FullReads

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.