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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.