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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.