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In the course of the years which had drifted by since Andreas came with his birds to New York that May morning he had not made for himself many friends. To be a friend of birds a man must have a quiet habit of body, and great gentleness of nature, and a true tenderness of heart; which qualities tend also to solitariness, being for the most part harmed rather than fostered by association with mankind. As suited him well, his business was not one that called him much abroad, nor that brought him greatly into contact with his fellows. In his good care the famous stock of songsters which he had brought with him from the fatherland had increased prodigiously; and even the sale of nearly all his best old birds, about the time that Conrad was ill, had worked, in the long run, to his benefit; for he had taken these birds to one and another of the great dealers, who thus came to know that in the little shop on Avenue B were to be found canaries the like of which for tameness and for rare beauty of note could not be bought elsewhere in all New York. Thereafter, as his young birds grew up, learning from Andreas himself the lesson of gentleness, and from his teaching-birds the lesson of sweetness of note, he had no lack of high-paying customers; so that from his business he derived an income far in excess of his modest needs. What went with the overplus was known only to certain of his country-folk, whose ill venture after greater fortune in America had proved to be but a fiercer struggle with still greater poverty than they had struggled with at home; and no doubt the angels also kept track of his modest benefactions, for such is reputed to be their way.

Many a wounded life was healed by these hidden ministrations on the part of Andreas; and, as rightly followed, great love there was for him in many a humble heart. But love of this sort is not friendship, for friendship requires some one plane at least of equality, and also association and converse, which conditions were lacking in the case of Andreas and those to whom he gave his aid; for the shyness of his nature led him to keep himself apart–save when the demand upon his charity was for that comfort and sympathy which can only be given in person–from those whose burdens he lightened; so that, for the most part, while the needed help was given the hand that gave it remained concealed.

Yet with a few of his country-folk in New York Andreas had established, in course of time, relations of warm friendliness. Of his kin only two cousins were left; for the rich, good uncle, from overmuch eating of his own delicatessen, had come to a bilious ending; and his uncle’s widow, wise in her generation, had returned to her native town in Saxony, where she was enabled, by reason of the fortune that the delicatessen-shop had brought to her, to outshine the local baroness, and presently to attain the summit of her highest hopes and happiness by wedding an impoverished local baron, and so becoming a baroness herself. Her two sons were well pleased with this marriage. They were carrying on a great business in hog products, and had purchased for themselves fine estates in the country and fine houses in town. To be able to speak of their mother as “the baroness” suited them very well. Andreas saw but little of these gilded relatives–who yet were good-hearted men, and very kindly disposed towards him–for their magnificent surroundings were appalling to his simple mind. His few friends were more nearly in his own walk in life, and his friendship with them had been built up, as substantial friendship should be, by slow degrees.

At the Cafe Nuernberger, near by his own little shop–a bakery celebrated for the excellence of its bread, and for the great variety of its toothsome. German cakes–it was his custom to make daily purchases. With the plump, rosy Aunt Hedwig, who presided over the bakery, he passed the good word of the day shyly; he responded shyly to the friendly nod of the baker, Gottlieb Brekel, when that worthy chanced to be in the shop; and he shyly greeted a certain jolly Herr Sohnstein, a German lawyer of distinction, who was about the bakery a great deal and who popularly was believed to be a suitor for the plump Hedwig’s plump hand. And these shy greetings might have gone on day after day for all eternity–or at least for so much of it as these several persons were entitled to live out on earth–without increasing one particle in cordiality, had there not been one other dweller in the bakery to act as a solvent upon the bird-dealer’s reserve. This was the baker’s daughter Minna, a child a year or two older than Roschen and cast in a sturdier mould.