bakery. It was a
red brick house, with dusty windows toward the street, and just inside
the door a little shop, where Mr. German retailed the scalloped cookies,
fluted gingerbread, long loaves of bread, and scantly filled pies, in
which he dealt, and which were manufactured in the long shop, where in
summer you caught glimpses of flour-barrels all a-row, and men who might
have come out of those barrels, so strewed with flour were all their
clothes,--paper-cap and white apron scarcely to be distinguished from
the rest of the dress, as far as color and dustiness went. Here, too,
when her father drove out the cart every afternoon, sitting in front of
the counter with her sewing or her knitting, Dely German, the baker's
pretty daughter, dealt out the cakes and rattled the pennies in her
apron-pocket with so good a grace, that not a young farmer came into
Hanerford with grain or potatoes or live stock, who did not cast a
glance in at the shop-door, going toward town, and go in on his return,
ostensibly to buy a sheet of gingerbread or a dozen cookies for his
refreshment on the drive homeward. It was a curious thing to see how
much hungrier they were on the way home than coming into town. Though
they might have had a good dinner in Hanerford, that never appeased
their appetites entirely, while in the morning they had driven their
slow teams all the way without so much as thinking of cakes and cheese!
So by the time Dely was seventeen, her black eyes and bright cheeks were
well known for miles about, and many a youth, going home to the clean
kitchen where his old mother sat by the fire knitting, or his spinster
sister scolded and scrubbed over his muddy boot-tracks, thought how
pretty it would look to see Dely German sitting on the other side, in
her neat calico frock and white apron, her black hair shining smooth,
and her fresh, bright face looking a welcome.

But Dely did not think about any one of them in a reciprocal manner; she
liked them all pretty well, but she loved nobody except her father and
mother, her three cats and all their kittens, the big dog, the old
horse, and a wheezy robin that she kept in a cage, because her favorite
cat had half killed it one day, and it never could fly any more. For all
these dumb things she had a really intense affection: as for her father
and mother, she seemed to be a part of them; it never occurred to her
that they could leave her, or she them; and when old Joe German died one
summ