so long had treasured in his mind. And when
+      the dough was packed in earthen pots, over which bladders were tied, all
+      the pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar, as far from the
+      great oven as possible, that the precious honey-cake might undergo that
+      subtle change which only comes with time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img src="images/208.jpg"
+      alt="Pots Were Set Away in the Coolest Part of The Cellar 208 "
+      width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      For at least a year must pass before the honey-cake really can be said to
+      be good at all; and the longer that it remains in the pots, even until
+      five-and-twenty years, the better does it become. Therefore it is that all
+      makers of lebkuchen who aspire to become famous professors of the craft
+      add each year to their stock of honey-cake, yet draw always from the
+      oldest pots a time-soaked dough that ever grows more precious in its sweet
+      excellence of age. Thus large sums&mdash;more hundreds of dollars than a
+      young baker, just starting upon his farinaceous career, would dare to
+      dream of&mdash;may be invested; and the old rich bakers who can dower
+      their daughters with many honey-pots know that in the matter of
+      sons-in-law they have but to pick and choose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was about Christmas-time&mdash;which is the proper time for this office&mdash;that
+      Gottlieb made his first honey-cake; and it was a little before the
+      Christmas following that his first lebkuchen was baked. For a whole week
+      before this portentous event occurred he was in a nervous tremor; by day
+      he scarcely slept; as he sat beside the oven at night his pipe so
+      frequently went out that twice, having thus lost track of time, his baking
+      of bread came near to being toast. And when at last the fateful night
+      arrived that saw his first batch of lebkuchen in the oven, he actually
+      forgot to smoke at all!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb had but a sorry Christmas that year. The best that even Aunt
+      Hedwig could say of his lebkuchen was that it was not bad. Herr Sohnstein,
+      to be sure, brazenly declared that it was delicious; but Gottlieb
+      remembered that Herr Sohnstein, who conducted a flourishing practice in
+      the criminal courts, was trained in the art of romantic deviations from
+      the truth whenever it was necessary to put a good face on a bad cause; and
+      he observed sadly that the notary's teeth were at variance with his
+      tongue, for the piece of lebkuchen that Herr Sohnstein ate was
+      infinitessimally small. As for the regular German customers of the bakery,
+      they simply bit one single bite and then refused to buy. Indeed, but for
+      the children from St. Bridget's School&mdash;who, being for the most part
+      boys, and Irish boys at that, presumably could eat anything&mdash;it is
+      not impossible that that first baking of lebkuchen might have remained
+      uneaten even until this present day. And it was due mainly to the stout
+      stomachs of successive generations of these enterprising boys that the
+      series of experiments which Gottlieb then began in the making of lebkuchen
+      was brought, in the course of years, to something like a satisfactory
+      conclusion. But even at its best, never was this lebkuchen at all like
+      that of which in his hopeful youth he had dreamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, spoke highly of it, and even managed to eat of
+      it quite considerable quantities. Gottlieb did not imagine that Herr
+      Sohnstein could have in this matter any ulterior motives; but Aunt Hedwig
+      much more than half suspected that in order to please her by pleasing her
+      brother he was making a sacrifice of his stomach to his heart. If this
+      theory had any foundation in fact, it is certain that Herr Sohnstein did
+      not appreciably profit by his gallant risk of indigestion; for while Aunt
+      Hedwig by no means seemed disposed to shatter all his hopes by a sharp
+      refusal, she gave no indication whatever of any intention to permit her
+      ripe red lips to utter the longed-for word of assent. Aunt Hedwig,
+      unquestionably, was needlessly cruel in her treatment of Herr Sohnstein,
+      and he frequently told her so. Sometimes he would ask her, with a fine
+      irony, if she meant to keep him waiting for his answer until her brother
+      had made lebkuchen as good as the lebkuchen of Nürnberg? To which
+      invariably she would reply that, in the first place, she did not know of
+      any question that he ever had asked her that required an answer; and, in
+      the second place, that she did mean to keep him waiting just precisely
+      that long. And then she would add, with a delicate drollery that was all
+      her own, that whenever he got tired of waiting he might hire a whole
+      horse-car all to himself and ride right away. Ah, this Aunt Hedwig had a
+      funny way with her!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so the years slipped by; and little Minna, who laughed at the passing
+      years as merrily as Aunt Hedwig laughed at Herr Sohnstein, grew up into a
+      blithe, trig, round maiden, and ceased to be little Minna at all. She was
+      her mother over again, Gottlieb said; but this was not by any means true.
+      She did have her mother's goodness and sweetness, but her sturdy body
+      bespoke her father's stronger strain. Aunt Hedwig, of this same strain,
+      undisguisedly was stocky. Minna was only comfortably stout, with good
+      broad shoulders, and an honest round waist that anybody with half an eye
+      for waists could see would be a satisfactory armful. And she had also Aunt
+      Hedwig's constant cheeriness. All day long her laugh sounded happily
+      through the house, or her voice went blithely in happy talk, or, failing
+      anybody to talk to, trilled out some scrap of a sweet old German song. The
+      two apprentices and the young man who drove the bread-wagon of course were
+      wildly and desperately in love with her&mdash;a tender passion that they
+      dared not disclose to its object, but that they frequently and boastingly
+      aired to each other. Naturally these interchanges of confidence were apt
+      to be somewhat tempestuous. As the result of one of them, when the elder
+      apprentice had declared that Minna's beautiful brown hair was finer than
+      any wig in the window of the hair-dresser on the west side of the square,
+      and that she had given him a lock of it; and when the young man who drove
+      the bread-wagon (he was a profane young man) had declared that it was a
+      verdammter sight finer than any wig, and that she hadn't&mdash;the elder
+      apprentice got a dreadful black eye, and the younger apprentice was almost
+      smothered in the dough-trough, and the young man who drove the bread-wagon
+      had his head broken with the peel that was broken over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img src="images/214.jpg" alt="Almost Smothered in the Dough-trough 214 "
+      width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Hedwig did not need to be told, nor did Minna, the little jade, the
+      cause of this direful combat; and both of these amiable women thought
+      Gottlieb very hard-hearted because he charged the broken peel&mdash;it was
+      a new one&mdash;and the considerable amount of dough that was wasted by
+      sticking to the younger apprentice's person, against the wages of the
+      three combatants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This reference to the apprentices and to the wagon shows that Gottlieb's
+      bakery no longer was a small bakery, but a large one. In the making of
+      lebkuchen, it is true, he had not prospered; but in all other ways he had
+      prospered amazingly. From Avenue A over to the East River, and from far
+      below Tompkins Square clear away to the upper regions of Lexington Avenue,
+      the young man who drove the bread-wagon rattled along every morning as
+      hard as ever he could go, and he vowed and declared, this young man did,
+      that nothing but his love for Minna kept him in a place where all the year
+      round he was compelled in every single day to do the work of two.
+      Meanwhile the little shop on East Fourth Street had been abandoned for a
+      bigger shop, and this, in turn, for one still bigger&mdash;quite a palace
+      of a shop, with plate-glass windows&mdash;on Avenue B. It was here,
+      beginning in a modest way with a couple of tables whereat chance-hungry
+      people might sit while they ate zwieback or a thick slice of hearty
+      pumpernickel and drank a glass of milk, that a restaurant was established
+      as a tender to the bakery. It did not set out to be a large restaurant,
+      and, in fact, never became one. In the back part of the shop were a dozen
+      tables, covered with oil-cloth and decorated with red napkins, and at
+      these tables, under the especial direction of Aunt Hedwig, who was a
+      culinary genius, was served a limited, but from a German stand-point most
+      toothsome, bill of fare. There was Hasenpfeffer mit Spätzle, and
+      Sauerbraten mit Kartoffelklösse, and Rindfleisch mit Meerrettig, and
+      Bratwurst mit Rothkraut; and Aunt Hedwig made delicious coffee, and the
+      bakery of course provided all manner of sweet cakes. In the summer-time
+      they did a famous business in ice-cream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the plate-glass windows beneath the sweeping curve of white letters in
+      which the name of the owner of the bakery was set forth was added in
+      smaller letters the words "Café Nürnberger." Gottlieb and Aunt Hedwig and
+      the man who made the sign (this last, however, for the venal reason that
+      more letters would be required) had stood out stoutly for the honest
+      German "Kaffehaus;" but Minna, whose tastes were refined, had insisted
+      upon the use of the French word: there was more style about it, she said.
+      And this was a case in which style was wedded to substantial excellence.
+      What with the good things which Gottlieb baked and the good things which
+      Aunt Hedwig cooked, the Café Nürnberger presently acquired a somewhat
+      enviable reputation. It became even a resort of the aristocracy, in this
+      case represented by the dwellers in the handsome houses on the eastern and
+      northern sides of Tompkins Square. Of winter evenings, when bright
+      gas-light and a big glowing stove made the restaurant a very cozy place
+      indeed, large parties of these aristocrats would drop in on their way home
+      from the Thalia Theatre, and would stuff themselves with Hasenpfeffer and
+      Sauerbraten and Kartoffelklösse, and would swig Aunt Hedwig's strong
+      coffee (out of cups big enough and thick enough to have served as shells
+      and been fired from a mortar), until it would seem as though they must
+      certainly crack their aristocratic skins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altogether, Gottlieb was in a flourishing line of business; and but for
+      the deep sorrow that time never wholly could heal, and but for the
+      continued failure of his attempts to make a really excellent lebkuchen, he
+      would have been a very happy man. By this time he had come to be a baker
+      of ease. The hard part of the work was done by the apprentices, and the
+      morning delivery of bread was attended to by the young man who drove the
+      bread-wagon. In the summer-time he would take Minna and Aunt Hedwig,
+      always accompanied by her faithful Herr Sohnstein, upon beer-drinking
+      expeditions to Guttenberg and other fashionable suburban resorts; and
+      through the cozy winter evenings he smoked his long pipe comfortably in
+      the little room at the back of the shop, where Minna and Aunt Hedwig sat
+      with him, and where Herr Sohnstein, also smoking a long pipe, usually sat
+      with him too. Sometimes Minna would sing sweet German songs to them,
+      accompanying herself very creditably upon a cabinet organ&mdash;for Minna
+      had received not only the substantial education that enabled her to keep
+      the bakery accounts, but also had been instructed in the polite
+      accomplishments of music and the dance. In summer, when expeditions were
+      not on foot, these smoking parties usually were held upon the roof; where
+      Gottlieb had made a garden and grew roses in pots, and even had raised
+      some rare and delicious cauliflowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a pleasant place, that roof, of a warm summer evening, especially
+      when the rising full-moon sent a shimmering path of glory across the
+      rippling waters of the East River, and cast over the bad-smelling region
+      of Hunter's Point a glamour of golden haze that made it seem, oil tanks
+      and all, a bit of fairy-land. At such times, as they sat among the
+      rose-bushes and cauliflowers, Herr Sohnstein not infrequently would stop
+      smoking his long pipe while he slyly squeezed Aunt Hedwig's plump hand.
+      And Gottlieb also would stop smoking, as his thoughts wandered away along
+      that glittering path across the waters, and so up to heaven where his
+      Minna was. And then his thoughts would return to earth, to his little
+      Minna&mdash;for to him she still was but a child&mdash;and he would find
+      his sorrow lessened in thankfulness that, while his greatest treasure was
+      lost to him, this good daughter and so many other good things still were
+      his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the lebkuchen dream of Gottlieb's youth remained unrealized; still
+      unattained was the goal that twenty years before had seemed so near.
+      However, being a stout-hearted baker of the solid Nürnberg strain, he did
+      not at all surrender hope. Each year he added to his stock of honey-cake;
+      and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he still believed
+      that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such honey-cake as
+      would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the Kaiser himself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the affair of the broken peel there was a coolness between Gottlieb
+      and the elder apprentice, which, increasing, led to a positive coldness,
+      and then to a separation. And then it was that Fate put a large spoke in
+      all the wheels which ran in the Café Nürnberg by bringing into Gottlieb's
+      employment a ruddy young Nürnberger, lately come out of that ancient city
+      to America, named Hans Kuhn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not chance that led Hans to earn his living in a bakery when he
+      came to New York. He was a born baker: a baker by choice, by force of
+      natural genius, by hereditary right. Back in the dusk of the Middle Ages,
+      as far as ever the traditions of his family and the records of the Guild
+      of Bakers of Nürnberg ran, all the men of his race had been bakers, and
+      famous ones at that. A cumulative destiny to bake was upon him, and he
+      loved baking with all his heart. It was no desire to abandon his craft
+      that had led him to leave Nürnberg and cross the ocean; rather was he
+      moved by a noble ambition to build up on a broad and sure foundation the
+      noble art of baking in the New World. And it had chanced, moreover, that
+      in the conscription he had drawn an unlucky number.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this young man entered the Café Nürnberg&mdash;being drawn thither by
+      its display of the name of his own native city&mdash;and asked for a job,
+      his air was so frank, his talk about baking so intelligent, that Gottlieb
+      took kindly to him at once; and Minna, sitting demurely at her accounts in
+      the little wire cage over which was a fine tin sign inscribed in golden
+      letters with the word "Cashier," was mightily well pleased, in a demure
+      and proper way, at sight of his ruddy cheeks and bushy shock of
+      light-brown hair and little yellow mustache and honest blue eyes. When he
+      told, in answer to Gottlieb's questions, that he was the grandson of the
+      very baker in Nürnberg whose delicious lebkuchen Gottlieb had eaten when
+      he was a boy, and that a part of his bakerly equipment was the lebkuchen
+      recipe that had come down in his family from the baker genius, his remote
+      ancestor, who had invented it&mdash;well, when he had told this much about
+      himself, it is not surprising that Gottlieb fairly jumped for joy, and
+      engaged him, not as his apprentice, but as his assistant, on the spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was rather dashing to Gottlieb's enthusiasm, however, that his
+      assistant&mdash;thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom&mdash;declined
+      immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that was
+      required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was made&mdash;possibly
+      the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after all. But the Herr
+      Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the neighborhood when the
+      first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on sale. Indeed, as the fame
+      of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the coming of the new baker was
+      accepted by all Germans with discriminating palates as one of the most
+      important events that ever had occurred on the East Side. The work of the
+      young man who drove the bread-wagon was so greatly increased that he
+      organized a strike, uniting in his own person the several functions of
+      strikers, walking delegates, district assembly, and executive committee.
+      And when the strike collapsed&mdash;that is to say, when the young man was
+      discharged summarily&mdash;Gottlieb really did find it necessary to hire
+      two new young men, and to buy an extra horse and wagon. Morally speaking,
+      therefore (although the original young man, who remained out of employment
+      for several weeks, and had a pretty hard time of it, did not think so),
+      the strike was a complete success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of
+      three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with
+      Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her. Nor
+      was it reasonable to suppose that even Minna, who had treated casual
+      apprentices and wagon-driving young men with a seemly scorn, would
+      continue to sit in the seat of the scornful when siege in form was laid to
+      her heart by a properly ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed assistant baker, whose
+      skill was such that he could make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the German
+      portion of the saints in Paradise. At the end of three months the feelings
+      of these young people towards each other were quite clearly defined in
+      their own minds; at the end of six months, as they were sitting together
+      one afternoon in the little back room at a time when the shop happened to
+      be empty, things came to the pleasing crisis that they both for a
+      considerable period had foreseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then, unfortunately, came a storm&mdash;that neither of them had
+      foreseen at all&mdash;that shook the Café Nürnberg to its very
+      foundations!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb was the storm, and he moved over a wide area with great rapidity
+      and violence. He was central, naturally, over Hans and Minna: the first of
+      whom, after being denounced with great energy as a viper who had been
+      warmed to the biting point, was ordered to take himself off without a
+      single instant's delay, and never to darken the doors of the Café Nürnberg
+      again; and the second of whom was declared to be a baby fool, who must be
+      kept locked up in her own third-story back room, and fed on nothing more
+      appetizing than pumpernickel and water until she came to her senses. In
+      the outer edges of the storm the apprentices and the young men who drove
+      the wagons found themselves most hotly involved; and a very violent gust
+      swept down upon Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein, who surely were as
+      innocent in the premises as any two people quite satisfactorily engaged in
+      earnest but somewhat dilatory love-making of their own very well could be.
+      Indeed, this storm was an ill wind that blew a famous blast of luck to
+      Herr Sohnstein: for Aunt Hedwig, being dreadfully upset by her brother's
+      outbreak, went of her own accord to Herr Sohnstein for sympathy and
+      consolation&mdash;and found both in such liberal quantities, and with them
+      such tender pleadings to enter a matrimonial haven where storms should be
+      unknown, that presently, smiling through her tears, she uttered the words
+      of consent for which the excellent notary had waited loyally through more
+      than a dozen weary years. It was Herr Sohn-stein's turn to be upset then.
+      He couldn't believe, until he had soothed himself with a phenomenal number
+      of pipes, that happiness so perfect could be real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly one reason why Gottlieb's storm was so violent was that he could
+      not give any good reason for it. Hans really was a most estimable young
+      man; he came of a good family; as a baker he was nothing short of a
+      genius. All this Gottlieb knew, and all this he frequently had said to
+      Aunt Hedwig and to Herr Sohnstein, and, worst of all, to Minna. As each of
+      these persons now pointed out to him, in order to be consistent in his new
+      position he must eat a great many of his own words; and he would have
+      essayed this indigestible banquet willingly had he been convinced that
+      thus he really could have proved that Hans was a viper and all the other
+      unpleasant things which he had called him in his wrath. In truth, Gottlieb
+      was, and in the depths of his heart he knew that he was, neither more nor
+      less than a dog in the manger. His feeling simply was that Minna was his
+      Minna, and that neither Hans nor anybody else had any right to her. This
+      was not a position that admitted of logical defence; but it was one that
+      he could be ugly and stick to: which was precisely what he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Minna did not remain long a prisoner in her own room, feeding upon
+      pumpernickel and water and bitter thoughts. Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein
+      succeeded in putting a stop to that cruelty. And these elderly lovers,
+      whose fresh love had made them of a sudden as young as Minna herself, and
+      had filled thera with a warm sympathy for her, laid their heads together
+      and sought earnestly to circumvent in her interest her father's stern
+      decree. It was a joy to see this picture, in the little room back of the
+      shop, of middle-aged love-making; and it was a little startling to find
+      how the new youth that their love had given them had filled them with a
+      quite extravagantly youthful recklessness. Herr Sohnstein, who was well
+      known as a grave, sedate, and unusually cautious notary, seriously
+      suggested (though he did not explain exactly how this would do it) that
+      they should make an effort to bring Gottlieb to terms by burning down the
+      bakery. And Aunt Hedwig, whose prudent temperament was sufficiently
+      disclosed in the fact that she had hesitated in the matter of her own love
+      affair for upward of a dozen years, not less seriously advanced the
+      proposition that they all should elope from the Café Nürnberg and set up a
+      rival establishment! Herr Sohnstein did not make any audible comment upon
+      this violent proposal of Aunt Hedwig's, but it evidently put an idea into
+      his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Gottlieb happened to be walking along the south side of Tompkins
+      Square, a fortnight or so after the tempest, he found his steps arrested
+      by a great sign that lay face downward on trestles across the sidewalk, in
+      readiness for hoisting in place upon the front of a smart new shop. Inside
+      the shop he saw painters and paper-hangers at work; and on the large
+      plate-glass window a man was gluing white letters with a dexterous
+      celerity. The letters already in place read "Nürnberger Lebku&mdash;" And
+      as to this legend he saw "chen" added, he rolled out a stout South German
+      oath and stamped upon the ground. But far stronger was the oath that he
+      uttered as the big sign was swung upward, and he read upon it, in golden
+      German letters:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img src="images/226.jpg" alt="Bakery Sign 226 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      That the Recording Angel blotted out with his tears the fines which he was
+      compelled on this occasion to record against Gottlieb Brekel in Heaven's
+      high chancery is highly improbable. In the only known case of such
+      lachrymic erasure the provocation to profanity was a commendable moral
+      motive that was eminently unselfish. But when Gottlieb Brekel swore
+      roundly in his native German all the way from the south-west corner of
+      Tompkins Square to the corner of Third Street and the Bowery; and from
+      that point, when he had transacted his business there, all the way back to
+      the Café Nürnberg in Avenue B, his motives could not in any wise be
+      regarded as moral, and selfishness lay at their very root.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb already found himself involved in serious difficulties with the
+      many customers who bought his lebkuchen; for with the departure of Hans he
+      had been compelled to fall back upon his own resources, and with the most
+      lamentable results. Great quantities of his first baking were returned to
+      him, with comments in both High German and Low German of a very
+      uncomplimentary sort. His second baking&mdash;saving the relatively
+      inconsiderable quantities consumed by the omnivorous children of St.
+      Bridget's School&mdash;simply remained upon his hands unsold. And now, to
+      make his humiliation the more complete, here was his discharged assistant
+      setting up as his rival; and with every probability that the attempted
+      rivalry would be crowned with success. Really there was something,
+      perhaps, to be said in palliation of Gottlieb's profanity after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he told at home that evening of Hans Kuhn's upstart pretensions, his
+      statements were received with an ominous silence. Aunt Hedwig only coughed
+      slightly, and continued her knitting with more than usual energy. Herr
+      Sohnstein only moved a little in his chair and puffed a little harder than
+      usual at his pipe. Minna, who was in her wire cage in the shop settling
+      her cash, only bent more intently over her books. But when Gottlieb went a
+      step further and said, looking very keenly at Herr Sohnstein as he said
+      it, that some great rascal must have lent Hans the money to make his fine
+      start, Aunt Hedwig at once bristled up and said with emphasis that
+      rascals, neither great nor small, were in the habit of lending their money
+      to deserving young men; and Herr Sohnstein, a little sheepishly perhaps,
+      and mumbling a little in his gray mustache, ventured the statement that
+      this was a free country already, and people living in it were at liberty
+      to lend their money to whom they pleased; and Minna, looking up from her
+      books&mdash;Gottlieb's back was turned towards her&mdash;blew a most
+      unfilial kiss from the tips of her chubby fingers to Herr Sohnstein right
+      over her father's shoulder. All of which goes to show that something very
+      like open war had broken out in the Café Nürnberg, and that the once
+      united family dwelling therein was fairly divided into rival camps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb's dreary case was made a little less dreary when he found that
+      the lebkuchen which Hans produced in his fine new bakery was distinctly an
+      inferior article; not much better, in fact, than Gottlieb's own. To any
+      intelligent baker the reason for this was obvious: Hans was making his
+      lebkuchen with new honey-cake. Thus made, even by the best of recipes, it
+      could not be anything but a failure. Gottlieb gave a long sigh of relief
+      as he realized this comforting fact, and at the same time thought of his
+      own great store of honey-pots&mdash;there were hundreds of them now&mdash;all
+      ready and waiting to his hand. But his feeling of satisfaction passed
+      quickly to one of impotent rage as he recognized his own powerlessness,
+      for all his wealth of honey-pots, to make lebkuchen which would be eaten
+      by anybody but the tough-palated children from St. Bridget's School. He
+      was alone, smoking, in the little room back of the shop as this bitter
+      thought came to him; in his rage he struck the table beside him a blow so
+      sounding that the family cat, peacefully slumbering behind the stove,
+      sprang up with a yell of terror and made but two jumps to the open door.
+      Coming on top of all his other trials&mdash;the revolt of his own little
+      Minna, the defection of Aunt Hedwig, and the almost open enmity of Herr
+      Sohnstein&mdash;this compulsory surrender of all his hope of honest fame
+      was indeed a deadly blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb smoked on in sullen anger; his heart torn and tortured, and his
+      mind filled with a confusion of bitter evil thoughts. And presently&mdash;for
+      the devil is at every man's elbow, ready to take advantage of any sudden
+      weakness, or turn to his own purposes any too great strength&mdash;these
+      thoughts grew more evil and more clear: until they fairly resolved
+      themselves into the determination to steal from Hans the recipe for making
+      lebkuchen, and so to crush completely his rival and at the same time to
+      make certain his own fortune and fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the devil did not plant the notion of theft in Gottlieb's mind
+      in this bald fashion; for the devil is a most considerate person, and ever
+      shows a courteous disposition to spare the feelings of those whom he would
+      lead into sin. No: the temptation that he suggested was the subtle and
+      ingenious one that Gottlieb should proceed to recover his own stolen
+      property! His logic was admirable: Hans had been Gottlieb's assistant; and
+      as such Gottlieb had owned him and his recipe as well. When Hans went away
+      and took the recipe with him, he took that which still belonged to his
+      master. Therefore, triumphantly argued the devil, Gottlieb had a perfect
+      right to regain the recipe either by fair means or by foul. And finally,
+      as a bit of supplementary devil-logic, the thought was suggested that
+      inasmuch as Hans certainly must know the recipe by heart, the mere loss of
+      the paper on which it was written would not be any real loss to him at
+      all! It is only fair to Gottlieb's good angel to state that during this
+      able presentment of the wrong side of the case he did venture to hint once
+      or twice&mdash;in the feeble, perfunctory sort of way that unfortunately
+      seems to be characteristic of good angels when their services really are
+      most urgently required&mdash;that the whole matter might be compromised
+      satisfactorily to all the parties in interest by permitting Hans to marry
+      Minna, and by then taking him into partnership in the bakery. And it is
+      only just to Gottlieb to state that to these fainthearted suggestions of
+      his good angel he did not give one moment's heed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the devil is a thorough-going sort of a person, and having planted the
+      evil wish in Gottlieb's soul he lost no time in opening to him an evil way
+      to its accomplishment. When Hans, a stranger in New York, had come to work
+      at the Cafe Nürnberg, Gottlieb had commended him to the good graces of a
+      friend of his, a highly respectable little round Brunswicker widow who let
+      lodgings, and in the comfortable quarters thus provided for him Hans ever
+      since had remained. In this same house lodged also one of Gottlieb's
+      apprentices&mdash;a loose young fellow, for whose proper regulation the
+      widow more than once had been compelled to seek his master's counsel and
+      aid. In this combination of circumstances, to which the devil now directed
+      his attention, Gottlieb saw his opportunity. It was easy to make the widow
+      believe that the loose young apprentice had taken the short step from
+      looseness to crime, and that a suspicion of theft rested upon him so
+      heavily as to justify the searching of his room; it was easy to make the
+      widow keep guard below while Gottlieb searched; and it was very easy then
+      to search, not for imaginary stolen goods in the chest of the apprentice,
+      but for that which he himself wanted to steal from the chest of Hans Kuhn.
+      As to opening the chest there was no difficulty at all. Gottlieb had half
+      a dozen Nürnberg locks in his house, and he had counted, as the event
+      proved correctly, upon making the key of one of these locks serve his
+      turn. And in the chest, without any trouble at all, he found a leather
+      wallet, and in the wallet the precious recipe&mdash;written on parchment
+      in old High German that he found very difficult to read, and dated in
+      Nürnberg in the year 1603. Gottlieb was pale as death as he went
+      down-stairs to the widow; and his teeth fairly chattered as he told her
+      that he had made a mistake. He tried to say that the apprentice was not a
+      thief&mdash;but the word <i>dieb</i> somehow stuck in his throat. Keen
+      chills penetrated him as he almost ran through the streets to his home.
+      For the devil, who heretofore had been in front of him and had only
+      beckoned, now was behind him and was driving him with a right goodwill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he entered the room at the back of the shop, where Minna was sewing,
+      and where Herr Sohnstein, with his arm comfortably around Aunt Hedwig's
+      waist, was smoking his long pipe, he created a stir of genuine alarm. As
+      Aunt Hedwig very truly said, he looked as though he had seen a ghost. Herr
+      Sohnstein, of a more practical turn of mind, asked him if he had been
+      knocked down and robbed; and the word <i>beraubt</i> grated most harshly
+      upon Gottlieb's ears. But what cut him most of all was the way in which
+      Minna&mdash;forgetting all his late unkind-ness at sight of his pale,
+      frightened face&mdash;sprang to him with open arms, and with all the old
+      love in her voice asked him to tell her what had gone wrong. Under these
+      favoring conditions, Gottlieb's good angel bestirred himself somewhat more
+      vigorously, and for a moment it seemed not impossible that right might
+      triumph over wrong. But the devil bustled promptly upon the scene, and of
+      course had things all his own way again in a moment. It certainly is most
+      unfortunate that good angels, as a rule, are so weak in their angelic
+      knees!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb pushed Minna away from him roughly; addressed to Aunt Hedwig the
+      impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a surly
+      tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful in the
+      vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then, having planted these barbed arrows
+      in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his friend, sought the
+      retirement of his own upper room. As he left them, Minna buried her face
+      in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also
+      cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside for the moment his pipe, put his
+      arms protectingly around them both. They all were very miserable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the upper room, where the air seemed so stifling that he had to open
+      the window wide in order to breathe, Gottlieb was very miserable too. He
+      was fleeing into Tarshish, this temporarily wicked baker; and just as fell
+      out in the case of that other one who fled to Tarshish, his flight was a
+      failure: for this little world of ours is far too small to give any one a
+      chance to run away from committed sin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb tried to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same time
+      tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his attempt
+      was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the brown
+      parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High German
+      phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing of it at
+      all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never would be able
+      to make anything of it&mdash;that, without losing any part of the penalty
+      justly attendant upon his crime, the crime itself might prove to be, so
+      far as the practical benefit that he sought was concerned, absolutely
+      futile. As this dreadful possibility arose before his mind a faintness and
+      giddiness came over him. The room seemed to be whirling around him; life
+      seemed to be slipping away from him; there was a strange, horrible ringing
+      in his ears. He leaned forward over the table at which he was sitting and
+      buried his face in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, possibly, Gottlieb fell asleep, though of this he never felt really
+      sure. What is quite certain is that he saw, as clearly as he ever saw her
+      in life, his dear dead Minna; but with a face so sad, so reproachful, so
+      full of piteous entreaty, that his blood seemed to stand still, while a
+      consuming coldness settled upon his heart. He struggled to speak with her,
+      to assure her that he would repair the evil that he had done, to plead for
+      forgiveness; but, for all his striving, no other words would come to his
+      lips save those which a little while before he had spoken so roughly to
+      poor Aunt Hedwig: "The only people who see ghosts are women and fools!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, of a sudden, he found himself still seated at the table, the
+      brown parchment still spread out before him, and the faint light of early
+      morning breaking into the room. The window was wide open, as he had left
+      it, and he was chilled to the marrow; he had a shocking cold in the head;
+      there were rheumatic twinges in all his joints as he arose. What with the
+      physical misery arising from these causes, and the moral misery arising
+      from his sense of committed sin, he was in about as desperately bad a
+      humor with himself as a man could be. He was in no mood to make another
+      effort to read the difficult German of the recipe, the cause of all his
+      troubles. The sight of it pained him, and he thrust it hurriedly into an
+      old desk in which were stored (and these also were a source of pain to
+      him) several generations of uncollected bills&mdash;practical proofs that
+      the adage in regard to the impossibility of simultaneously possessing
+      cakes and pennies does not always hold good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He locked the desk and put the key in his pocket; and then returned the
+      key to the lock and left it there, as the thought occurred to him that the
+      locking of this desk, that never in all the years that he had owned it had
+      been locked before, might arouse suspicion. It seemed most natural to
+      Gottlieb that his actions should be regarded with suspicion; he had a
+      feeling that already his crime must be known to half the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before night it certainly is true that the one person most deeply
+      interested in the discovery and punishment of Gottlieb's crime&mdash;that
+      is to say, Hans Kuhn&mdash;did know all about it; which fact would seem
+      surprising, considering how skilfully Gottlieb had gone about his work,
+      were it not remembered that his unwitting accessory had been the little
+      round Brunswicker widow, and were it not known that little round widows&mdash;Brunswick
+      born or born elsewhere&mdash;as a class are incapable of keeping a secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This excellent woman, to do her justice, had followed Gottlieb's orders to
+      the letter. He had warned her not to tell the loose apprentice that his
+      chest had been searched; and, so far as that apprentice was concerned,
+      wild horses might have been employed to drag that little round widow to
+      pieces&mdash;at least she might have permitted the wild horses to be
+      hitched up to her&mdash;before ever an indiscreet word would have passed
+      her lips. But when Hans Kuhn, for whom she entertained a high respect, and
+      for whom she had also that warmly friendly feeling which trig middle-aged
+      widows not seldom manifest towards good-looking young men, came to her in
+      a fine state of wrath, and told her that his chest had been ransacked (he
+      did not tell her of his loss, for he had not himself observed it), she did
+      not consider that she violated any confidence in telling him everything
+      that had occurred. It was all a mistake, she said; the Herr Brekel had
+      gone into the wrong room; she must set the matter right at once; that bad
+      young man might be a thief, after all. Hans felt a cold thrill run through
+      him at the widow's words. But he controlled himself so well that she did
+      not suspect his inward perturbation; and she accepted in as good faith his
+      offer to inform the Herr Brekel of his error as she did, a day later, his
+      assurance that the matter had been satisfactorily adjusted, and that the
+      innocence of the apprentice had been proved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Hans returned to his violated chest, and found that the dread
+      which had assailed his soul was founded in substantial truth&mdash;the
+      recipe was gone! In itself the loss of the recipe was no very great
+      matter, for he knew it by heart; but that Gottlieb&mdash;who had also a
+      cellar full of rich old honey-cake&mdash;should have gained possession of
+      it was a desperate matter indeed. Here instantly was an end to the hope of
+      successful rivalry that Hans had cherished; and with the wreck of his luck
+      in trade, as it seemed to him in the first shock of his misfortune, away
+      in fragments to the four winds of heaven was scattered every vestige of
+      probability that he would have luck in love. Being so suddenly confronted
+      with a compound catastrophe so overwhelming, even a bolder baker than Hans
+      Kuhn very well might have been for a time aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as his wits slowly came together again Hans perceived that the game
+      was not by any means lost, after all; on the contrary, it looked very much
+      as though he had it pretty well in his own hands. Gottlieb was a thief,
+      and all that was needed to complete the chain of evidence against him was
+      his first baking of lebkuchen; for that as clearly would prove him to be
+      in possession of the stolen recipe as what the widow could tell would
+      prove that he had created for himself an opportunity to steal it. The most
+      agreeable way of winning a father-in-law is not by force of threatening to
+      hale him to a police court, but it is better to win him that way than not
+      to win him at all, Hans thought; and he thought also that this was one of
+      the occasions when it was quite justifiable to fight the devil with fire.
+      So his spirits rose, and now he longed for, as eagerly as in the first
+      moments of his loss he had dreaded, the production of such lebkuchen at
+      the Café Nürnberg as would prove the proprietor of that highly respectable
+      establishment to be neither more nor less than a robber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hans was both annoyed and surprised as time passed on and the "cakes
+      succulent but damnatory" were not forthcoming from Gottlieb's oven. He
+      himself went on making unsatisfactory lebkuchen of bad materials by a good
+      formula, and Gottlieb continued to make unsatisfactory lebkuchen by a bad
+      formula of the best materials. Orthodox German palates found nothing to
+      commend and much to reprobate in both results. This was the situation for
+      several weeks. Hans could not understand it at all. The subject was a
+      delicate one to broach to Minna during their short but blissful interviews
+      about dusk in the central fastnesses of Tompkins Square, at which
+      interviews Aunt Hedwig winked and Herr Sohnstein openly connived by
+      keeping watch for them against Gottlieb's possible appearance; for Hans
+      had determined that until he had positive proof to go upon he would keep
+      secret, and most of all from Minna, the dreadful fact of her father's
+      crime. Therefore did he remain in a state of very harrowing uncertainty,
+      with his plan of campaign completely brought to a stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During this period a heavy cloud hung over the Café Nürnberg. Gottlieb
+      came fitfully to his meals; and when he did come, he ate almost nothing.
+      Each day he grew more and more morose; each night, when poor Aunt Hedwig
+      was not kept awake by her own sorrowful thoughts, her slumbers were,
+      broken by hearing her brother pacing heavily the floor of the adjoining
+      room. In some sort he made up for his loss of sleep at night by sleeping
+      of an evening in the little room back of the shop, falling into restless
+      naps (when he should have been restfully smoking his long pipe), from
+      which he would wake with a start and sometimes with a cry of alarm, and
+      would dart furtive horrified glances at Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein:
+      who were doing nothing of a horrifying nature, only sitting cozily close
+      together, more or less enfolded in each other's arms. It was a little
+      inconsiderate on the part of the lovers, and very-hard on Minna, this
+      extremely open love-making; for Minna's love-making necessarily was by
+      fitful snatches amid the bleak desolations of Tompkins Square. They would
+      try to comfort each other, she and Hans, as they stood cheerlessly under
+      the chill lee of the music stand; but their outlook was a dreary one, and
+      their efforts in this direction were not crowned with any great success.
+      Sometimes as Minna came home again along the west side of the square, and
+      saw in Spengler's window the wreaths of highly-artificial immortelles with
+      the word "Ruhe" upon them in vivid purple letters, she fairly would fall
+      to crying over the thought that until she should become a fit subject for
+      such a wreath there was small chance that any real rest would be hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, all this is aside from Gottlieb's horrified looks as he waked
+      from his troubled slumbers&mdash;looks which would disappear as he became
+      thoroughly aroused, but only to return again after his next uneasy nap.
+      One day he startled Aunt Hedwig by asking her if she believed in ghosts.
+      Remembering his severe words in condemnation of her casual reference to
+      these supernatural beings, it was with some hesitation that she replied
+      that she did. Still more to her surprise, Gottlieb turned away from her
+      hurriedly, yet not so hurriedly but that she saw a strange, scared look
+      upon his face, and in a low and trembling voice replied: "And so do I!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the fact may as well be admitted frankly that a ghost was the
+      disturbing element that was making Gottlieb's life go wrong; that, as
+      there seemed to be every reason to believe, was hurrying him towards the
+      grave: for a middle-aged German who refuses to eat, whose regular sleep
+      forsakes him, and who actually gives up smoking, naturally cannot be
+      expected to remain long in this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the ghost of his dead wife. At first she appeared to him only in
+      his dreams, standing beside the desk in which he had placed the stolen
+      recipe for making lebkuchen, and holding down the lid of that desk with a
+      firm but diaphanous white hand. Presently she appeared to him quite as
+      clearly in his waking hours. Her face still wore an expression at once
+      tender and reproachful; but every day the look of tenderness diminished,
+      while the look of reproach grew stronger and more stern. Each time that he
+      sought to open the desk that he might take thence the recipe and make his
+      crime a practical business success, the figure assumed an air so terribly
+      menacing that his heart failed him, and he gave over the attempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, then, was the all-sufficient reason why the good lebkuchen that
+      would have proved Gottlieb a thief was not for sale at the Café Nürenburg;
+      and this was the reason why Gottlieb himself, broken down by loss of food
+      and sleep and by the nervous wear and tear incident to forced
+      companionship with an angry ghost, was drawing each day nearer and nearer
+      to that dark portal through which bakers and all other people pass hence
+      into the shadowy region whence there is no return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb Brekel never had been an especially pious man. As became a
+      reputable German citizen, he had paid regularly the rent of a pew in the
+      Church of the Redemptorist Fathers in Third Street; but, excepting on such
+      high feasts as Christmas and Easter, he usually had been content to occupy
+      it and to discharge his religious duties at large vicariously. Aunt
+      Hed-wig's bonnet invariably was the most brilliantly conspicuous feature
+      of the entire congregation, just as the prettiest face in the entire
+      congregation invariably was Minna's. But now that Gottlieb was confronted
+      with a spiritual difficulty, it occurred to him that he might
+      advantageously resort in his extremity to spiritual aid. He had no very
+      clear notion how the aid would be given; he was not even clear as to how
+      he ought to set about asking for it; and he was troubled by the conviction
+      that in order to obtain it he must not only repent of his sin, but must
+      make atonement by restitution&mdash;a possibility (for the devil still had
+      a good grip upon him) that made him hesitate a long while before he set
+      about purchasing ease for his conscience at so heavy a material cost.
+      However, his good angel at last managed to pluck up some courage&mdash;it
+      was high time&mdash;and, strengthened by this tardily given assistance, he
+      betook himself in search of consolation within church walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Church of the Redemptorist Fathers is a very beautiful church, and at
+      all times&mdash;save through the watches of the night and through one
+      mid-day hour&mdash;its doors stand hospitably open, silently inviting poor
+      sinners, weary and heavy laden with their sins, to enter into the calm of
+      its quiet holiness and there find rest. Tall, slender pillars uphold its
+      vaulted roof, in the groinings of which lurk mysterious shadows. Below, a
+      warm, rich light comes through the stained-glass windows: whereon are
+      pictured the blessed St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, founder of the
+      Redemptorist Congregation, blessedly instructing the chubby-faced
+      choristers; and the Venerable Clement Hofbauer, "primus in Germania" of
+      the Redemptorists, all in his black gown, kneeling, praying no doubt for
+      the outcast German souls for the saving of which he worked so hard and so
+      well; and (a picture that Minna dearly loved) St. Joseph and the sweet
+      Virgin and the little Christ-child fleeing together through the desert
+      from the wrath of the Judean king. And ranged around the walls on perches
+      high aloft are statues of various minor saints and of the Twelve Apostles;
+      of which Minna's favorite was the Apostle Matthias, because this saint,
+      with his high forehead tending towards baldness, and his long gray beard
+      and gray hair, and his kindly face, and even the axe in his hand (that was
+      not unlike a baker's peel), made her think always of her dear father. The
+      pew that Gottlieb paid for so regularly, and so irregularly occupied, was
+      just beneath the statue of this saint; which, however, gave Minna less
+      pleasure than would have been hers had not the next saint in the row been
+      the Apostle Simon with his dreadful saw. It must have hurt so horribly to
+      be sawed in two, she thought. In the dusky depths of the great chancel
+      gleamed the white marble of the beautiful altar, guarded by St. Peter with
+      his keys and St. Paul with his naked two-edged sword; and above the altar
+      was the dead Christ on Calvary, with His desolate mother and the
+      despairing Magdalene and St. John the divine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into this beautiful church it was that Gottlieb, led thither by his good
+      angel, entered; and the devil&mdash;raging in the terrible but impotent
+      fashion that is habitual with devils when they see slipping away from
+      their snares the souls which they thought to win to wickedness&mdash;of
+      course was forced to remain outside. But what feelings of keen repentance
+      filled this poor sinning baker's heart within that holy place, what good
+      resolves came to him, what light and refreshment irradiated and cheered
+      his darkened, harried soul&mdash;all these are things which better may be
+      suggested here than written out in full. For these things are so real, so
+      sacred, and so beautiful with a heavenly beauty, that they may not lightly
+      be used for decorative purposes in mere romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let it suffice, then, to tell&mdash;for so is our poor human stuff put
+      together that trivial commonplace facts often exhibit most searchingly the
+      changes for good or for evil which have come to pass in our inmost souls&mdash;that
+      Gottlieb, on returning to the Café Nürnberg, ate a prodigious dinner; and
+      after his dinner, for the first time in a fortnight, smoked a thoroughly
+      refreshing pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over his dinner and his pipe he was silent, manifesting, however, a sort
+      of sheepishness and constraint that were not less strange in the eyes of
+      Aunt Hedwig and Minna than was the sudden revival of his interest in
+      tobacco and food. As he smoked, a pleasant thought came to him. When he
+      had knocked the ashes from his pipe he ordered Minna, surlily, to bring
+      him his hat and coat; he must pay a visit to that rascal Sohnstein, he
+      said; and so went out. He left the two women lost in wonder; and Aunt
+      Hed-wig, because of his characterization of her dear Sohnstein as a
+      rascal, disposed to weep. And yet, somehow, they both felt that the storm
+      was breaking, and that clear weather was at hand. There was nobody in the
+      shop just then; and the two, standing behind the rampart of freshly-baked
+      cakes that was high heaped up upon the counter, embraced each other and
+      mingled tears, which they knew&mdash;by reason of the womanly instinct
+      that was in them&mdash;were tears of joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that very evening the prophecy of happiness that was in their joyful
+      sorrow was happily fulfilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb did not return to the Café Nürnberg until after nine o'clock.
+      With him came Herr Sohnstein. They both were very grave and silent, yet
+      both exhibited a most curious twinklesomeness in their eyes. Neither Aunt
+      Hedwig nor Minna could make anything of their strange mood; and Aunt
+      Hedwig was put to her trumps completely when she was sure that she saw her
+      brother&mdash;who was whispering to Herr Sohnstein behind the pie-counter&mdash;poke
+      the notary in the ribs. As to the joint chuckle at that moment of those
+      two mysterious men there could be no doubt; she heard it distinctly! 14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still further to Aunt Hedwig's surprise, for the Café Nürnberg never was
+      closed before ten o'clock, and usually remained open much later, Gottlieb
+      himself began to put up the shutters; and when this work was finished he
+      came back into the shop and locked behind him the double front door.
+      Almost as he turned the key there was a knock outside, as though somebody
+      actually had been waiting in the street for the signal that the closing of
+      the shutters gave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Another rascal would come in already, Sohn-stein," said Gottlieb,
+      gruffly. "Open for him, but lock the door again. I must go up-stairs."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gottlieb, with a queer smile upon his face, left the little back room; and
+      a moment later Minna uttered a cry of surprise, as Herr Sohnstein unlocked
+      the door and her own Hans entered the shop. What, she thought, could all
+      these wonders mean? As for Aunt Hedwig, she had sunk down into her big
+      armchair and her bright black eyes seemed to be fairly starting from her
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Sohnstein locked the door again, as he had been ordered to do, and
+      then brought Hans through the shop and into the little back room. Hans
+      evidently was not a party to the mystery, whatever the mystery might be.
+      He looked at Minna as wonderingly as she looked at him, and he was
+      distressingly ill at ease. But there was no time for either of them to ask
+      questions, for as Hans entered the room from the shop, Gottlieb returned
+      to it. In his hand Gottlieb held the brown old parchment on which the
+      lebkuchen recipe was written; the smile had left his face; he was very
+      pale. For a moment there was an awkward pause. Then Gottlieb, trembling a
+      little as he walked, crossed the room to where Hans stood and placed the
+      parchment in his hands. And it was in a trembling, broken voice that
+      Gottlieb said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hans, a most wicked man have I been. But my dead Minna has helped me, and
+      here I give again to thee what I stole from thy chest&mdash;I who was a
+      robber." Then Gottlieb covered his face with his hands, and presently each
+      of his bony knuckles sparkled with a pendant tear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My own dear father!" said Minna; and her arms were around him, and her
+      head was pressed close upon his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My own good brother, thou couldst not be a thief!" said Aunt Hedwig; and,
+      so saying, clasped her stout arms around them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My good old friend! all now is right again," said Herr Sohnstein; who
+      then affected to put his arms around the three, but really embraced only
+      Aunt Hedwig. However, there was quite enough of Aunt Hedwig to fill even
+      Herr Sohnstein's long arms; and he made the average of his one-third of an
+      embrace all right by bestowing it with a threefold energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The position of Hans as he regarded this affectionately writhing group
+      (that was not unsuggestive of the Laöcoon: with a new motive, a fourth
+      figure, a commendable addition of draperies, and a conspicuous lack of
+      serpents) would have been awkward under any circumstances; and as the
+      circumstances were sufficiently awkward to begin with, he was very much
+      embarrassed indeed. To Aunt Hed-wig's credit be it said that she was the
+      first (after Minna, of course; and Minna could not properly act in the
+      premises) to perceive his forsaken condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come, Hans," said the good Hedwig, her voice shaken by emotion and the
+      tightness of Herr Sohn-stein's grip about her waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Thou hadst better come, Hans," added Herr Sohnstein, jollily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "<i>Wilt</i> thou come, Hans&mdash;and forgive me?" Gottlieb asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not until Minna said, very faintly, yet with a heavenly
+      sweetness in her voice: "Thou <i>mayst</i> come, Hans!" that Hans actually
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img src="images/248.jpg" alt="Thou Mayst Come, Hans 248 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      And then for a while there was such hearty embracing of as much of the
+      other four as each of them could grasp that the like of it all for
+      good-will and lovingness never had been seen in a bakery before. And
+      Gottlieb's good angel exulted greatly; and the devil, who had lingered
+      about the premises in the hope that even at the eleventh hour the powers
+      of evil might get the better of the powers of good, acknowledged his
+      defeat with a howl of baffled rage: and then fled away in a blue flame and
+      a flash of lightning that made the waters of the East River (which stream
+      he was compelled to wade, thanks to General Newton, who took away his
+      stepping-stones) fairly hiss and bubble. And never did he dare to show so
+      much as the end of his wicked nose in the Café Nürnberg again!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But thou wilt not take from me this little one, my daughter, Hans?"
+      Gottlieb asked, when they had somewhat disentangled themselves. "Thou wilt
+      come and live with us, and be my partner, and together we will make the
+      good lebkuchen once more. Is it not so?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hans found this a trying question. He looked at Herr Sohnstein,
+      doubtfully. "Ah," said Herr Sohnstein, "thou meanest that a very
+      hard-hearted, money-lending man has hired a shop for thee and has made it
+      the most splendid bakery and the finest restaurant on all the East Side,
+      eh? And thou art afraid that this man, this old miser man, will keep thee
+      to thy bargainings, already?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hans gave a deprecating nod of assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, my boy Hans," Herr Sohnstein continued, with great good-humor, and
+      sliding his arm well around Aunt Hedwig's generous waist again as he spoke&mdash;"well,
+      my boy Hans, let me tell thee that that bad old miser man is not one-half
+      so bad as thou wouldst think. Dost thou remember that when he had a garden
+      made upon the roof of that fine bakery, and thou toldst to him that to
+      make a garden there was to waste his money, what he said? Did he not say
+      that if he made the garden God would send the flowers? And when that fine
+      sign was made with 'Nürnberger Bäkerei' upon it, and thou toldst to him
+      that to take that name of Nürnberg was not fair to his old friend, did he
+      not tell thee that with his old friend he would settle that matter so that
+      there should be no broken bones? For did he not know already that for
+      these five years past it has been the wish of Gottlieb's heart to leave
+      this old bakery&mdash;where his lease ends this very coming May&mdash;and
+      to have just such a new fine bakery upon the Square as now you two
+      together will have? Ah, this bad old miser man is not afraid but that his
+      miser money will come back to him again; and he is not such a fool but
+      that he had faith in his good friend Gottlieb, and knew that all would end
+      well. And now, truly, all will be happiness: for Gottlieb, who has gained
+      a good son, can spare to me this dear Hed-wig, his sister, and he will
+      come to church with us and see us all married in one bright day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Hedwig looked up into Herr Sohnstein's face as he ended this long
+      speech&mdash;not so fine, perhaps, as some of the speeches which he had
+      delivered in the criminal courts, but much more moving and a great deal
+      more genuine than the very best of them&mdash;and, with her eyes filling
+      with happy tears, said to him: "And it is to thee that we owe it, this
+      happiness!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Herr Sohnstein's face grew grave and his voice grew reverent as he
+      answered: "It is not so, my Hedwig. We owe our happiness to the good God
+      who has taken away the evil that was in our dear Gottlieb's heart." They
+      all were very quiet for a little space, and upon the silence broke the
+      sweet sound of the clock bell in the near-by church-tower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the last stroke had sounded Herr Sohnstein spoke again, and in his
+      customary jolly tone: "As for these young ones here, we will unlock the
+      door and let them walk out and look for a little at the music-stand that
+      they love so well in the Square. And Hedwig shall sit beside me while we
+      smoke our pipes, Gottlieb, eh? It is a long time already, old friend,
+      since thou and I have sat together and smoked our pipes."
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's A Romance Of Tompkins Square, by Thomas A. Janvier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Romance Of Tompkins Square
+       1891
+
+Author: Thomas A. Janvier
+
+Illustrator: W. T. Smedley
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23808]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A ROMANCE OF TOMPKINS SQUARE.
+
+By Thomas A. Janvier
+
+Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Brothers
+
+
+Whether the honey shall be brought to the boiling-point slowly or
+rapidly; whether it shall boil a long time or a short time; when and in
+what quantities the flour shall be added; how long the kneading shall
+last; in what size of earthen pot the dough shall be stored, and what
+manner of cover upon these pots best preserves the dough against the
+assaults of damp and mould; whether the pots shall be half-buried in the
+cool earth of the cellar or ranged on shelves to be freely exposed
+to the cool cellar air--all these several matters are enshrouded in a
+mystery that is penetrated only by the elect few of Nuernberg bakers by
+whom perfect lebkuchen is made. And the same is true of the Brunswick
+bakers, who call this rare compound honigkuchen, and of the makers of
+pferfferkuchen, as it is called by the bakers of Saxony.
+
+Nor does the mystery end here. This first stage in the making of
+lebkuchen is but means to an end, and for the compassing of that
+end--the blending and the baking of the finished and perfect
+honey-cake--each master-baker has his own especial recipe, that has come
+down to him from some ancestral baker of rare parts, or that by his own
+inborn genius has been directly inspired. And so, whether the toothsome
+result be Nuernberger lebkuchen, or Brunsscheiger peppernotte, or Basler
+leckerly, the making of it is a mystery from first to last.
+
+It was because of this mystery that the life of Gottlieb Brekel had been
+imbittered for nearly twenty years--ever since, in fact, his first essay
+in the compounding of Nuernberger lebkuchen had been made. He was but a
+young baker then: now he was an old one, and notwithstanding the guarded
+praise of friends and the partial approval of the public (notably of
+that portion of the public under the age of ten years that attended St.
+Bridget's Parochial School) he full well knew that his efforts through
+all these years to make, in New York, lebkuchen such as he himself had
+eaten when he was a boy, at home in Nuernberg, had been neither more nor
+less than a long series of failures.
+
+In the hopeful days of his apprenticeship all had seemed so easy before
+him. Let him but have a little shop, and then a little capital wherewith
+to lay in his supply of honey, and the thing would be done! He had
+no recipe, it is true; for he was a baker not by heredity, but by
+selection. Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of
+honey-cake making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of
+his own genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen
+so excellent that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem
+tasteless. But these were the bright dreams of youth, which age had
+refused to realize.
+
+In course of time the little shop became an accomplished fact; a very
+little shop it was in East Fourth Street. Capital came more slowly, and
+three several times, when a sum almost sufficient had been saved, was
+it diverted from its destined purpose of buying the honey without which
+Gottlieb could not make even a beginning in his triumphal lebkuchen
+career.
+
+His first accumulation was swept away through the conquest of Ambition
+by Love. In this case Love was personified in one Minna Schaus--who was
+not by any means a typical sturdy German lass, with laughing looks and
+stalwart ways, but a daintily-finished, golden-haired maiden, with soft
+blue eyes full of tenderness, and a gentleness of manner that Gottlieb
+thought--and with more reason than lovers sometimes think things of this
+sort--was very like the manner of an angel. And for love of her Gottlieb
+forgot for a while his high resolves in regard to lebkuchen making;
+and on the altar of his affections--in part to pay for his modest
+wedding-feast, in part to pay for the modest outfit for their
+housekeeping over the bakery--the money laid aside for the filling of
+his honey-pots very willingly was offered up.
+
+A second time were his honey-pots sacrificed, that the coming into
+the world of the little Minna might be made smooth. This, also, was a
+willing sacrifice; though in his heart of hearts Gottlieb felt a twinge
+of regret that his first-born was not a son, to whom the fame and
+fortune incident to the making of perfect lebkuchen might descend.
+But he was a philosopher in his way, and did not suffer himself to be
+seriously disconcerted by an accident that by no means was irreparable.
+As he smoked his long pipe that night, while the bread was baking,
+he said to himself, cheerily: "It is a girl. Yes, that is easy. Girls
+sprout everywhere; they are like grass. But a boy, and a boy who is to
+grow up into such a baker as my boy will be--ah, that is another matter.
+But patience, Gottlieb; all in good time." Then, when his third pipe was
+finished--which was his measure of time for the baking--he fetched out
+the sweet-smelling hot bread from the oven with his long peel, and set
+forth upon his round of delivery. And he whistled a mellow old Nuernberg
+air as he pushed his cart through the streets before him that frosty
+morning, and in his heart he thanked the good God who had sent him
+the blessings of a dear wife and a sweet little daughter and a growing
+trade.
+
+And yet once more were his honey-pots sacrificed, and this time the
+sacrifice was sad indeed. From the day that the little Minna came into
+the world his own Minna, as in a little while was but too plain to
+him, began to make ready to leave it. As the weeks went by, the little
+strength that at first had come to her was lost again; the faint color
+faded from her cheeks, and left them so wan that through the fair skin
+the blue veins showed in most delicate tracery; and as her dear eyes
+ever grew gentler and more loving, the light slowly went out from them.
+So within the year the end came. In that great sorrow Gottlieb forgot
+his ambition, and cared not, when the bills were paid, that his
+honey-pots still remained unfilled. For the care of his home and of
+little Minna his good sister Hedwig came to him. Very drearily, for a
+long while, the work of the bakery went on.
+
+But a strong man, stirred by a strong purpose, does not relinquish
+that purpose lightly; and the one redeeming feature of the life of many
+sorrows which in this world we all are condemned to live is that even
+the bitterest sorrow is softened by time. But for this partial relief
+our race no doubt would have been extinguished ages ago in a madness
+wrought of grief and rage.
+
+Gottlieb's strong purpose was to make the best lebkuchen that baker ever
+baked. After a fashion his sorrow healed, as the flesh heals about a
+bullet that has gone too deep to be extracted by the surgeon's craft,
+and while it was with him always, and not seldom sent through all his
+being thrills of pain, he bore it hidden from the world, and went
+about his work again. Working comforted him. The baking of bread is an
+employment that is at once soothing and sustaining. As a man kneads the
+spongy dough he has good exercise and wholesome time for thought.
+While the baking goes on he may smoke and meditate. The smell of the
+newly-baked bread is a pleasant smell, and brings with it pleasant
+thoughts of many people well nourished in the eating of it. Moreover,
+there is no time in the whole twenty-four hours when a city is so
+innocent, so like the quiet honest country-side, as that time in the
+crisp morning when a baker goes his rounds.
+
+As Gottlieb found himself refreshed and strengthened by these manifold
+good influences of his gentle trade, his burden of sorrow was softened
+to him and made easier to bear. Comforting thoughts of the little
+Minna--growing to be a fine little lass now--stole in upon him, and
+within him the hope arose that she would grow to be like the dear mother
+whom she never had known. So the little fine roots of a new love struck
+down into his sad heart; and presently the sweet plant of love began
+to grow for him again, casting its delicate tendrils strongly about the
+child, who truly was a part of the being about which his earlier and
+stronger love had clung. Yet the love that thus was re-established in
+Gottlieb's breast was far from filling it, and so for ambition there was
+ample room.
+
+[Illustration: Sat beside the oven smoking his second pipe 204]
+
+Somewhat to his surprise, one night, as he sat beside the oven smoking
+his second pipe, he found himself thinking once more about his project
+for making such lebkuchen as never yet had been known outside of
+Nuernberg--lebkuchen that would make him at once the admiration and
+the despair of every German baker in New York. Nor was there, as he
+perceived as he turned the matter over in his mind, any reason now why
+he should not set about making this project a reality; for he had money
+enough, and more than enough, in store to buy the honey that he had so
+long desired. His eyes sparkled; he forgot to smoke; and when he turned
+again, half unconsciously, to his pipe, it had gone out. This roused
+him. The brightness faded from his eyes; he drew a long sigh. Then he
+lighted his pipe again, and until the baking was ended his thoughts no
+longer were busied with ambitious schemes for the making of lebkuchen,
+but went back with a sad tenderness to the happy time that had come so
+quickly to so cruel an end.
+
+But the spark was kindled, and presently the fire burned. When he told
+the good Hedwig that he had bought the honey at last, that excellent
+woman--albeit not much given to display of the tender emotions--shed
+tears of joy. She was a sturdy, thick-waisted, stout-ankled person, this
+Aunt Hedwig, with a cheery red face, and prodigiously fine white teeth,
+and very bright black eyes; and her taste in dress was such that when
+of a Sunday she went to the Church of the Redemptorist Fathers, in Third
+Street, she was more brilliant than ever King Solomon was in all his
+glory, in her startling array of vivid reds and greens and blues. But
+beneath her violent exterior of energetic color she had a warm and
+faithful heart, as little Minna knew already, and as her brother
+Gottlieb had known for many a long good year. Therefore was Gottlieb now
+gladdened by her hearty show of sympathy; and he returned with a good
+will the sounding smack that she gave him with her red lips, and the
+strong hug that she gave him with her stout arms.
+
+It was at sight of this pleasing manifestation of affection that Herr
+Sohnstein, the notary--who was present in the little room back of the
+shop where it occurred--at once declared that he meant to buy some honey
+too. And Aunt Hedwig, smiling so generously as to show every one of her
+fine white teeth, promptly told him that he had better be off and buy
+it, because perhaps he could buy at the same place some hugs and kisses
+too: at which sally and quick repartee they all laughed. Herr Sohnstein
+long had been the declared lover of Aunt Hedwig's, and long had been
+held at arm's-length (quite literally occasionally) by that vigorous
+person; who believed, because of her good heart, that her present duty
+was not to consult her own happiness by becoming Frau Sohnstein, but
+to remain the Fraeulein Brekel, and care for her lonely brother and her
+brother's child.
+
+Being thus encouraged, Gottlieb bought the honey forthwith; and with
+Aunt Hedwig's zealous assistance set about boiling it and straining it
+and kneading it into a sticky dough, all in accordance with the wise old
+baker's directions which he so long had treasured in his mind. And when
+the dough was packed in earthen pots, over which bladders were tied, all
+the pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar, as far from
+the great oven as possible, that the precious honey-cake might undergo
+that subtle change which only comes with time.
+
+[Illustration: Pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar 208]
+
+For at least a year must pass before the honey-cake really can be said
+to be good at all; and the longer that it remains in the pots, even
+until five-and-twenty years, the better does it become. Therefore it is
+that all makers of lebkuchen who aspire to become famous professors of
+the craft add each year to their stock of honey-cake, yet draw always
+from the oldest pots a time-soaked dough that ever grows more precious
+in its sweet excellence of age. Thus large sums--more hundreds of
+dollars than a young baker, just starting upon his farinaceous career,
+would dare to dream of--may be invested; and the old rich bakers who can
+dower their daughters with many honey-pots know that in the matter of
+sons-in-law they have but to pick and choose.
+
+It was about Christmas-time--which is the proper time for this
+office--that Gottlieb made his first honey-cake; and it was a little
+before the Christmas following that his first lebkuchen was baked. For
+a whole week before this portentous event occurred he was in a nervous
+tremor; by day he scarcely slept; as he sat beside the oven at night his
+pipe so frequently went out that twice, having thus lost track of time,
+his baking of bread came near to being toast. And when at last the
+fateful night arrived that saw his first batch of lebkuchen in the oven,
+he actually forgot to smoke at all!
+
+Gottlieb had but a sorry Christmas that year. The best that even
+Aunt Hedwig could say of his lebkuchen was that it was not bad. Herr
+Sohnstein, to be sure, brazenly declared that it was delicious; but
+Gottlieb remembered that Herr Sohnstein, who conducted a flourishing
+practice in the criminal courts, was trained in the art of romantic
+deviations from the truth whenever it was necessary to put a good face
+on a bad cause; and he observed sadly that the notary's teeth were at
+variance with his tongue, for the piece of lebkuchen that Herr Sohnstein
+ate was infinitessimally small. As for the regular German customers of
+the bakery, they simply bit one single bite and then refused to buy.
+Indeed, but for the children from St. Bridget's School--who, being
+for the most part boys, and Irish boys at that, presumably could eat
+anything--it is not impossible that that first baking of lebkuchen
+might have remained uneaten even until this present day. And it was
+due mainly to the stout stomachs of successive generations of these
+enterprising boys that the series of experiments which Gottlieb then
+began in the making of lebkuchen was brought, in the course of years,
+to something like a satisfactory conclusion. But even at its best, never
+was this lebkuchen at all like that of which in his hopeful youth he had
+dreamed.
+
+Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, spoke highly of it, and even managed to eat
+of it quite considerable quantities. Gottlieb did not imagine that
+Herr Sohnstein could have in this matter any ulterior motives; but Aunt
+Hedwig much more than half suspected that in order to please her by
+pleasing her brother he was making a sacrifice of his stomach to his
+heart. If this theory had any foundation in fact, it is certain that
+Herr Sohnstein did not appreciably profit by his gallant risk of
+indigestion; for while Aunt Hedwig by no means seemed disposed to
+shatter all his hopes by a sharp refusal, she gave no indication
+whatever of any intention to permit her ripe red lips to utter the
+longed-for word of assent. Aunt Hedwig, unquestionably, was needlessly
+cruel in her treatment of Herr Sohnstein, and he frequently told her so.
+Sometimes he would ask her, with a fine irony, if she meant to keep him
+waiting for his answer until her brother had made lebkuchen as good as
+the lebkuchen of Nuernberg? To which invariably she would reply that, in
+the first place, she did not know of any question that he ever had asked
+her that required an answer; and, in the second place, that she did mean
+to keep him waiting just precisely that long. And then she would add,
+with a delicate drollery that was all her own, that whenever he got
+tired of waiting he might hire a whole horse-car all to himself and ride
+right away. Ah, this Aunt Hedwig had a funny way with her!
+
+And so the years slipped by; and little Minna, who laughed at the
+passing years as merrily as Aunt Hedwig laughed at Herr Sohnstein, grew
+up into a blithe, trig, round maiden, and ceased to be little Minna at
+all. She was her mother over again, Gottlieb said; but this was not by
+any means true. She did have her mother's goodness and sweetness, but
+her sturdy body bespoke her father's stronger strain. Aunt Hedwig, of
+this same strain, undisguisedly was stocky. Minna was only comfortably
+stout, with good broad shoulders, and an honest round waist that anybody
+with half an eye for waists could see would be a satisfactory armful.
+And she had also Aunt Hedwig's constant cheeriness. All day long her
+laugh sounded happily through the house, or her voice went blithely in
+happy talk, or, failing anybody to talk to, trilled out some scrap of a
+sweet old German song. The two apprentices and the young man who drove
+the bread-wagon of course were wildly and desperately in love with
+her--a tender passion that they dared not disclose to its object, but
+that they frequently and boastingly aired to each other. Naturally these
+interchanges of confidence were apt to be somewhat tempestuous. As
+the result of one of them, when the elder apprentice had declared that
+Minna's beautiful brown hair was finer than any wig in the window of the
+hair-dresser on the west side of the square, and that she had given him
+a lock of it; and when the young man who drove the bread-wagon (he was
+a profane young man) had declared that it was a verdammter sight finer
+than any wig, and that she hadn't--the elder apprentice got a dreadful
+black eye, and the younger apprentice was almost smothered in the
+dough-trough, and the young man who drove the bread-wagon had his head
+broken with the peel that was broken over it.
+
+[Illustration: Almost smothered in the dough-trough 214]
+
+Aunt Hedwig did not need to be told, nor did Minna, the little jade, the
+cause of this direful combat; and both of these amiable women thought
+Gottlieb very hard-hearted because he charged the broken peel--it was
+a new one--and the considerable amount of dough that was wasted by
+sticking to the younger apprentice's person, against the wages of the
+three combatants.
+
+This reference to the apprentices and to the wagon shows that Gottlieb's
+bakery no longer was a small bakery, but a large one. In the making of
+lebkuchen, it is true, he had not prospered; but in all other ways he
+had prospered amazingly. From Avenue A over to the East River, and from
+far below Tompkins Square clear away to the upper regions of Lexington
+Avenue, the young man who drove the bread-wagon rattled along every
+morning as hard as ever he could go, and he vowed and declared, this
+young man did, that nothing but his love for Minna kept him in a place
+where all the year round he was compelled in every single day to do the
+work of two. Meanwhile the little shop on East Fourth Street had
+been abandoned for a bigger shop, and this, in turn, for one still
+bigger--quite a palace of a shop, with plate-glass windows--on Avenue B.
+It was here, beginning in a modest way with a couple of tables whereat
+chance-hungry people might sit while they ate zwieback or a thick slice
+of hearty pumpernickel and drank a glass of milk, that a restaurant was
+established as a tender to the bakery. It did not set out to be a large
+restaurant, and, in fact, never became one. In the back part of the
+shop were a dozen tables, covered with oil-cloth and decorated with
+red napkins, and at these tables, under the especial direction of Aunt
+Hedwig, who was a culinary genius, was served a limited, but from a
+German stand-point most toothsome, bill of fare. There was Hasenpfeffer
+mit Spaetzle, and Sauerbraten mit Kartoffelkloesse, and Rindfleisch mit
+Meerrettig, and Bratwurst mit Rothkraut; and Aunt Hedwig made delicious
+coffee, and the bakery of course provided all manner of sweet cakes. In
+the summer-time they did a famous business in ice-cream.
+
+On the plate-glass windows beneath the sweeping curve of white letters
+in which the name of the owner of the bakery was set forth was added in
+smaller letters the words "Cafe Nuernberger." Gottlieb and Aunt Hedwig
+and the man who made the sign (this last, however, for the venal reason
+that more letters would be required) had stood out stoutly for the
+honest German "Kaffehaus;" but Minna, whose tastes were refined, had
+insisted upon the use of the French word: there was more style about it,
+she said. And this was a case in which style was wedded to substantial
+excellence. What with the good things which Gottlieb baked and the good
+things which Aunt Hedwig cooked, the Cafe Nuernberger presently
+acquired a somewhat enviable reputation. It became even a resort of the
+aristocracy, in this case represented by the dwellers in the handsome
+houses on the eastern and northern sides of Tompkins Square. Of winter
+evenings, when bright gas-light and a big glowing stove made the
+restaurant a very cozy place indeed, large parties of these aristocrats
+would drop in on their way home from the Thalia Theatre, and would stuff
+themselves with Hasenpfeffer and Sauerbraten and Kartoffelkloesse, and
+would swig Aunt Hedwig's strong coffee (out of cups big enough and thick
+enough to have served as shells and been fired from a mortar), until it
+would seem as though they must certainly crack their aristocratic skins.
+
+Altogether, Gottlieb was in a flourishing line of business; and but
+for the deep sorrow that time never wholly could heal, and but for the
+continued failure of his attempts to make a really excellent lebkuchen,
+he would have been a very happy man. By this time he had come to be a
+baker of ease. The hard part of the work was done by the apprentices,
+and the morning delivery of bread was attended to by the young man who
+drove the bread-wagon. In the summer-time he would take Minna and
+Aunt Hedwig, always accompanied by her faithful Herr Sohnstein, upon
+beer-drinking expeditions to Guttenberg and other fashionable suburban
+resorts; and through the cozy winter evenings he smoked his long pipe
+comfortably in the little room at the back of the shop, where Minna and
+Aunt Hedwig sat with him, and where Herr Sohnstein, also smoking a long
+pipe, usually sat with him too. Sometimes Minna would sing sweet German
+songs to them, accompanying herself very creditably upon a cabinet
+organ--for Minna had received not only the substantial education that
+enabled her to keep the bakery accounts, but also had been instructed
+in the polite accomplishments of music and the dance. In summer, when
+expeditions were not on foot, these smoking parties usually were held
+upon the roof; where Gottlieb had made a garden and grew roses in pots,
+and even had raised some rare and delicious cauliflowers.
+
+It was a pleasant place, that roof, of a warm summer evening, especially
+when the rising full-moon sent a shimmering path of glory across the
+rippling waters of the East River, and cast over the bad-smelling region
+of Hunter's Point a glamour of golden haze that made it seem, oil tanks
+and all, a bit of fairy-land. At such times, as they sat among the
+rose-bushes and cauliflowers, Herr Sohnstein not infrequently would stop
+smoking his long pipe while he slyly squeezed Aunt Hedwig's plump hand.
+And Gottlieb also would stop smoking, as his thoughts wandered away
+along that glittering path across the waters, and so up to heaven where
+his Minna was. And then his thoughts would return to earth, to his
+little Minna--for to him she still was but a child--and he would find
+his sorrow lessened in thankfulness that, while his greatest treasure
+was lost to him, this good daughter and so many other good things still
+were his.
+
+But the lebkuchen dream of Gottlieb's youth remained unrealized; still
+unattained was the goal that twenty years before had seemed so near.
+However, being a stout-hearted baker of the solid Nuernberg strain,
+he did not at all surrender hope. Each year he added to his stock of
+honey-cake; and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he
+still believed that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such
+honey-cake as would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
+Kaiser himself!
+
+After the affair of the broken peel there was a coolness between
+Gottlieb and the elder apprentice, which, increasing, led to a positive
+coldness, and then to a separation. And then it was that Fate put a
+large spoke in all the wheels which ran in the Cafe Nuernberg by bringing
+into Gottlieb's employment a ruddy young Nuernberger, lately come out of
+that ancient city to America, named Hans Kuhn.
+
+It was not chance that led Hans to earn his living in a bakery when he
+came to New York. He was a born baker: a baker by choice, by force of
+natural genius, by hereditary right. Back in the dusk of the Middle
+Ages, as far as ever the traditions of his family and the records of
+the Guild of Bakers of Nuernberg ran, all the men of his race had been
+bakers, and famous ones at that. A cumulative destiny to bake was upon
+him, and he loved baking with all his heart. It was no desire to abandon
+his craft that had led him to leave Nuernberg and cross the ocean;
+rather was he moved by a noble ambition to build up on a broad and sure
+foundation the noble art of baking in the New World. And it had chanced,
+moreover, that in the conscription he had drawn an unlucky number.
+
+When this young man entered the Cafe Nuernberg--being drawn thither by
+its display of the name of his own native city--and asked for a job, his
+air was so frank, his talk about baking so intelligent, that Gottlieb
+took kindly to him at once; and Minna, sitting demurely at her accounts
+in the little wire cage over which was a fine tin sign inscribed in
+golden letters with the word "Cashier," was mightily well pleased, in a
+demure and proper way, at sight of his ruddy cheeks and bushy shock of
+light-brown hair and little yellow mustache and honest blue eyes. When
+he told, in answer to Gottlieb's questions, that he was the grandson of
+the very baker in Nuernberg whose delicious lebkuchen Gottlieb had eaten
+when he was a boy, and that a part of his bakerly equipment was the
+lebkuchen recipe that had come down in his family from the baker genius,
+his remote ancestor, who had invented it--well, when he had told this
+much about himself, it is not surprising that Gottlieb fairly jumped for
+joy, and engaged him, not as his apprentice, but as his assistant, on
+the spot.
+
+It was rather dashing to Gottlieb's enthusiasm, however, that his
+assistant--thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom--declined
+immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that
+was required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was
+made--possibly the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after
+all. But the Herr Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the
+neighborhood when the first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on
+sale. Indeed, as the fame of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the
+coming of the new baker was accepted by all Germans with discriminating
+palates as one of the most important events that ever had occurred on
+the East Side. The work of the young man who drove the bread-wagon was
+so greatly increased that he organized a strike, uniting in his own
+person the several functions of strikers, walking delegates, district
+assembly, and executive committee. And when the strike collapsed--that
+is to say, when the young man was discharged summarily--Gottlieb really
+did find it necessary to hire two new young men, and to buy an extra
+horse and wagon. Morally speaking, therefore (although the original
+young man, who remained out of employment for several weeks, and had
+a pretty hard time of it, did not think so), the strike was a complete
+success.
+
+As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of
+three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with
+Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her.
+Nor was it reasonable to suppose that even Minna, who had treated casual
+apprentices and wagon-driving young men with a seemly scorn, would
+continue to sit in the seat of the scornful when siege in form was laid
+to her heart by a properly ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed assistant baker,
+whose skill was such that he could make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
+German portion of the saints in Paradise. At the end of three months
+the feelings of these young people towards each other were quite clearly
+defined in their own minds; at the end of six months, as they were
+sitting together one afternoon in the little back room at a time when
+the shop happened to be empty, things came to the pleasing crisis that
+they both for a considerable period had foreseen.
+
+But then, unfortunately, came a storm--that neither of them had foreseen
+at all--that shook the Cafe Nuernberg to its very foundations!
+
+Gottlieb was the storm, and he moved over a wide area with great
+rapidity and violence. He was central, naturally, over Hans and Minna:
+the first of whom, after being denounced with great energy as a viper
+who had been warmed to the biting point, was ordered to take himself off
+without a single instant's delay, and never to darken the doors of the
+Cafe Nuernberg again; and the second of whom was declared to be a baby
+fool, who must be kept locked up in her own third-story back room, and
+fed on nothing more appetizing than pumpernickel and water until she
+came to her senses. In the outer edges of the storm the apprentices and
+the young men who drove the wagons found themselves most hotly involved;
+and a very violent gust swept down upon Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein,
+who surely were as innocent in the premises as any two people quite
+satisfactorily engaged in earnest but somewhat dilatory love-making of
+their own very well could be. Indeed, this storm was an ill wind that
+blew a famous blast of luck to Herr Sohnstein: for Aunt Hedwig, being
+dreadfully upset by her brother's outbreak, went of her own accord to
+Herr Sohnstein for sympathy and consolation--and found both in such
+liberal quantities, and with them such tender pleadings to enter a
+matrimonial haven where storms should be unknown, that presently,
+smiling through her tears, she uttered the words of consent for which
+the excellent notary had waited loyally through more than a dozen weary
+years. It was Herr Sohn-stein's turn to be upset then. He couldn't
+believe, until he had soothed himself with a phenomenal number of pipes,
+that happiness so perfect could be real.
+
+Possibly one reason why Gottlieb's storm was so violent was that he
+could not give any good reason for it. Hans really was a most estimable
+young man; he came of a good family; as a baker he was nothing short of
+a genius. All this Gottlieb knew, and all this he frequently had said to
+Aunt Hedwig and to Herr Sohnstein, and, worst of all, to Minna. As each
+of these persons now pointed out to him, in order to be consistent in
+his new position he must eat a great many of his own words; and he would
+have essayed this indigestible banquet willingly had he been convinced
+that thus he really could have proved that Hans was a viper and all the
+other unpleasant things which he had called him in his wrath. In truth,
+Gottlieb was, and in the depths of his heart he knew that he was,
+neither more nor less than a dog in the manger. His feeling simply was
+that Minna was his Minna, and that neither Hans nor anybody else had any
+right to her. This was not a position that admitted of logical defence;
+but it was one that he could be ugly and stick to: which was precisely
+what he did.
+
+Minna did not remain long a prisoner in her own room, feeding upon
+pumpernickel and water and bitter thoughts. Aunt Hedwig and Herr
+Sohnstein succeeded in putting a stop to that cruelty. And these elderly
+lovers, whose fresh love had made them of a sudden as young as Minna
+herself, and had filled thera with a warm sympathy for her, laid their
+heads together and sought earnestly to circumvent in her interest her
+father's stern decree. It was a joy to see this picture, in the little
+room back of the shop, of middle-aged love-making; and it was a little
+startling to find how the new youth that their love had given them
+had filled them with a quite extravagantly youthful recklessness.
+Herr Sohnstein, who was well known as a grave, sedate, and unusually
+cautious notary, seriously suggested (though he did not explain exactly
+how this would do it) that they should make an effort to bring Gottlieb
+to terms by burning down the bakery. And Aunt Hedwig, whose prudent
+temperament was sufficiently disclosed in the fact that she had
+hesitated in the matter of her own love affair for upward of a dozen
+years, not less seriously advanced the proposition that they all should
+elope from the Cafe Nuernberg and set up a rival establishment! Herr
+Sohnstein did not make any audible comment upon this violent proposal of
+Aunt Hedwig's, but it evidently put an idea into his head.
+
+As Gottlieb happened to be walking along the south side of Tompkins
+Square, a fortnight or so after the tempest, he found his steps arrested
+by a great sign that lay face downward on trestles across the sidewalk,
+in readiness for hoisting in place upon the front of a smart new shop.
+Inside the shop he saw painters and paper-hangers at work; and on the
+large plate-glass window a man was gluing white letters with a dexterous
+celerity. The letters already in place read "Nuernberger Lebku--" And as
+to this legend he saw "chen" added, he rolled out a stout South German
+oath and stamped upon the ground. But far stronger was the oath that he
+uttered as the big sign was swung upward, and he read upon it, in golden
+German letters:
+
+[Illustration: Bakery Sign 226]
+
+That the Recording Angel blotted out with his tears the fines which
+he was compelled on this occasion to record against Gottlieb Brekel in
+Heaven's high chancery is highly improbable. In the only known case of
+such lachrymic erasure the provocation to profanity was a commendable
+moral motive that was eminently unselfish. But when Gottlieb Brekel
+swore roundly in his native German all the way from the south-west
+corner of Tompkins Square to the corner of Third Street and the Bowery;
+and from that point, when he had transacted his business there, all the
+way back to the Cafe Nuernberg in Avenue B, his motives could not in any
+wise be regarded as moral, and selfishness lay at their very root.
+
+Gottlieb already found himself involved in serious difficulties with the
+many customers who bought his lebkuchen; for with the departure of Hans
+he had been compelled to fall back upon his own resources, and with
+the most lamentable results. Great quantities of his first baking were
+returned to him, with comments in both High German and Low German of
+a very uncomplimentary sort. His second baking--saving the relatively
+inconsiderable quantities consumed by the omnivorous children of St.
+Bridget's School--simply remained upon his hands unsold. And now,
+to make his humiliation the more complete, here was his discharged
+assistant setting up as his rival; and with every probability that
+the attempted rivalry would be crowned with success. Really there was
+something, perhaps, to be said in palliation of Gottlieb's profanity
+after all.
+
+When he told at home that evening of Hans Kuhn's upstart pretensions,
+his statements were received with an ominous silence. Aunt Hedwig
+only coughed slightly, and continued her knitting with more than usual
+energy. Herr Sohnstein only moved a little in his chair and puffed a
+little harder than usual at his pipe. Minna, who was in her wire cage in
+the shop settling her cash, only bent more intently over her books. But
+when Gottlieb went a step further and said, looking very keenly at Herr
+Sohnstein as he said it, that some great rascal must have lent Hans the
+money to make his fine start, Aunt Hedwig at once bristled up and said
+with emphasis that rascals, neither great nor small, were in the habit
+of lending their money to deserving young men; and Herr Sohnstein, a
+little sheepishly perhaps, and mumbling a little in his gray mustache,
+ventured the statement that this was a free country already, and people
+living in it were at liberty to lend their money to whom they pleased;
+and Minna, looking up from her books--Gottlieb's back was turned towards
+her--blew a most unfilial kiss from the tips of her chubby fingers to
+Herr Sohnstein right over her father's shoulder. All of which goes
+to show that something very like open war had broken out in the Cafe
+Nuernberg, and that the once united family dwelling therein was fairly
+divided into rival camps.
+
+Gottlieb's dreary case was made a little less dreary when he found that
+the lebkuchen which Hans produced in his fine new bakery was distinctly
+an inferior article; not much better, in fact, than Gottlieb's own. To
+any intelligent baker the reason for this was obvious: Hans was making
+his lebkuchen with new honey-cake. Thus made, even by the best of
+recipes, it could not be anything but a failure. Gottlieb gave a long
+sigh of relief as he realized this comforting fact, and at the same time
+thought of his own great store of honey-pots--there were hundreds
+of them now--all ready and waiting to his hand. But his feeling of
+satisfaction passed quickly to one of impotent rage as he recognized his
+own powerlessness, for all his wealth of honey-pots, to make lebkuchen
+which would be eaten by anybody but the tough-palated children from St.
+Bridget's School. He was alone, smoking, in the little room back of the
+shop as this bitter thought came to him; in his rage he struck the table
+beside him a blow so sounding that the family cat, peacefully slumbering
+behind the stove, sprang up with a yell of terror and made but two jumps
+to the open door. Coming on top of all his other trials--the revolt of
+his own little Minna, the defection of Aunt Hedwig, and the almost open
+enmity of Herr Sohnstein--this compulsory surrender of all his hope of
+honest fame was indeed a deadly blow.
+
+Gottlieb smoked on in sullen anger; his heart torn and tortured, and his
+mind filled with a confusion of bitter evil thoughts. And presently--for
+the devil is at every man's elbow, ready to take advantage of any sudden
+weakness, or turn to his own purposes any too great strength--these
+thoughts grew more evil and more clear: until they fairly resolved
+themselves into the determination to steal from Hans the recipe for
+making lebkuchen, and so to crush completely his rival and at the same
+time to make certain his own fortune and fame.
+
+Of course the devil did not plant the notion of theft in Gottlieb's mind
+in this bald fashion; for the devil is a most considerate person, and
+ever shows a courteous disposition to spare the feelings of those whom
+he would lead into sin. No: the temptation that he suggested was the
+subtle and ingenious one that Gottlieb should proceed to recover his
+own stolen property! His logic was admirable: Hans had been Gottlieb's
+assistant; and as such Gottlieb had owned him and his recipe as well.
+When Hans went away and took the recipe with him, he took that which
+still belonged to his master. Therefore, triumphantly argued the devil,
+Gottlieb had a perfect right to regain the recipe either by fair means
+or by foul. And finally, as a bit of supplementary devil-logic, the
+thought was suggested that inasmuch as Hans certainly must know the
+recipe by heart, the mere loss of the paper on which it was written
+would not be any real loss to him at all! It is only fair to Gottlieb's
+good angel to state that during this able presentment of the wrong
+side of the case he did venture to hint once or twice--in the feeble,
+perfunctory sort of way that unfortunately seems to be characteristic of
+good angels when their services really are most urgently required--that
+the whole matter might be compromised satisfactorily to all the parties
+in interest by permitting Hans to marry Minna, and by then taking him
+into partnership in the bakery. And it is only just to Gottlieb to state
+that to these fainthearted suggestions of his good angel he did not give
+one moment's heed.
+
+Now the devil is a thorough-going sort of a person, and having planted
+the evil wish in Gottlieb's soul he lost no time in opening to him an
+evil way to its accomplishment. When Hans, a stranger in New York, had
+come to work at the Cafe Nuernberg, Gottlieb had commended him to
+the good graces of a friend of his, a highly respectable little round
+Brunswicker widow who let lodgings, and in the comfortable quarters thus
+provided for him Hans ever since had remained. In this same house lodged
+also one of Gottlieb's apprentices--a loose young fellow, for whose
+proper regulation the widow more than once had been compelled to seek
+his master's counsel and aid. In this combination of circumstances,
+to which the devil now directed his attention, Gottlieb saw his
+opportunity. It was easy to make the widow believe that the loose young
+apprentice had taken the short step from looseness to crime, and that
+a suspicion of theft rested upon him so heavily as to justify the
+searching of his room; it was easy to make the widow keep guard below
+while Gottlieb searched; and it was very easy then to search, not for
+imaginary stolen goods in the chest of the apprentice, but for that
+which he himself wanted to steal from the chest of Hans Kuhn. As to
+opening the chest there was no difficulty at all. Gottlieb had half
+a dozen Nuernberg locks in his house, and he had counted, as the event
+proved correctly, upon making the key of one of these locks serve his
+turn. And in the chest, without any trouble at all, he found a leather
+wallet, and in the wallet the precious recipe--written on parchment
+in old High German that he found very difficult to read, and dated
+in Nuernberg in the year 1603. Gottlieb was pale as death as he went
+down-stairs to the widow; and his teeth fairly chattered as he told her
+that he had made a mistake. He tried to say that the apprentice was not
+a thief--but the word _dieb_ somehow stuck in his throat. Keen chills
+penetrated him as he almost ran through the streets to his home. For the
+devil, who heretofore had been in front of him and had only beckoned,
+now was behind him and was driving him with a right goodwill.
+
+When he entered the room at the back of the shop, where Minna was
+sewing, and where Herr Sohnstein, with his arm comfortably around Aunt
+Hedwig's waist, was smoking his long pipe, he created a stir of genuine
+alarm. As Aunt Hedwig very truly said, he looked as though he had seen
+a ghost. Herr Sohnstein, of a more practical turn of mind, asked him if
+he had been knocked down and robbed; and the word _beraubt_ grated most
+harshly upon Gottlieb's ears. But what cut him most of all was the way
+in which Minna--forgetting all his late unkind-ness at sight of his
+pale, frightened face--sprang to him with open arms, and with all the
+old love in her voice asked him to tell her what had gone wrong. Under
+these favoring conditions, Gottlieb's good angel bestirred himself
+somewhat more vigorously, and for a moment it seemed not impossible that
+right might triumph over wrong. But the devil bustled promptly upon the
+scene, and of course had things all his own way again in a moment. It
+certainly is most unfortunate that good angels, as a rule, are so weak
+in their angelic knees!
+
+Gottlieb pushed Minna away from him roughly; addressed to Aunt Hedwig
+the impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a
+surly tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful
+in the vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then, having planted these
+barbed arrows in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his
+friend, sought the retirement of his own upper room. As he left them,
+Minna buried her face in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried
+bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside
+for the moment his pipe, put his arms protectingly around them both.
+They all were very miserable.
+
+In the upper room, where the air seemed so stifling that he had to open
+the window wide in order to breathe, Gottlieb was very miserable too.
+He was fleeing into Tarshish, this temporarily wicked baker; and just as
+fell out in the case of that other one who fled to Tarshish, his flight
+was a failure: for this little world of ours is far too small to give
+any one a chance to run away from committed sin.
+
+Gottlieb tried to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same
+time tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his
+attempt was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the
+brown parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High
+German phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing
+of it at all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never
+would be able to make anything of it--that, without losing any part
+of the penalty justly attendant upon his crime, the crime itself
+might prove to be, so far as the practical benefit that he sought was
+concerned, absolutely futile. As this dreadful possibility arose before
+his mind a faintness and giddiness came over him. The room seemed to be
+whirling around him; life seemed to be slipping away from him; there
+was a strange, horrible ringing in his ears. He leaned forward over the
+table at which he was sitting and buried his face in his hands.
+
+Then, possibly, Gottlieb fell asleep, though of this he never felt
+really sure. What is quite certain is that he saw, as clearly as he
+ever saw her in life, his dear dead Minna; but with a face so sad, so
+reproachful, so full of piteous entreaty, that his blood seemed to stand
+still, while a consuming coldness settled upon his heart. He struggled
+to speak with her, to assure her that he would repair the evil that he
+had done, to plead for forgiveness; but, for all his striving, no other
+words would come to his lips save those which a little while before
+he had spoken so roughly to poor Aunt Hedwig: "The only people who see
+ghosts are women and fools!"
+
+And then, of a sudden, he found himself still seated at the table, the
+brown parchment still spread out before him, and the faint light of
+early morning breaking into the room. The window was wide open, as he
+had left it, and he was chilled to the marrow; he had a shocking cold
+in the head; there were rheumatic twinges in all his joints as he arose.
+What with the physical misery arising from these causes, and the moral
+misery arising from his sense of committed sin, he was in about as
+desperately bad a humor with himself as a man could be. He was in no
+mood to make another effort to read the difficult German of the recipe,
+the cause of all his troubles. The sight of it pained him, and he thrust
+it hurriedly into an old desk in which were stored (and these also
+were a source of pain to him) several generations of uncollected
+bills--practical proofs that the adage in regard to the impossibility of
+simultaneously possessing cakes and pennies does not always hold good.
+
+He locked the desk and put the key in his pocket; and then returned the
+key to the lock and left it there, as the thought occurred to him that
+the locking of this desk, that never in all the years that he had
+owned it had been locked before, might arouse suspicion. It seemed most
+natural to Gottlieb that his actions should be regarded with suspicion;
+he had a feeling that already his crime must be known to half the world.
+
+And before night it certainly is true that the one person most deeply
+interested in the discovery and punishment of Gottlieb's crime--that
+is to say, Hans Kuhn--did know all about it; which fact would seem
+surprising, considering how skilfully Gottlieb had gone about his work,
+were it not remembered that his unwitting accessory had been the
+little round Brunswicker widow, and were it not known that little round
+widows--Brunswick born or born elsewhere--as a class are incapable of
+keeping a secret.
+
+This excellent woman, to do her justice, had followed Gottlieb's orders
+to the letter. He had warned her not to tell the loose apprentice
+that his chest had been searched; and, so far as that apprentice was
+concerned, wild horses might have been employed to drag that little
+round widow to pieces--at least she might have permitted the wild horses
+to be hitched up to her--before ever an indiscreet word would have
+passed her lips. But when Hans Kuhn, for whom she entertained a high
+respect, and for whom she had also that warmly friendly feeling which
+trig middle-aged widows not seldom manifest towards good-looking young
+men, came to her in a fine state of wrath, and told her that his chest
+had been ransacked (he did not tell her of his loss, for he had not
+himself observed it), she did not consider that she violated any
+confidence in telling him everything that had occurred. It was all a
+mistake, she said; the Herr Brekel had gone into the wrong room; she
+must set the matter right at once; that bad young man might be a thief,
+after all. Hans felt a cold thrill run through him at the widow's words.
+But he controlled himself so well that she did not suspect his inward
+perturbation; and she accepted in as good faith his offer to inform the
+Herr Brekel of his error as she did, a day later, his assurance that the
+matter had been satisfactorily adjusted, and that the innocence of the
+apprentice had been proved.
+
+And then Hans returned to his violated chest, and found that the dread
+which had assailed his soul was founded in substantial truth--the recipe
+was gone! In itself the loss of the recipe was no very great matter, for
+he knew it by heart; but that Gottlieb--who had also a cellar full of
+rich old honey-cake--should have gained possession of it was a desperate
+matter indeed. Here instantly was an end to the hope of successful
+rivalry that Hans had cherished; and with the wreck of his luck in
+trade, as it seemed to him in the first shock of his misfortune, away
+in fragments to the four winds of heaven was scattered every vestige
+of probability that he would have luck in love. Being so suddenly
+confronted with a compound catastrophe so overwhelming, even a bolder
+baker than Hans Kuhn very well might have been for a time aghast.
+
+But as his wits slowly came together again Hans perceived that the game
+was not by any means lost, after all; on the contrary, it looked very
+much as though he had it pretty well in his own hands. Gottlieb was a
+thief, and all that was needed to complete the chain of evidence against
+him was his first baking of lebkuchen; for that as clearly would prove
+him to be in possession of the stolen recipe as what the widow could
+tell would prove that he had created for himself an opportunity to steal
+it. The most agreeable way of winning a father-in-law is not by force of
+threatening to hale him to a police court, but it is better to win him
+that way than not to win him at all, Hans thought; and he thought also
+that this was one of the occasions when it was quite justifiable to
+fight the devil with fire. So his spirits rose, and now he longed for,
+as eagerly as in the first moments of his loss he had dreaded, the
+production of such lebkuchen at the Cafe Nuernberg as would prove the
+proprietor of that highly respectable establishment to be neither more
+nor less than a robber.
+
+Hans was both annoyed and surprised as time passed on and the "cakes
+succulent but damnatory" were not forthcoming from Gottlieb's oven. He
+himself went on making unsatisfactory lebkuchen of bad materials by a
+good formula, and Gottlieb continued to make unsatisfactory lebkuchen
+by a bad formula of the best materials. Orthodox German palates found
+nothing to commend and much to reprobate in both results. This was the
+situation for several weeks. Hans could not understand it at all. The
+subject was a delicate one to broach to Minna during their short but
+blissful interviews about dusk in the central fastnesses of Tompkins
+Square, at which interviews Aunt Hedwig winked and Herr Sohnstein
+openly connived by keeping watch for them against Gottlieb's possible
+appearance; for Hans had determined that until he had positive proof to
+go upon he would keep secret, and most of all from Minna, the dreadful
+fact of her father's crime. Therefore did he remain in a state of very
+harrowing uncertainty, with his plan of campaign completely brought to a
+stand.
+
+During this period a heavy cloud hung over the Cafe Nuernberg. Gottlieb
+came fitfully to his meals; and when he did come, he ate almost nothing.
+Each day he grew more and more morose; each night, when poor Aunt Hedwig
+was not kept awake by her own sorrowful thoughts, her slumbers were,
+broken by hearing her brother pacing heavily the floor of the adjoining
+room. In some sort he made up for his loss of sleep at night by sleeping
+of an evening in the little room back of the shop, falling into restless
+naps (when he should have been restfully smoking his long pipe), from
+which he would wake with a start and sometimes with a cry of alarm, and
+would dart furtive horrified glances at Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein:
+who were doing nothing of a horrifying nature, only sitting cozily close
+together, more or less enfolded in each other's arms. It was a little
+inconsiderate on the part of the lovers, and very-hard on Minna, this
+extremely open love-making; for Minna's love-making necessarily was
+by fitful snatches amid the bleak desolations of Tompkins Square. They
+would try to comfort each other, she and Hans, as they stood cheerlessly
+under the chill lee of the music stand; but their outlook was a dreary
+one, and their efforts in this direction were not crowned with any great
+success. Sometimes as Minna came home again along the west side of the
+square, and saw in Spengler's window the wreaths of highly-artificial
+immortelles with the word "Ruhe" upon them in vivid purple letters,
+she fairly would fall to crying over the thought that until she should
+become a fit subject for such a wreath there was small chance that any
+real rest would be hers.
+
+However, all this is aside from Gottlieb's horrified looks as he waked
+from his troubled slumbers--looks which would disappear as he became
+thoroughly aroused, but only to return again after his next uneasy nap.
+One day he startled Aunt Hedwig by asking her if she believed in ghosts.
+Remembering his severe words in condemnation of her casual reference to
+these supernatural beings, it was with some hesitation that she replied
+that she did. Still more to her surprise, Gottlieb turned away from her
+hurriedly, yet not so hurriedly but that she saw a strange, scared look
+upon his face, and in a low and trembling voice replied: "And so do I!"
+
+And now the fact may as well be admitted frankly that a ghost was the
+disturbing element that was making Gottlieb's life go wrong; that, as
+there seemed to be every reason to believe, was hurrying him towards the
+grave: for a middle-aged German who refuses to eat, whose regular sleep
+forsakes him, and who actually gives up smoking, naturally cannot be
+expected to remain long in this world.
+
+It was the ghost of his dead wife. At first she appeared to him only in
+his dreams, standing beside the desk in which he had placed the stolen
+recipe for making lebkuchen, and holding down the lid of that desk with
+a firm but diaphanous white hand. Presently she appeared to him quite as
+clearly in his waking hours. Her face still wore an expression at once
+tender and reproachful; but every day the look of tenderness diminished,
+while the look of reproach grew stronger and more stern. Each time that
+he sought to open the desk that he might take thence the recipe and make
+his crime a practical business success, the figure assumed an air
+so terribly menacing that his heart failed him, and he gave over the
+attempt.
+
+This, then, was the all-sufficient reason why the good lebkuchen
+that would have proved Gottlieb a thief was not for sale at the Cafe
+Nuerenburg; and this was the reason why Gottlieb himself, broken down
+by loss of food and sleep and by the nervous wear and tear incident to
+forced companionship with an angry ghost, was drawing each day nearer
+and nearer to that dark portal through which bakers and all other people
+pass hence into the shadowy region whence there is no return.
+
+Gottlieb Brekel never had been an especially pious man. As became a
+reputable German citizen, he had paid regularly the rent of a pew in the
+Church of the Redemptorist Fathers in Third Street; but, excepting on
+such high feasts as Christmas and Easter, he usually had been content
+to occupy it and to discharge his religious duties at large vicariously.
+Aunt Hed-wig's bonnet invariably was the most brilliantly conspicuous
+feature of the entire congregation, just as the prettiest face in the
+entire congregation invariably was Minna's. But now that Gottlieb was
+confronted with a spiritual difficulty, it occurred to him that he might
+advantageously resort in his extremity to spiritual aid. He had no very
+clear notion how the aid would be given; he was not even clear as to
+how he ought to set about asking for it; and he was troubled by the
+conviction that in order to obtain it he must not only repent of his
+sin, but must make atonement by restitution--a possibility (for the
+devil still had a good grip upon him) that made him hesitate a long
+while before he set about purchasing ease for his conscience at so heavy
+a material cost. However, his good angel at last managed to pluck up
+some courage--it was high time--and, strengthened by this tardily given
+assistance, he betook himself in search of consolation within church
+walls.
+
+The Church of the Redemptorist Fathers is a very beautiful church, and
+at all times--save through the watches of the night and through one
+mid-day hour--its doors stand hospitably open, silently inviting poor
+sinners, weary and heavy laden with their sins, to enter into the calm
+of its quiet holiness and there find rest. Tall, slender pillars uphold
+its vaulted roof, in the groinings of which lurk mysterious shadows.
+Below, a warm, rich light comes through the stained-glass windows:
+whereon are pictured the blessed St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, founder
+of the Redemptorist Congregation, blessedly instructing the chubby-faced
+choristers; and the Venerable Clement Hofbauer, "primus in Germania" of
+the Redemptorists, all in his black gown, kneeling, praying no doubt for
+the outcast German souls for the saving of which he worked so hard and
+so well; and (a picture that Minna dearly loved) St. Joseph and the
+sweet Virgin and the little Christ-child fleeing together through the
+desert from the wrath of the Judean king. And ranged around the walls on
+perches high aloft are statues of various minor saints and of the Twelve
+Apostles; of which Minna's favorite was the Apostle Matthias, because
+this saint, with his high forehead tending towards baldness, and his
+long gray beard and gray hair, and his kindly face, and even the axe in
+his hand (that was not unlike a baker's peel), made her think always
+of her dear father. The pew that Gottlieb paid for so regularly, and so
+irregularly occupied, was just beneath the statue of this saint; which,
+however, gave Minna less pleasure than would have been hers had not the
+next saint in the row been the Apostle Simon with his dreadful saw. It
+must have hurt so horribly to be sawed in two, she thought. In the dusky
+depths of the great chancel gleamed the white marble of the beautiful
+altar, guarded by St. Peter with his keys and St. Paul with his naked
+two-edged sword; and above the altar was the dead Christ on Calvary,
+with His desolate mother and the despairing Magdalene and St. John the
+divine.
+
+Into this beautiful church it was that Gottlieb, led thither by his
+good angel, entered; and the devil--raging in the terrible but impotent
+fashion that is habitual with devils when they see slipping away from
+their snares the souls which they thought to win to wickedness--of
+course was forced to remain outside. But what feelings of keen
+repentance filled this poor sinning baker's heart within that holy
+place, what good resolves came to him, what light and refreshment
+irradiated and cheered his darkened, harried soul--all these are things
+which better may be suggested here than written out in full. For these
+things are so real, so sacred, and so beautiful with a heavenly beauty,
+that they may not lightly be used for decorative purposes in mere
+romance.
+
+Let it suffice, then, to tell--for so is our poor human stuff put
+together that trivial commonplace facts often exhibit most searchingly
+the changes for good or for evil which have come to pass in our
+inmost souls--that Gottlieb, on returning to the Cafe Nuernberg, ate
+a prodigious dinner; and after his dinner, for the first time in a
+fortnight, smoked a thoroughly refreshing pipe.
+
+Over his dinner and his pipe he was silent, manifesting, however, a sort
+of sheepishness and constraint that were not less strange in the eyes
+of Aunt Hedwig and Minna than was the sudden revival of his interest in
+tobacco and food. As he smoked, a pleasant thought came to him. When he
+had knocked the ashes from his pipe he ordered Minna, surlily, to bring
+him his hat and coat; he must pay a visit to that rascal Sohnstein, he
+said; and so went out. He left the two women lost in wonder; and Aunt
+Hed-wig, because of his characterization of her dear Sohnstein as a
+rascal, disposed to weep. And yet, somehow, they both felt that the
+storm was breaking, and that clear weather was at hand. There was nobody
+in the shop just then; and the two, standing behind the rampart of
+freshly-baked cakes that was high heaped up upon the counter, embraced
+each other and mingled tears, which they knew--by reason of the womanly
+instinct that was in them--were tears of joy.
+
+And that very evening the prophecy of happiness that was in their joyful
+sorrow was happily fulfilled.
+
+Gottlieb did not return to the Cafe Nuernberg until after nine o'clock.
+With him came Herr Sohnstein. They both were very grave and silent, yet
+both exhibited a most curious twinklesomeness in their eyes. Neither
+Aunt Hedwig nor Minna could make anything of their strange mood; and
+Aunt Hedwig was put to her trumps completely when she was sure that
+she saw her brother--who was whispering to Herr Sohnstein behind the
+pie-counter--poke the notary in the ribs. As to the joint chuckle at
+that moment of those two mysterious men there could be no doubt; she
+heard it distinctly! 14
+
+Still further to Aunt Hedwig's surprise, for the Cafe Nuernberg never
+was closed before ten o'clock, and usually remained open much later,
+Gottlieb himself began to put up the shutters; and when this work was
+finished he came back into the shop and locked behind him the double
+front door. Almost as he turned the key there was a knock outside, as
+though somebody actually had been waiting in the street for the signal
+that the closing of the shutters gave.
+
+"Another rascal would come in already, Sohn-stein," said Gottlieb,
+gruffly. "Open for him, but lock the door again. I must go up-stairs."
+
+Gottlieb, with a queer smile upon his face, left the little back room;
+and a moment later Minna uttered a cry of surprise, as Herr Sohnstein
+unlocked the door and her own Hans entered the shop. What, she thought,
+could all these wonders mean? As for Aunt Hedwig, she had sunk down into
+her big armchair and her bright black eyes seemed to be fairly starting
+from her head.
+
+Herr Sohnstein locked the door again, as he had been ordered to do, and
+then brought Hans through the shop and into the little back room. Hans
+evidently was not a party to the mystery, whatever the mystery might
+be. He looked at Minna as wonderingly as she looked at him, and he was
+distressingly ill at ease. But there was no time for either of them
+to ask questions, for as Hans entered the room from the shop, Gottlieb
+returned to it. In his hand Gottlieb held the brown old parchment on
+which the lebkuchen recipe was written; the smile had left his face; he
+was very pale. For a moment there was an awkward pause. Then Gottlieb,
+trembling a little as he walked, crossed the room to where Hans stood
+and placed the parchment in his hands. And it was in a trembling, broken
+voice that Gottlieb said:
+
+"Hans, a most wicked man have I been. But my dead Minna has helped me,
+and here I give again to thee what I stole from thy chest--I who was a
+robber." Then Gottlieb covered his face with his hands, and presently
+each of his bony knuckles sparkled with a pendant tear.
+
+"My own dear father!" said Minna; and her arms were around him, and her
+head was pressed close upon his breast.
+
+"My own good brother, thou couldst not be a thief!" said Aunt Hedwig;
+and, so saying, clasped her stout arms around them both.
+
+"My good old friend! all now is right again," said Herr Sohnstein; who
+then affected to put his arms around the three, but really embraced only
+Aunt Hedwig. However, there was quite enough of Aunt Hedwig to fill even
+Herr Sohnstein's long arms; and he made the average of his one-third of
+an embrace all right by bestowing it with a threefold energy.
+
+The position of Hans as he regarded this affectionately writhing group
+(that was not unsuggestive of the Laoecoon: with a new motive, a fourth
+figure, a commendable addition of draperies, and a conspicuous lack of
+serpents) would have been awkward under any circumstances; and as the
+circumstances were sufficiently awkward to begin with, he was very much
+embarrassed indeed. To Aunt Hed-wig's credit be it said that she was the
+first (after Minna, of course; and Minna could not properly act in the
+premises) to perceive his forsaken condition.
+
+"Come, Hans," said the good Hedwig, her voice shaken by emotion and the
+tightness of Herr Sohn-stein's grip about her waist.
+
+"Thou hadst better come, Hans," added Herr Sohnstein, jollily.
+
+"_Wilt_ thou come, Hans--and forgive me?" Gottlieb asked.
+
+But it was not until Minna said, very faintly, yet with a heavenly
+sweetness in her voice: "Thou _mayst_ come, Hans!" that Hans actually
+came.
+
+[Illustration: Thou mayst come, Hans 248]
+
+And then for a while there was such hearty embracing of as much of
+the other four as each of them could grasp that the like of it all for
+good-will and lovingness never had been seen in a bakery before. And
+Gottlieb's good angel exulted greatly; and the devil, who had lingered
+about the premises in the hope that even at the eleventh hour the powers
+of evil might get the better of the powers of good, acknowledged his
+defeat with a howl of baffled rage: and then fled away in a blue flame
+and a flash of lightning that made the waters of the East River (which
+stream he was compelled to wade, thanks to General Newton, who took away
+his stepping-stones) fairly hiss and bubble. And never did he dare to
+show so much as the end of his wicked nose in the Cafe Nuernberg again!
+
+"But thou wilt not take from me this little one, my daughter, Hans?"
+Gottlieb asked, when they had somewhat disentangled themselves. "Thou
+wilt come and live with us, and be my partner, and together we will make
+the good lebkuchen once more. Is it not so?"
+
+Hans found this a trying question. He looked at Herr Sohnstein,
+doubtfully. "Ah," said Herr Sohnstein, "thou meanest that a very
+hard-hearted, money-lending man has hired a shop for thee and has made
+it the most splendid bakery and the finest restaurant on all the East
+Side, eh? And thou art afraid that this man, this old miser man, will
+keep thee to thy bargainings, already?"
+
+Hans gave a deprecating nod of assent.
+
+"Well, my boy Hans," Herr Sohnstein continued, with great good-humor,
+and sliding his arm well around Aunt Hedwig's generous waist again as he
+spoke--"well, my boy Hans, let me tell thee that that bad old miser man
+is not one-half so bad as thou wouldst think. Dost thou remember that
+when he had a garden made upon the roof of that fine bakery, and thou
+toldst to him that to make a garden there was to waste his money, what
+he said? Did he not say that if he made the garden God would send the
+flowers? And when that fine sign was made with 'Nuernberger Baekerei' upon
+it, and thou toldst to him that to take that name of Nuernberg was not
+fair to his old friend, did he not tell thee that with his old friend
+he would settle that matter so that there should be no broken bones? For
+did he not know already that for these five years past it has been the
+wish of Gottlieb's heart to leave this old bakery--where his lease ends
+this very coming May--and to have just such a new fine bakery upon the
+Square as now you two together will have? Ah, this bad old miser man is
+not afraid but that his miser money will come back to him again; and he
+is not such a fool but that he had faith in his good friend Gottlieb,
+and knew that all would end well. And now, truly, all will be happiness:
+for Gottlieb, who has gained a good son, can spare to me this dear
+Hed-wig, his sister, and he will come to church with us and see us all
+married in one bright day."
+
+Aunt Hedwig looked up into Herr Sohnstein's face as he ended this long
+speech--not so fine, perhaps, as some of the speeches which he had
+delivered in the criminal courts, but much more moving and a great deal
+more genuine than the very best of them--and, with her eyes filling
+with happy tears, said to him: "And it is to thee that we owe it, this
+happiness!"
+
+But Herr Sohnstein's face grew grave and his voice grew reverent as he
+answered: "It is not so, my Hedwig. We owe our happiness to the good God
+who has taken away the evil that was in our dear Gottlieb's heart." They
+all were very quiet for a little space, and upon the silence broke the
+sweet sound of the clock bell in the near-by church-tower.
+
+When the last stroke had sounded Herr Sohnstein spoke again, and in his
+customary jolly tone: "As for these young ones here, we will unlock the
+door and let them walk out and look for a little at the music-stand that
+they love so well in the Square. And Hedwig shall sit beside me while
+we smoke our pipes, Gottlieb, eh? It is a long time already, old friend,
+since thou and I have sat together and smoked our pipes."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Romance Of Tompkins Square, by Thomas A. Janvier
+
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