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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.