ctory armful.
And she had also Aunt Hedwig's constant cheeriness. All day long her
laugh sounded happily through the house, or her voice went blithely in
happy talk, or, failing anybody to talk to, trilled out some scrap of a
sweet old German song. The two apprentices and the young man who drove
the bread-wagon of course were wildly and desperately in love with
her--a tender passion that they dared not disclose to its object, but
that they frequently and boastingly aired to each other. Naturally these
interchanges of confidence were apt to be somewhat tempestuous. As
the result of one of them, when the elder apprentice had declared that
Minna's beautiful brown hair was finer than any wig in the window of the
hair-dresser on the west side of the square, and that she had given him
a lock of it; and when the young man who drove the bread-wagon (he was
a profane young man) had declared that it was a verdammter sight finer
than any wig, and that she hadn't--the elder apprentice got a dreadful
black eye, and the younger apprentice was almost smothered in the
dough-trough, and the young man who drove the bread-wagon had his head
broken with the peel that was broken over it.

[Illustration: Almost smothered in the dough-trough 214]

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 w